Government to spend $20 billion on IT in five years

Sam Pitroda, the prime minister’s advisor on public information infrastructure and innovations, said India is likely to end up spending around $20 billion on the current overhaul of its IT infrastructure.

The estimate by Pitroda, who has a unique perspective of government’s IT-related expenditure due to his unique position at the centre, is the first estimation of the quantum of investment that is going into different government-funded IT related projects.

It is also higher than the $8.2 billion estimate given by the government for the various ‘digitisation’ projects currently underway at its various ministries and bodies.

“We have 15,000 people working on government software, at the central level,” Pitroda said, speaking at this year’s PanIIT conference in Delhi. Pitroda said investments into IT, at the current scale, is unprecedented in the country and rare even when compared to other countries.

“We are putting up national knowledge networks, connecting panchayats, creating e-goverance facilities, software, UID (unique identification number), GIS (geospatial information system), applications. When we put all this together we would probably spend $20 billion over the next five years on IT infrastructure,” he said.

Pitroda added that the government is currently working on ‘lighting up’ the lakhs of kilometres of unused fibre-optic cable lying in the country to bring high-speed connectivity to even small villages.

Pitroda, an IITian who made his fortune in the US in 60s and 70s, urged Indians to look at the outsourcing issue in the right perspective.

“I was recently in Detroit. When you drive around, you see all these homes boarded up. It is a depressing feeling, because lots of jobs have been lost all of a sudden. As a result, everyone’s focus in the US is on job creation,” he said, when asked how India should react to Obama’s anti-outsourcing stance.

That said, he added, trying to turn back the clock by bringing manufacturing jobs to the US was not the right way to go about correcting the situation.

“You have got to think forward and not backward. It’s not about going back to what it was. It’s about creating a new future,” he said, urging the US administration to think of new ways to create jobs in the new global situation.

Finally, he said, outsourcing is not going to be killed off or saved by US government actions, but by business imperatives, and India does not have anything to worry as long as business fundamentals favour outsourcing.

“If it makes business sense to them (companies), they will do it. If it doesn’t, they won’t. It’s that simple,” he pointed out.