Indian Information Technology and IT enabled serives (ITES-BOP) continue to chart remarkable growth. The Indian software and services export is estimated at Rs. 103200 crore (US $23.4 billion) in 2005-06, as compared to Rs. 80180 crore (US$ 17.7 billion) in 2004-05, an increase of 32 per cent in dollar terms.
The ITES – BPO
sector has become the biggest employment generator amongst young college graduates with the number of jobs almost doubling each year. The no. of professinals employed in India by IT and ITES sectors is estimated at 1287000 as of March 2006.
National Plan on e-governance
The national Common Minimum programme adopted by the government accords high priority to improving the quality of basic governance and in that contest has proposed to promote e-governance on a massive scale in areas of concern to the common. A national egovernance plan has accordingly been drawn up covering 25 mission mode projects and of support components to be implemented at the Central, State and Local Government Levels.
MAJOR INITIATIVES IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SECTOR
For realizing IT objectives, Data Connectivity and Services Delivering Access points need to be established all over the country, including the remotest areas. The Government is establishing State Wide Area Networks (SWANs) at a total outlay of Rs. 3,334 crore. These SWANs will extend data connectivity of 2 Mega bits per second upto the block level in State or Union Territory in the country. The block level nodes in turn, will have a provision to extend connectivity further to the village level using contemporary wireless technology. The government is also formulating a proposal to establish 100,000 common service centers that would extend the reach of electronic services, both government and private to the village level. Under the scheme, proposals from 26 states/UTs have already been sanctioned.
PC penetration- The department of Information technology has identified increase of PC penetration and internet utilization/coverage in the country; and growth of domestic software market as the thrust area for action during next 2-3 years. The department has set up six committees on low cost PC manufacturing; Education; e-Govenance, IT for Rural and Social sectors, Multilingual software Application and Contests; Internet penetration; and Telemedicine to prepare action plan in the respective sectors.
.IN Domain Name – In order to bring about a substantially increased proliferation of .IN Internet domain name, a new .IN Internet domain name policy was announced by the government in October 2004. It aims at adopting a liberal and market friendly approach to register large number of IN domain names. The policy has received wide acceptance country wide. The .IN inernet domain name registration has crossed 3,50,000 during December 2007.
Migration of IPV6 from Ipv4 : Internet protocol version 6 (Ipv6) is the next generation protocol of Internet to which migration is to take place from the currently used Internet Protocol version 4 (Ipv4). Ipv6 is essentially an upgrade to the data networking protocol that powers the internet. Keeping in view the global trends in Ipv6, the department of Information Technology took the initiative towards Ipv6 transition and National Roadmap for Ipv6 implementation.
Indian Language Technology – The benefits of information technology can reach the common man in India only when the digitised information is available in all Indian Languages. To enable wide proliferation of ICT in Indian languages, tools, products and resources should be freely available to the general public. The hindi software tools and fonts were released in June 2005.
