Communications and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal on Friday unveiled the draft National Policy on Information Technology 2011 that envisages taking the overall revenue from the sector from $89 billion as of today to $300 billion by 2020, besides creating additional one-crore jobs. He also hinted that once the Direct Taxes Code (DTC) was in place, the Centre might extend tax holiday under the Software Technology Park of India (SPTI) scheme, which expired in March this year, besides giving incentives to small and medium enterprises engaged in the IT sector.
Exploring new markets
Aimed at further consolidating the position of the Indian IT and IT-enabled services (ITeS) sector in the global arena, the draft policy has set the target of achieving $200 billion exports target by 2020 against the current level of $59 billion. “Today, 80 per cent of the IT sector revenue comes from exports, mainly from North America and Europe. While we have seen IT sector exports growing at 30 per cent, this year it may be around 15 per cent due to global financial crisis…we need to diversify our exports by exploring new markets to sustain the growth momentum,” he pointed out.
The draft policy, which will be available for comments from public and various stakeholders for a month, also focuses on gaining a significant global market share in cloud-based technologies and services, and mobile-based value added services.
“The focus is on deployment of ICT in all sectors of the economy and providing IT solutions to the world. It also aims to strengthen and enhance India's position as the global IT hub and to use IT as an engine for rapid, inclusive and sustainable growth in the national economy,” he added.
The draft policy will also look into formulating fiscal and other incentives to attract investment in this sector in Tier II and Tier III cities, besides promoting innovation and research and design in cutting-edge technologies and in strategic sectors such as defence, space and atomic energy.
Referring to the launch of world's cheapest tablet PC ‘Aakash', Mr. Sibal said the aim was to integrate Internet and mobile-based delivery of services onto a common platform to enable seamless, ubiquitous, secure and personalised delivery of government and non-government services throughout the country.
PTI reports:
Further, the draft policy calls for setting up centres of excellence in institutions of higher learning so as to produce at least 3,000 PhDs in the information and communication technology sector in specialised areas by 2020.
