Monday, December 8, 2008

How the Indian IT Industry is tiding the current global crisis ? - A Nasscom Report

PuneTech blog reports about a recent talk by Ganesh Natarajan of Nasscom on how the Indian IT industry is tiding the current IT crisis. The presentation can be found here. The report is full of graphs and figures and is a very interesting and motivating read.

My summary of the report
  • Inspite of global uncertainities, the revenue aggregate (from IT-BPO sector) as a percentage of GDP continues to rise (albeit a little less compared to the rises in previous years).
  • This growth (in the face of current global crisis) is partly due to entry into new market verticals like Airlines, Media and healthcare apart from Banking, Financial, Insurance and Telecom. This reduces dependency.
  • The industry is progressing towards providing more end-to-end services. The report cites the BPO industry as an example, where in addition to customer support, services like finance, accounting, HR, procurement and knowledge services are also being offered.
  • India is exporting its services to more and more regions (though US still holds 61% of the share). The fast growing areas are Europe and Middle East. This makes us less prone to mistakes made by "Superpowers" :).
  • The report indicates that by 2020 India will lead the world in working age population. The estimated work force in India will be 47mn compared to -17mn in the US. This extreme imbalance in work force will work towards India's sustained growth.
To ensure that India does not lose its advantage a number of initiatives are being undertaken:
  • IT Export services are being spread across more cities to manage pressure on Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi.Nasscom identifies around 43 Tier 2/3 cities.
  • There is a comprehensive program in place for making Indias large talent force "employable". These include short-time objectives like making large investments in training, medium-term objectives like faculty development programs to train and sustain faculty (this is very very important given the current crisis of good teachers in our country) and long-term objectives like setting up new IITs, investing in technology innovation etc.