"The PC is still the fulcrum of the new economy"

On

the significance of the five-million figure

I don’t think it’s really a very important milestone per se. Five million

as a number is not so huge by worldwide standards. I would be much happier if

you reach a mark of five million per year. That would be a great milestone.

On the significance of the PC

I think the PC is still the fulcrum of the new economy. So it is still very

significant and it is important that the benefits of that sort of the Internet

age should extend beyond the larger towns and to that extent we should get

Internet connectivity through PCs into the rural areas and the smaller towns.

That’s beginning to happen but one would love to see that accelerated at a

faster rate. I don’t see any substitution for both the individual power that

you get through the PC as well as the connectivity that it provides to other

parts of either an enterprise or the external world.

Manufacturing in India

You are seeing that the country is talking of a flood of imports and Indian

industry is not getting competitive. The answers were available when the prime

minister had set up the taskforce on IT. There were certain recommendations,

those on the software front, the telecom front and the hardware front.

Unfortunately in the case of hardware, although everybody said the

recommendations were good, for some completely mistaken notions on revenue

protection, nothing was done on those directions. I think today the

infrastructure is inadequate and India is not competitive in terms of

manufacturing.