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This results in considerable delays in courts and uncertainty and unpredictability
about rights, obligations and potential liabilities. Information asymmetry between
suppliers and users of public services often lead to corruption and major uncertainties.
At present, the entire control of land ownership information is with a minor village
official and modernizing and updating such records assumes special significance.
As India liberalizes and opens itself up, information problems and slow
transactions could generate significant losses and bottlenecks, and undermine
participation in the information-based global economy. Equally important,
information scarcity leads to policy mistakes, poor decision making, slow learning
processes, barriers to foreign investment and joint ventures and narrow participation
in the development processes.
India is already investing substantially in data collection and processing and in IT
hardware and systems development. These investments are likely to increase,
regardless of whether a coherent IT strategy is adopted. The challenge is not merely
to apply and diffuse IT into key sector, it is also to rationalize public expenditure
on data collection and processing to facilitate appropriate IT investments in the
private sector, and perhaps most important, to build local capabilities that ends
effective use of IT investments and get the most benefits from them.
The cost of inaction in increasing IT diffusion across the country could be so high
that it can also reduce our competitive advantage in the area of software exports.
Therefore, we have to act now. Both the industry and the government need to sit
together, formulate and implement a national plan of IT diffusion in India.
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