With its large talent pool of English-speaking Information Technology professionals, its extensive and expanding domestic market, and the increasingly central place occupied by information and communication technologies (ICT) in the government’s development strategy, India is well positioned to leverage ICT moving forward.
This will enable the country to leapfrog to higher stages of development, reduce poverty and regional income disparities, and reinforce its competitiveness for enhanced growth and prosperity. This is the conclusion of the World Economic Forum’s recently just released Global Information Technology Report 2009-2010.
The report underlines the remarkable strides India has made in the last two decades, emerging as a global player in sectors such as ITeS-BPO and also by increasing ICT penetration and diffusion.
At the same time, there are challenges ahead, as well as opportunities for better exploiting India’s many competitive advantages when it comes to networked readiness, the report points out.
India still lags behind relevant comparators, including China, in most of the dimensions measured by the Networked Readiness Index. In particular, notwithstanding the high level of individual preparation for using ICT and fairly affordable access costs, individual penetration remains extremely low by international standards, with the majority of citizens not yet benefiting from ICT advances in their daily activities and transactions.
The strong economic growth experienced by India in the last 20 years has neither bridged the economic and social divide between urban and rural areas nor significantly reduced extreme poverty. The country still faces important development challenges in making growth more inclusive.
ICT could play an important enabling role in that area by improving all citizens’ access to markets as well as to basic services in education, health, and financial services, among others. Although much has been achieved, without increasing ICT penetration the enormous opportunities it offers will continue to elude a substantial segment of the population.
A significant impediment to increasing penetration is the dismal quality and underdevelopment of national hard infrastructure, including energy and transport networks and fixed telephony. This not only undermines widespread ICT use but stands in the way of productivity increases and manufacturing development and deters foreign investors.
In parallel, despite the major market reforms that dismantled the licence raj system in the 1990s, the regulatory environment for doing business must be improved by further cutting red tape and government inefficiencies as well as enhancing public governance. Such improvements would result in a more favourable and predictable regulatory and market environment for both foreign and domestic investment. In particular, additional foreign investment could engender significant positive externalities in terms of job creation, technology development and management skills, the report says.
On a more positive note, ICT, both as a target sector and an enabling infrastructure for enhanced efficiency and better living conditions, has increasingly been prioritised by the government over the last 20 years. A comprehensive long-term plan, the National eGovernment Programme, was adopted in 1996, embracing almost all sectors, and to be implemented at integrated, Central, and state levels.
The report says the government’s coherent vision of the importance of ICT bodes well for fully leveraging the country’s enormous potential going forward, turning ICT into a key catalyst of India’s development and societal inclusion.
It adds, however, that the government’s vision needs, of course, to be matched by a concomitant commitment and effort on the part of the business sector and civil society at large, as the experience of the most successful networked economies has shown.
The report seeks to provide a useful basis for a society-wide discussion on how to further improve ICT diffusion and development in India in order to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the country’s several advantages in this realm.
By offering a snapshot of the country’s networked readiness and by drawing comparisons with economies with similar characteristics and challenges, the report aims to throw light on the weaknesses that should be addressed on a priority basis and point to possible solutions and best practices that would make India a truly networked society.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Rajiv Shirali
Quelle/Source: Business Standard, 14.11.2010
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