Microsoft to invest Rs 2,000 cr in India

NEW DELHI: Microsoft Corp has committed an investment of Rs 2,000 crore in the country over the next three years. The investment would be in the areas of education, promoting partnerships, innovation and localization of Microsoft software. Earlier during his four-day visit in the country, Gates had committed an investment of Rs 280 crore from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation towards the cause of helping the AIDS campaign in the country.

Education would be a major focus area among the company's commitments. Project Shiksha--Empowering the Future, would work towards empowering students, training teachers and help in developing IT curriculum. "The project expects to train about 80,000 teachers who would in turn reach out to about 3.5 million students over the next five years," said Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Architect of Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft also plans to set up 10 state-of-the-art Microsoft IT Academy Centers in partnership with state education departments in addition to collaborating with over 2,000 partner-driven school labs. There would be a dedicated team coordinating the efforts on these fronts.

India has always been an important destination for the company for developing Microsoft-based tools and application. Gates said that the liberalization and opening up of the telecommunication sector would help the country play a greater role on these fronts. What was more exciting is that developers could not work on a collaborative environment irrespective of the distance.

Besides the long-term partnerships with Indian software powerhouses like Satyam Computers, Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Microsoft would be bullish about its partnerships in the country by outsourcing more product testing work to its partners. Gates promised more investments in the India Development Center scaling the employee strength from 200 to 300 by 2005.

Praising the software skills available in the country, Gates said, "India is of strategic importance as its developer and skill base continues to grow. Today talented Indian companies are developing an increasing number of .Net projects across the globe. The Indian developer community is creating next generation .Net applications."

Speaking about Microsoft's commitment to localization of its products, Gates said, "There would be a Hindi version of the Windows XP and the next version of Microsoft Office code named Office 11. In addition Microsoft will work with local partners to extend Windows XP language support to include Bengali and Malayalam taking the total number of languages supported by Windows XP to 11." These are Hindi, Sanskrit, Konkani, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam, Gurmukhi, Telugu, Kannada and Gujarati.

Gates brushed aside queries about the threat to Microsoft from the growth of Linux as a platform saying that while Linux has been eating into the space of the Unix server space, there was no threat to Microsoft at the desktop and server levels.