India needs to looks at domestic market

BANGALORE, INDIA: Year on year, we receive Nasscom reports on Indian IT exports. While last year its was said to cross $50 billion with a growth of 5.5 per cent, the exports this year are expected to grow by 16-19 per cent. What happened to the domestic pie?

On the sidelines of C-Change, India CIO Forum 2011, Rajeeva Ratna Shah, former Secretary, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India, shared his thoughts about how Indian corporate should look at domestic market for inclusive growth in the country.

He also talked about his experiences within the Department of IT, his learning, his viewpoints on IT adoption in India, government sector and the challenges. Read on:

What is your view about India as a growth market?

At present the Indian IT exports are at $50 billion; the IT companies together should look at domestic market and aim to get equal business from domestic and international markets by 2020.

While the international market is growing by 20-30 per cent, the domestic growth is at 15 per cent. They are largely export orientated. They need to look deeper beyond the A and B level. While we are talking about 9-10 growth in economy, the future growth lies not only in the international but also domestic domain.

The slow pick up in domestic market could have been because India is a different market. In my observation, the working formula is slim margin and high volumes for better topline. There we could find boom in communication, mobile handsets cheaper than any other country. There has to be better awareness to increase engagement of the CIOs.

How do you see the government's role in Indian IT, with projects like UIDAI (Aadhar) and e-governance coming up?

UIDAI is very good step which will act as a catalyst in country's growth. What Nandan Nilekani is doing, will leave a positive impact. It is building a leak-proof pipeline dedicated to reach the right beneficiary of the government subsidies and offerings. It will put everything on record. If you apply for service, just a 16-digit number generated from a database could be enough to fulfill the processes.

Coming to the e-governance programs, I see that these initiatives will take off very well in coming years. These are far superior and more connected than the traditional projects, removing the delays. The challenge is that our numbers are staggering with a big uneducated population. There is plan to connect 600 thousand villages by July-December though wi-fi and other through broadband.

We believe that lean and mean organizations deliver much faster than heavy organizations, therefore every state is creating a team to assign work which will also generate more jobs. In three years these projects should take off everywhere.

How do you measure the entire debate about the corruption in government procedures? How, in your view, IT can bring a change?

Corruption is not a new word in the political dictionary. The Adarsh Housing Society scam, for example, could have been avoided had there been a proper records. The initiatives like creating new automated records of every house through geographical information system (GIS) setting will prevent such scams in future.

The initiatives taken by the various state governments under e-governance is a right step and will help in eradicating corruption. One of the projects under e-governance that I liked is Bhoomi in Karnataka. Bhoomi (meaning land) is the project of online delivery and management of land records in Karnataka. It has computerized 20 million records of land ownership of 6.7 million farmers in the state.

I would share about another project, about crime-criminal database. We had suggested complete digitization of this register. Starting from crime detection, identification, legislation, every crime would have its own ID and tracking number till the punishment and this will also indicate if there are cases of serial/similar crimes. Every police station maintains a register called register no.10. The famous slang Dus Numberi used for criminals is coined from this. Dus Numberi is one whose name is listed in the Register no.10.

Like the tracking ID for crime, there would be tracking ID for every criminal; the database would have details of a criminal, from name to biometric details. So when a person with a criminal background applies for a job or passport, it would be treated accordingly with the help of the code/ID.

Could you recall about any of the projects that could not take off very well, even though it had huge growth opportunity?

We could see that the world was moving towards newer technologies and would seek talents in unique areas like bio-informatics, IT for instrumentation and many more. Understanding the need, we conceived International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) and planned to set up a chain of these institutes like an Institute of Information Technology (IIT) or a National Institute of Technology (NIT). It is an autonomous university set up as a not-for-profit public private partnership (NPPP).

We had certain funding in mind and we therefore approached Nasscom to involve industry and collaboratively help in building up this project, where majority of the contribution would come from the government (us). The idea was to act as a catalyst and then let Nasscom expand it further taking it from our hands. It was disappointing to see that Nasscom could not generate the expected interest among its members, perhaps because it plays a different role which is more like a lobbyist than an association.

Today we have IIIT in a few cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, but the projects did not reap the expected yield.