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One great strength of our industry is our English-speaking engineers: we produce
nearly 100,000 IT-related engineers every year. The second advantage is our logic
and mathematical expertise — remember, India invented the numeral zero! The third
strength is adaptability and fourth, of course, is our cost and quality advantage. This
is important to India. In the knowledge-based economy, we have found an area
where we can do particularly well. And this area is bringing employment, foreign
exchange and pride; it is making India modern.
The government bid contribution
:
When the Ministry of Information Technology
was formed in 1999, the industry had concerns about the fact that it would interfere.
Subsequent events have proved otherwise. The ministry has acted as an “ambassador”
to other departments. The government has helped develop a legal framework and
provide the infrastructure. It has been trying to give us more power, bandwidth
and infrastructure like new airports and highways.
NASDAQ’s role in India has also been significant. Today, even if you go to small
towns and villages in India, people know about NASDAQ. More and more companies
want to list their Indian software companies on NASDAQ. For years, they’ve been
servicing clients around the world: they believe now that their customers would
also like to be investors.
Looking ahead, there are two exciting prospects. Having promoted India for so
long for its cost and quality advantage, we are now, in addition, looking at
positioning India to create original technology—which others follow. Secondly, back
home we want to take IT to the masses. We do not believe in the digital divide—we
believe in a digital unite. We can use IT to spread literacy and for healthcare—we
want to take the benefits of IT to the people of the country.
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AN ABSTRACT OF AN INTERVIEW WITH DEWANG MEHTA
