Elections & Budget Done-Now What?

The author is CEO of Zensar Technologies and member of the chairmen's council of Nasscom. He can be reached at maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

One of the most evocative headlines following the Congress debacle in the recent state elections talked about one career ending at the age of 39 while another was beginning at 38! A rather drastic pronouncement of the end of an aspiring career but echoing the sentiment that many Congress watchers must be feeling as they see the party and the ruling coalition flounder from corruption scandals to policy paralysis to the latest telling blow!

While this may not be the knockout punch for a party that had so much going for it when it came to power for a second innings, the compulsions of making a comeback with the vote banks before the next parliamentary election are likely to drive a form of behavior which cannot spell success for the stock markets, the corporate sector, or the IT industry.

While one hopes to be proved wrong, it seems unlikely that we will see any of the signs of economic progress that was uppermost on all business minds just a couple of years ago! So much could have been done that would have consolidated India's global successes and taken it to a position of strength in the leadership firmament.

The accumulated foreign exchange, thanks largely to IT exports, could have been used to transform digital, social, and physical infrastructure and enable many smaller towns and cities to become destinations of domestic and foreign investment.

Taking a leaf out of China's book, India could have opened the doors to FDI in select sectors and asked for sourcing and technology purchases in return while keeping coalition partners happy through better engagement than we have seen so far. And a more pragmatic policy of working with the states and helping the less privileged members of society through subsidized skills development and job creation like Philippines could have placed the government in better light when the time came for the people to cast their votes rather than just 'vote their caste'!

But then all this is 20-20 hindsight-the industry has achieved great results in both exports and the domestic market in the last five years although the domestic consumption, particularly in the government, has slowed perceptibly in recent times.

Our tryst with a $200 bn+ exports destiny by 2020 is very achievable with or without the government coming to the party. However IT will be one of the key drivers of the wheels of the Indian economy, and the IT intensity in the public and private sector can be doubled with the opportunities to embrace what Gartner calls 'the nexus of forces'.

Active proliferation of SaaS and IaaS solutions, aggressive application extensions to mobility and enterprise, and serious investments in big data business intelligence and analytics to drive an IT-enabled society-all this and more is possible. Let's hope successive governments see the road ahead with as much clarity as we do!