The who's who of the infotech and communications industry was in Chennai for the concluding session of Connect 2006 jointly organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry and the government of Tamil Nadu. And collectively, they were worth $50 billion: 7% of India's GDP.
Anil Ambani, chairman, Reliance Communications; Shiv Nadar, chairman and CEO, HCL Technologies; S Ramadorai, chairman and CEO, Tata Consultancy Services; Lakshmi Narayanan, CEO, Cognizant; Kiran Karnik, president, Nasscom; and Promod Haque, managing partner, Northwest Venture Partners were the industry leaders who deliberated on Vision 2011 for Tamil Nadu.
Also present was Dayanidhi Maran, Union Minister of IT and Communications, Government of India.
Dayanidhi Maran: My vision for Tamil Nadu in the next five years would be to accelerate growth to achieve its rightful position in the global and national ICT (infotech and communications technology) sector.
By 2011, Tamil Nadu is all set to reach about 25% of the Indian market for ICT, about $30 billion in terms of revenue, split across IT, ITES and manufacturing. This would mean Tamil Nadu would be able to generate over 20 lakh (2 million) jobs by the year 2011.
S Ramadorai: Tamil Nadu has a great window of opportunity by focusing and synergising its energies on select sectors. The need of the hour is government-industry-academia partnership in leveraging IT for all round growth.
Shiv Nadar: For Tamil Nadu to transform itself into a global ICT superpower, it should convert a Tier-2 potential city into a metropolis, refund tax through an interest free loan for companies going into Tier-2 towns and consider training cost as an investment and refund it.
Anil Ambani: The need of the hour is to address the info-structure challenges as communication infrastructure is the lifeline of knowledge and economy and can drive growth and competitiveness. The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group on Saturday committed to set up a Special Economic Zone in Chennai and also invest Rs 12,000 crore (Rs 120 billion) for a 1,000 MW power plant, IT Park and desalination project.
Pramod Haque: Chennai is like America's Silicon Valley twenty years ago. Influence of nearby institutions of higher education in Chennai encourages entrepreneurship as Stanford has done in the Silicon Valley. India or for that matter Chennai can be the hardware manufacturing hub like China and Taiwan.
India is initially attractive because of lower labour costs. However, the long-term appeal rests on 'knowledge arbitrage' rather than pure 'cost arbitrage.'
(From left to right) Shiv Nadar, chairman and CEO, HCL Technologies; Kiran Karnik, president, Nasscom; Dayanidhi Mara, Union IT and Communications Minister; Anil Ambani, chairman, Reliance Communications; S Ramadorai, chairman and CEO, and Promod Haque, managing partner, Northwest Venture Partners.
Photograph: Sreeram Selvaraj
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