Indian IT industry needs 1.5 lakh pros

PUNE: Allaying the fears of students about job opportunities in this sector, Nasscom president Kiran Karnik said there has been an ‘upsurge in recruitment' this year with the IT Industry needing close to 1,50,000 trained personnel to meet their demands. He stated that despite the recession, India's IT industry has been registering a growth of 26 percent every year as compared to negligible or no growth in other countries and this has spurred this increased demand.

He was speaking at the inauguration of C-DAC's Common Campus Placement Program (CCPP) for its students. He added that the initiative would not only help students in having so many IT companies to come together and recruit but help the industry as well.

He was of the opinion that since C-DAC already had the necessary linkages, Nasscom could provide the information on areas such as the demand for IT professionals, say two years from now. He said, " Nasscom could assist in facilitation and leave the rest to training institutes like C-DAC."

On the IT industry, Karnik opined that the industry was ‘doing extremely well' grossing around $ 10 billion last year. He said that this year, the IT industry was targeting a figure of $ 12 billion in exports alone, further expressing the hope that the figure should touch the $ 50 billion mark by 2008.

Karnik also sought to clear myths associated with the BPO sector. While agreeing that a majority of the sector remains non-technical, he pointed out that there were organizations, which were coming up for specialized domain areas such as bioinformatics, equity analysis of industries and so on.

However, according to him Indian IT professionals had some homework to do in terms of soft skills, which has become a vital pre-requisite these days, he observed.

CCPP is a C-DAC ACTS' endeavor to bring its students on a common platform for the entire IT industry. As many as 39 IT organizations are reported to have confirmed their participation in the two-week placement program that concludes on February 8.

CyberMedia News Service