Be scrupulous in visa issues: Shourie

BARAMATI: Referring to the protectionist move in the US against outsourcing of business processes to India, minister for disinvestment, communications and IT Arun Shourie recommended certain remedies to the Indian software industry to ensure that things go smoothly.

"Be scrupulous in visa issues. The Nasscom and MIT are working together on this issue. Put to work those firms in the US benefiting by outsourcing to India and most importantly, we are taking up the issue with the US authorities," he said. He was addressing a press conference after inaugurating the third annual Baramati Initiative on ICT and Development being held at Baramati, Maharashtra from May 30 to June 2. The meet is organized by Digital Partners in association with Vidya Pratisthan’s Institute of Information Technology.

The minister stated that such a reaction was only natural since India had built up a major presence in IT." We should not be surprised and instead put ourselves in the same position. We are the largest users of anti-dumping measures in the world. We have 167 of them," he said.

Shourie pointed out that the incidents that had occurred at Malaysia, Indonesia and Holland were not connected. " In Indonesia, it was a commercial dispute and in Malaysia, it was wrong information that lead to the raid. In the case of Holland, a wrong visa," he explained.

The minister said that the five bills in the US were akin to the private member resolutions in India. The only bill to worry about is the bill moved in Washington by a representative from Seattle, which is backed by the Technical Staff Union, he added.

Asked to comment on the debacle of Media Lab Asia (MLA), Shourie said that MLA was now over since the basic assumptions were not fulfilled. "The salary scales were way out of line and the head of MLA took home a salary that was 19 times more than head of the Indian Space mission K Kasturirangan. We have terminated the contract and relationship with MIT and have raised a revived proposal to the cabinet to continue the project on a reduced scale. Research projects will continue," he said. "I would much rather prefer a technical advisory committee consisting eminent Indian scientists assess the projects and fund these. They can also work on an overview of research in IT," he added.

On the debate of propagating the use of open source code versus proprietary solutions, Shourie believed that it would not be a good idea for the government to indicate a preference. In government contracts, it is better to be technology neutral.

Earlier, he praised the Baramati experiment and said that we must learn to exchange ideas that have worked. In India, we have many success stories and don’t know about them. Computers are no longer `elitist’ and are tools for empowerment, he said, offering the services of his ministry to Sharad Pawar, the man behind the Baramati initiative.