Indian IT Industry: An encouraging progress

The Indian IT industry has witnessed a rapid growth from the late 90s with regular shifts in paradigm consistently. Computers which were considered to be purely scientific computing machines has now transformed and undergone sea changes - from Mainframe to hand-held devices with better processing & storage capacity, domain specific applications to highly customized applications, specific to generic applications, domain specific to Convergence of various domains (Humanities, Sciences, Medical Sciences, Bio Technology, Physical Sciences and so on) giving way to development of Cross-functional applications, static response machines to Human-Computer Interaction and responsive computing, restricted storage space to Cloud, owning infrastructure to renting services & infrastructure and so on.

According to various reports (reference to BCG, NASSCOM, Gartner), India has established itself as the world's largest sourcing destination for the Information Technology (IT) industry accounting for approximately 67% of the US$ 124-130B market. The IT industry itself employs about 10 million workforces and even more importantly, the IT industry has led the economic transformation of the country and altered the perception of India in the global economy. Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) are collectively expected to offer a US$ 1 trillion opportunity. Cloud represents the largest opportunity under SMAC, increasing at a CAGR of approximately 30% to around US$B 650-700 by 2020. The social media is the second most lucrative segment for IT firms, offering a US$ 250 billion market opportunity by 2020. The Indian e-commerce segment is US$ 12 billion in size and is witnessing strong growth and thereby offers another attractive avenue for IT companies to develop products and services to cater to the high growth consumer segment.

There is trend that now all the developments are directly or indirectly focused towards finding way & means to reach out to the masses and empowering each individual of society through digitization and thus empowering society digitally and socially both. The Digital India Mission, as ambitious initiative of Government of India, seems to be aligned to achieve these objectives.

But then all these does not happen without understanding the objectives, benefits, provisions and challenges. It needs a strong and effective campaign to take these details to citizens by the individuals those who foresee the future, craft technology vision and have ability to lead from the front to create awareness about the Digital India concept, awareness about its provisions, its long term impact on businesses, society, health, education, governance, media etc. 

Dr. Sunil Kr Pandey