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Cooperate to Conquer…

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Every year, when the cold winds of December begin to sweep

through the nation’s capital, the Confederation of Indian Industry holds the

India Economic Summit in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. A

"not to be missed opportunity", you have CEOs and CEO wannabes

hobnobbing with their peers, listening to a large cohort of international

speakers airing their views on the global and Indian economies. This year too,

it proved to be an exciting event, providing a direction for the country and the

IT Industry as well!

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“One reason for the awesome growth of the infotech sector in China is the proliferation of the communications backbone there”

Economic realities and challenges



Union finance minister Yashwant Sinha, in his typical forthright style,

sought to dismiss the prophets of gloom with a confident assertion that only

China and India have been able to show five percent growth in this recessionary

year and that significant progress has been made in clearing the bureaucratic

webs for higher levels of FDI in the future. He also struck a poignant note when

he reminded the Indian CEOs that a concerted effort to record over 7% GDP growth

for the next decade would see a 100 million Indians moving up and out of the

ranks of poverty. This is a significant achievement by any standards and one, as

Sinha reminded, that we could all proudly boast about to our grandchildren.

Speaking in subsequent sessions, both Arun Shourie and Arun Jaitley spoke of the

difficulties faced in implementation even when all sections and factions of the

Government as well as the opposition had approved the budgets and policies.

In sharp contrast, both Professor Jun Gu, a scientist at the Academy of

science in Beijing and Ma QiYuan, Chairman of the Time innovation venture from

China, spoke of the breathtaking speed at which China was implementing investor

friendly policies in every sector of the economy including IT. These policies

have seen China replacing Malaysia, Korea and Taiwan as the epicenter of

electronics manufacturing in Asia and the Chinese IT Industry growing to a

staggering US $ 110 billion. The only area where China lags behind India is in

software exports where our US $ 6 billion plus industry can proudly claim to be

far ahead of their 400 million. But for how long? There is certainly an enormous

opportunity for cooperation between Indian software and Chinese hardware, but it

will require a wise political and business leadership to translate the perceived

threat into a real partnering opportunity.

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One reason for the awesome growth of the Infotech sector in China is the

proliferation of communications infrastructure–Over a quarter billion

telephones and 27 million Internet users with extraordinary year on year growth,

while India still dreams the 100 million telephone dream. The contrast was

sharply brought out in a plenary session where India’s Telecom czar Sunil

Mittal of Bharti Televentures raised some very pertinent questions on the urgent

need to open up the telecom sector and give the VSNLs and BSNLs of this country

a run for their money. In the same session, David Lim, the Information and

Communications Minister of Singapore talked about the country state’s

calculated moves in e-Infrastructure, e-Talent, e-Capital-Markets and e-Ideas.

These are a host of farsighted moves to ensure that the country stays at the

leading edge of the new e-transformation that is expected to sweep the corporate

world.

Areas of emerging opportunity



With the world just gaining back its confidence and investment appetite

after the tumultuous 9/11 events, there was guarded optimism among all the

speakers who touched upon the consulting and software opportunities in the new

world. Rajat Gupta, MD of McKinsey and Company Worldwide, spoke about the

resilience of the US Economy and the irrepressible spirit of the Indian diaspora

in the Silicon Valley and across the United States. In fact, a recent Morgan

Stanley survey found that security software is high on the list of investment

areas, with e-commerce, enterprise application integration and ERP still

figuring among the Top Five.

Another absorbing session in the Summit was the one titled Gene Tech: The

next technological wave. This session had a galaxy of visionaries — Manju

Sharma, secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Sharat Chandra, Indian Institute

of Science and Swati Piramal, chief scientific officer of Nicholas Piramal. It

is a matter of pride that Indian companies are now at the bleeding edge of stem

cell research, though one point that each of the speakers made was that biotech

and bioinformatics cannot be the "Get Rich Quick" replacement for the

dotcom era.

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And then, there was a word of caution from Sudarshan Sampathkumar of

Accenture. Sampathkumar asked the Indian Government and industry to return to

manufacturing, particularly the labor-intensive variety, which continues to be

the only way for India to generate employment for the teeming millions. The role

of IT in making manufacturing more competitive continues to play second fiddle

to the great exports dream. Fortunately, there are a few new economy individuals

running old economy entities. People like Amit Kalyani of Bharat Forge and

Naushad Forbes of Forbes Marshal are willing to seize this opportunity and show

the way in the very near future. The big opportunity for the Indian economy will

lie in the joining of hands of manufacturing and IT, biology and IT and maybe

even social services and IT, to create value added applications that will

transform not just Indian society and meet Yashwant Sinha’s dream, but also

become a role model for the developing world.

And finally, one tribe that was conspicuous by its absence in this year’s

India Economic Summit was the IT CEO Community. Barring Ashank Desai of Mastek,

Pradeep Kar of Microland and yours truly, only Ashok Soota in his role as Vice

President of CII and Narayan Murthy as one of the co-chairs for the event, were

visible on all the days of the event. Is it a case of recession weariness? Now

that the US customers are stirring to life, maybe the worst is over for the

Indian software sector at least and we will see more optimism in the year to

come.

Ganesh Natrajan The author is deputy

chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies and the global CEO of Zensar.

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