Why IT makes sense to look ahead

In UK, in mid-May, I interacted with some leading stalwarts from the industry, the government, media and think-tanks. While they seemed enamored of India’s success, they wished to know the suitability of India as a future IT destination, in terms of quality standards, benchmarking, specialised services and security of data, as well as in terms of the growth of standards of Indian IT education infrastructure. They were convinced that India needed to make fresh global interventions to drive its next wave of IT business.

So are we prepared for this new push and have we recovered from the earlier reverses? The answers are elusive. The software industry’s onward march has clearly created a massive divide between the large companies, with falling share prices, and the smaller ones dying by the day. We still have no clear indication on what happened to the many companies that mushroomed during the windfall registration under STPI, or Software Technology Parks of India, in the year 2000. Having emerged stronger from the Y2K syndrome, the IT hungry nation failed, at that time, to live up to its dreams. Now the government in general and NASSCOM in particular have to manage the situation, otherwise India stands to lose its talent. Many trained techies are returning to India because of the global economic recession and there have been no efforts to tap their potential.

Secondly, how much of IT has actually penetrated into the country in the last five years? There is a great deal of buzz about e-governance, but the record varies from state to state. There is, in fact, resistance in many regions to the introduction of IT as it is felt that the transparency ushered in by it would affect the ability of vested interests to tweak the system for their own benefit. Even the computerisation of various government departments has been sluggish. In other words, as one serving bureaucrat put it, there has been a haphazard proliferation of IT in government.

The time has come to re-think a few concepts. E-governance needs to be electronic governance and not election governance. Simultaneously, we need to improve the quality of work, build capacity and improve network readiness. The reports of the Indian Market Research Bureau for the Central government ministries and departments and the National Council of Applied Economic Research for the states do not speak very well of our IT management. Similarly, a Harvard study last year pegs us at the 54th position in the Network Readiness Index of 75 nations.

Also, how strong are we in the area of securing our networks? Security considerations are still on the backburner, apart from some anti-virus systems and firewalls, which only provide a false sense of security. To date, the nation has no cyber security policy and the industry’s response has also been wanting. At a time when many other nations are trying to catch up with us on the IT-enabled services and software exports bandwagon, we need to have an ace up our sleeve. Even our enemies are out to discredit us and the best example of such pursuits are the regular hacking and virus attacks from Pakistani networks. We cannot complain about these forces to the world community. It would expect us to be more readily prepared to meet such eventualities.

While stories of India’s glory in this field continue to be narrated in many regions, we must remember that this is a fast-moving industry and we need to be ahead of the competition. This needs a balanced and multi-directional approach.