Connecting India with Bharat

MUMBAI, INDIA: The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) today urged the Indian IT industry to engage more youngsters and to go beyond their current corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to act as a catalyst for further social change.

The Nasscom India Leadership Forum 2008 today opined that the need to carry the less-fortunate cousins along with the emerging India has become more critical than ever.

The Forum observed that the responsibility lies within enterprises to ensure that smaller CSR movements combine to create a bigger result that would connect India with Bharat.

Speaking at the Forum, Nasscom president Som Mittal said that his association had set a target of achieving $60 billion in terms of growth by 2010.

“We have reviewed our vision for the next 10 years and one of the critical components in this exercise has been how would our services impact the society,” said Mittal.

The question boils down to how youngsters would be engaged in organizations. “We need them to get engaged,” he said.

According to a Nasscom Foundation-Deloitte study, the creation of every job goes on to create four additional jobs in the economy.

The IT industry has been responsible for initiating the trend of first generation entrepreneurship and created role models for Indian middle class and spurred them to exploit available potentials with confidence.

The study, Catalyzing Change, portrays the CSR scene in the Indian IT and ITeS segments. The IT industry has been spurring the growth in smaller cities by hiring employees locally.

Further, several IT/ITeS companies are now shifting to smaller cities, beyond their traditional tier-one locations. The mushrooming of IT parks and townships helped in the development of infrastructure facilities in small cities and towns, Nasscom observed.

IT/ITeS companies have undertaken various community-based, replicable programmes for sustainable development, focusing on marginalized sections of society. The focus was mainly on education, health and environment.

Walter Fust, director general, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC, Swiss Confederation stressed on the need for telephones and computers to connect everyone in the society.

“The technology is available, but the question is whether we can do it at affordable prices or not,” he said.

“Despite the best of technology available at our disposal, we have 1.6 billion people not having access to electricity in the world,” he said. The trick, Fust said, is to bridge the divide between the haves and have-nots.



(prasadr@cybermedia.co.in)