The Hindu : Centre keen to operationalise electronic trade services

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 17, 2004

Business

Business

Centre keen to operationalise electronic trade services

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, MARCH 16. The Central Government is working on a project entitled EC/EDI for trade with a view to providing all international trade related services electronically. In fact, all regulatory and facilitating departments and organisations such as customs, Directorate General of Foreign Trade, ports, airports, scheduled banks, and others involved in the different aspects of international trade have geared to offer their services through EC/EDI.

Revealing this, K. K. Jaswal, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, while inaugurating the E-Business Summit, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), here said that in so far as the infrastructure for e-commerce was concerned, the Government had taken major initiatives over the last few years to establish the telecommunication infrastructure.

He said that the Government had a role in promoting e-commerce through policy formulation in areas related to the creation of infrastructure, legal and administrative framework and in technology related issues such as standards. "The Government is seized of all the issues related to enabling broadband Internet, cost of access, as also the quality of connectivity".

Outlining a roadmap, he said every business had to reinvent itself. The banking and insurance industry would have to reshape using Internet as one of the major channels for interfacing with customers. Also credit card usage would have to expand and the Internet would have to find newer ways to assure a customer that his credit card would not be used by anyone simply because the number was known.

The recent telecom policies have resulted in the teledensity crossing the figure of 7 per cent. PC penetration stands at 9 per 1,000 while the Internet connections are only about four million. From the beginning in 1997, when the framework for E-Commerce was proposed, governments the world over, he said, attempted to formulate e-commerce policies, while the actual e-commerce was led by the private sector.

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