India
Computers and Internet
With the growth of computer industry in India , India is now emerging
as an important destination for global business. The growth of
computer industry in India has led to the growth of software industry,
the hardware industry and the internet in India. GOI has accepted the
fact that to meet the expanding demands of India's 900 million population,
intensive computerization is not only inevitable but imperative. Service
sectors in the Indian economy have resorted to computerization on a
large scale to ensure availability of consistent information at
the right time. Of late, both the GOI and private sector have
emerged as major end-users of computer systems and software. At the
present rate of growth, the country which had only 100 computers before
1970 will have over five million computers before the turn of
the century.
Indian Software
Industry
Indian Software
Industry is one of the fastest sectors of the Indian economy employing
about 2.50 lakh workers mostly from the highly skilled and educated
segments. During the financial year 19998-99 (March-Feb) the Indian
software industry was worth about 159 billion Indian Rupees (3.85 billion
$ US) and exports accounted for nearly 70% of this at 2.69 billion USD.
In 1999 - 2000 the Indian software industry is expected to gross
over 5.65 billion USD representing the growth of nearly 50%.
Though India was
an early convert to computers with the Indian Government and the industry
using mainframes and data entry machines as early as the 50s/60s the
Indian Software Industry took off only since the mid 1980's. An
idea of its phenomenal growth can be had from the fact that the total
industry output increased from Indian Rupees 500 million in 1988-89
to 1,59,000 million in 1998-99.
The Indian Software
Industry is dominated (upto 70% by value) by exports and during the
first decade of its evolution exports were wholly comprised of onsite
staffing services at clients location overseas(also known as professional
services or body shopping). From this lower end of the value chain
the industry has steadily worked its way up and during 98-99 upto 40%
of the exports were by way of offshore services or packaged products.
The gross revenues
for the industry however do not fully reveal its potential to carry
out software development work of outstanding quality. For example several
top notch global IT majors like Microsoft, Motorola, Oracle, Cisco,
Texas Instruments, Alcatel and others are working on their next generation
products in their Indian labs. Similarly out of about one dozen software
labs across the world rated at level 5(the highest) of SEI-CMM standards
5 are in India with nearly 10 or so at level 4. More than 200 of Fortune
1000 companies out source software of significant values from India
for their core operations.
Domain Strengths
Indian Software
companies have demonstrated their strengths in the 4 main domains of
- banking and
financial services
- insurance
- manufacturing
- internet and
e-commerce
IT enabled services
The latest software
sector that is attracting increasingly large interest and investment
is IT enabled teleworking services like call centres, medical and legal
transcriptions, data and map digitisation, CAD, managing large databases,
web content creation, animation etc. Companies like Swissair, GE, Bechtel,
Singapore Airlines and several American insurance companies and Hollywood
studios have either set up such facilities or have outsourcing arrangements
with Indian companies. Thos sector currently employs 25,000 people and
is expected to explode over the next decade creating atleast a million
jobs. India has tremendous natural strengths in this area such as skilled
and English speaking work force at internationally competitive wages,
reliable communication network atleast in the major cities, ideal time
zone placement etc.
