The Hindu : Unite to fight protectionism, says Arun Shourie

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jan 13, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Unite to fight protectionism, says Arun Shourie

By Our Staff Reporter

HYDERABAD, JAN. 12. The Union Minister for Information Technology and Communication, Arun Shourie called for greater collaboration among Asian countries to overcome the backlash to our IT strengths.

Inaugurating the Second Asia IT Ministers' Summit here on Monday,

Mr. Shourie said developed countries could not expect developing countries to continue opening up our markets to their goods and services while raising protectionist walls at the first sign of competition from us. He said that today the entire world recognised Asian power in Information and Communication Technology and saw it as source of innovation in applications of ICT to daily life.

He underlined India's achievements in the ICT sector. Not only was India exporting US $ 13 billions of software annually, it was also the base for research and development in ICT for about 110 of the Fortune 500 companies. Furthermore, India had led in innovations in supercomputers, in e-governance and in making ICT accessible to distant regions, poor communities and disadvantaged groups.

He urged the gathered Ministers and senior officials to identify each other's core competencies and work out projects as part of a common Asian IT initiative. He also advocated taking up one "great" single project and work on it together to symbolise the collective strength of the Asian IT powers. The Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, reminded the leaders of the IT industry gathered for the Industry Forum that the poor had low purchasing power as individuals but as communities and groups they were viable players in the market. Giving the example of Andhra Pradesh's successful experiment with women self-help groups, he said that together these poor women had built up a corpus of US $ 350 millions over the past few years at a saving of Re. 1 per day.

Tapping the poor in this manner would open up hitherto hidden markets to the ICT industry and also provide the much needed fillip to the country's development, Mr. Naidu said.

He highlighted the e-governance initiatives of the State Government and said that the target was to put in place a paperless, transparent Government which minimum interface with citizens.

He argued that it was not paucity of available capital but lack of imagination and creativity which was holding back developing countries from joining the global IT revolution. He stressed that education and development of a skilled workforce was essential for developing countries to participate in the emerging knowledge economy and said that his Government had laid special stress on this.

The Union Minister of State for Communication and Information Technology, Thirunavukkarasar, welcomed the delegates.

Ministerial delegations from Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Yemen and Bhutan are attending the Summit. Senior official delegations are attending from Hong Kong, Iran, Israel, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Russia, Brunei Darussalam, China, Singapore, UAE, Bahrain, Philippines, Indonesia and Qatar.

The agenda of the Summit includes bridging the digital divide, standardisation and IT development in Asia, digitisation of culture, construction of broadband network, Internet affordability, management and security and other related issues.

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