Universal license within 6 months

NEW DELHI: Inaugurating the Sify’s countrywide video-conferencing initiative — iMeet in New Delhi, Minister for IT, Communications & Disinvestment, Arun Shourie said that the country would soon move towards automatic authoritative regime.

"We have taken the first step and are going to have universal license in place within the next six months. The idea is to give up licensing and move towards automatic authoritative regime where there would be more scope to innovate with new technologies," he added.

Shourie went on to say that this kind of regime would give every telecom operator a chance to provide as many services as possible. "I do not think that government should put any road-blocks as far as technological advancements are concerned, so this will make sure that pioneering technologies come to India, seamlessly," he explained.

Commenting on the government’s policy towards increasing the hardware sector growth, he informed that the government is on its way to meet its targets of reducing the duty on IT equipment to zero percent by January 2005. "We are fully committed to this task. This will help India boost its growth in hardware for electronics in general and IT in particular," he informed.

Accepting the fact that now there are a lot more second hand computers in the country than ever before, the minister said that, there is zero percent duty on second hand computers intended towards educating students in government schools and this is triggering a lot of penetration within India.

"We did a project in AP where 40,000 absolutely illiterate people were educated with the help of IT and second hand computers within a period of 10 weeks. According to me, this is a big achievement. IBM alone discards about 50,000 computers annually. With one computer alone we can teach around 300 to 400 people at the basic level and this could give us a chance to educate about 90 percent of our population within a short span of time. So we will have to devise ways to get the best out of this IT phenomenon," he explained.

(CyberMedia News Service)