Indian IT companies must go beyond catering to the back-end operations of foreign clients and increase their product offerings instead to help the country cut its reliance on technology developed abroad, Minister of State for Electronics and IT K.J. Alphons said.
Speaking at a CII summit on the Internet of Things (IoT) on Tuesday, Mr. Alphons warned about the dangers of relying too much on technology from overseas as programs and gadgets could collect information.
‘Scary world’
“It’s a very scary world, where a manufacturer can put a little code to collect information and even shut down systems,” Mr. Alphons said. “Why is our indigenous product sector so small? Can we survive just doing back end for other countries? This is deeply worrying.”
According to Mr. Alphons, Forbes estimated that there would be 25 billion IoT connected devices by 2020, while Cisco pegged that number at 50 billion.
Gartner, he said, predicts that IoT would result in an economic benefit of almost $2 trillion by 2020 while Cisco forecasts a value of $14.4 trillion by 2022.
“It is clear that the size of IoT industry is huge and India and Indian electronics industry must take maximum advantage of this opportunity,” he said.
