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CALL FOR HARNESSING IT ENABLED SERVICES EXPORTS OMAR ABDULLAH VISITS CALL CENTRE
Date : 23 Nov 2000
Location : New Delhi
Stressing that IT-enabled services would soon be one of the major constituents of exports from India, the Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, Shri Omar Abdullah, has called for big efforts to harness IT enabled services exports from the country. The IT Task Force, set up by the Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee has targetted US $ 50 billion of IT software and services exports from India by the year 2008. Out of this, IT enabled services would account for US $ 15 billion (Rs.69,000 crore), Shri Abdullah said after visiting the state-of-the-art Call Centre facility of Air Infotech at Gurgaon. The on-site visit of the Minister was organised by the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC) as part of its strategy to spread IT (Information Technology) culture among states and to leverage the competitive advantages of states for enhancing India's software and services exports. Shri Abdullah said that considering the importance of IT-enabled services, the government had identified IT enabled services as a thrust area, the global market size of which was estimated to be over US $ 800 billion. He further remarked that this area presented enormous opportunities for India, particularly with reference to development of entrepreneurs in the small enterprises, massive employment generation and IT diffusion in second-tier cities across India.
"The uptake of IT-enabled services means generating huge employment as the sector is expected to absorb a million persons, largely in smaller towns and rural areas. Such as proposition seems ideal for states like Jammu & Kashmir which has already set up a Software Technology Park and is keen to join the IT platform for the benefit of its people", Shri Abdullah said.
The emerging segment of IT-enabled services are critically important for the Indian economy as it is estimated that a large portion of India's IT-enabled services exports will come from this and similar other services such as medical transcription, data entry, web development, multi-media, digitilisation, mapping etc. India has a significant role to play in the growing worldwide IT-enabled services market and can harness the immense export opportunities emerging from this sector. Among the IT-enabled services, the call centre segment has been more proactive as well as attractive to companies with a wide base of customers. The call centre industry is expected to grow at compounded annual growth rate of 16.6 per cent during 1997-2004 and the market size is expected to be worth US $ 10 billion by 2004. The Indian IT industry is keen to translate these trends into real export opportunities in the near future. The United States has about 37,000 call centres while there are only a handful of call centres in India. The potential for setting up more call centres in India is tremendous due to certain competitive advantages such as availability of requisite infrastructure and manpower. In this context, Shri Abdullah referred to the forthcoming INDIASOFT 2001 being organised by ESC on 23-24 February 2001 at New Delhi with the support of his Ministry as well as of Ministry of Information Technology. INDIASOFT 2001 is a business-to-business partnering forum which will give Indian IT companies an opportunity to enter into strategic alliances and joint ventures with overseas IT companies in the area of software services and IT-enabled services.
Emphasising the government's proactive role in developing the Indian IT industry, Shri Abdullah said that "the government is committed to development and growth of IT-enabled services by creating an enabling business environment. The success of our software exports presently valued at more than US $ 4 billion is to be commended, but the potential for development of IT enabled services is immense when harnessed to our advantage".
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