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Mahajan off to Paris on IT mission

India's Information Technology Minister Pramod Mahajan arrives in Paris on Thursday morning, for a two-day visit to France, making it his first visit here since taking charge of the ministry.

Accompanying Mahajan will be a 22-member delegation, comprising ministry secretary P V Jaikrishnan, chairman of the National Association of Software Companies Dewang Mehta as well as representatives of nearly 20 Indian information technology companies, eager to examine the potential of the French market for Indian software exports.

Mahajan's agenda is fairly charged. On Thursday, he meets Minister for External Trade Francois Huwart, at the Ministere Des Economie, Finances Et Industrie in southwest Paris.

This will be followed by the first meeting of the Indo-French joint working group on information technology. The group was set up nearly two years ago, to expand bilateral Indo-French relations in the critical field of IT.

On Friday, Mahajan will meet select businessmen and industrialists from leading French IT companies. This will be followed by an address by Mahajan and Huwart to a wider gathering of Indian and French IT companies. Later in the day, NASSCOM will host a lunch meeting for their French counterparts. The lunch will be followed by a session where companies can have one-to-one meetings, to get to know potential partners.

Mahajan's visit is crucial since Indo-French relations in the field of IT are among the weakest. Though most Indian IT companies are focused on the United States, even within the European Union, companies prefer the United Kingdom and Nordic countries over France.

The French are largely to blame for this situation, since they have not yet woken up to the IT revolution and unlike Germany or Japan, they are yet to revise visa structures to attract IT professionals from all over the world. This despite the fact that the French government admits that France faces a shortage of over 100,000 IT professionals and needs them urgently to catch up with the rest of the European Union.

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