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ICT can make India a knowledge economy

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Known personalities from Indian Industry highlighted there is immense need to build information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure in order to disseminate knowledge equally across the country and to develop India as a knowledge economy.

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“ICT has the power to take knowledge deep inside the country. For this, we need to ensure that we develop a robust ICT infrastructure for distribution of the knowledge across our nation and make it a knowledge economy,” said Rajive Kaul, Nicco Corporation at an event organized by All India Management Association here today.

Acknowledging the transformation that Indian ICT industry has seen, G Krishnan, CEO and executive director, TV Today Network said, “We have seen an era when there were no telephone and now we are in era where there is abundant telephony across the country. Now we have to think the way we can empower the existing infrastructure for dissemination of knowledge and increasing productivity.”

Krishnan mentioned that his company has saved 4 hours of time per employee by creating a virtual office which is empowered by ICT but at the same time he expressed dissatisfaction with the existing bandwidth in the country.

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“People at many places in the country are ready to use technology but basic issue is bandwidth. The low bandwidth available in the country is one of the factors that checks people from taking benefit of the services and content being offered by a company. We can do a lot if we improve our connectivity issue,” added Krishnan.

Suresh Vaswani, Jt CEO, IT Business and member of the board, Wipro at the event pointed out that India has all the merits that are required for it to become a knowledge economy.

“Information is creating wealth in the industry and ICT is a vital tool for the spread of this information which in turn will create wealth. From our side we are doing enough investment to scale our R&D to move up the value chain and improve our knowledge. India has all whatever is required to become a knowledge economy. A strong ICT infrastructure can further facilitate in disseminating knowledge that we have,” said Vaswani.

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In response to this, Sachin Pilot, Minster of State for Communications and Information Technology said, “We are not to debate relevance of ICT but to think on the way we can move forward. We are looking the way we can bring more and more stakeholders on board. The leapfrog that we have made in technology has really helped us. Now we have to ensure that the existing technologies are utilized to their optimum level.”

He pointed the way government through National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is generating awareness among masses and bringing them close to the banking system.

“We are going deep down into villages through Common Service Centers to bring people close to technology,” added Pilot.

Pilot also mentioned, without giving any timeline, that government is making effort to reach 500 million broadband connections through the existing landline that country has.

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