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Friday, Sep 09, 2005

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Chief Minister releases new ITES policy

Special Correspondent

Second Information Technology Park to come up at Siruseri

"We are probably the only State that has taken the unique initiative of developing a specialised ITES curriculum"

CHENNAI: Chief Minister Jayalalithaa on Thursday released the new Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) policy and announced the setting up of a second Information Technology park at Siruseri.

Inaugurating the fifth edition of CONNECT 2005, the largest IT event in the State organised by the State Government and the Confederation of Indian Industry (southern region) here, Ms. Jayalalithaa said: "I have spelt out in the policy the steps that are being envisaged to add value to the existing educational curriculum. These include a wide-ranging gamut of activities from language and voice training to training in specialised verticals in the ITES sphere. We are, probably, the only State that has taken the unique initiative of developing, in partnership with the industry, a specialised ITES curriculum. This course has been widely adopted in several of the State's universities."

Ms. Jayalalithaa pointed to the near tripling of IT exports from the State and said one software unit was coming every three days. The number of software units in the State in 2004-05 was 1,266, she said, complimenting "the spirit" of medium and small companies "striving furiously for their niche markets."

The range and depth of software exports had created the confidence that the IT industry was on a stable platform, the Chief Minister said. In 2004-05, application software accounted for 61 per cent of the software exports; systems software — 12 per cent; ITES (other than Business Process Outsourcing) — 10 per cent, BPO — five per cent; product development - three per cent; and other sectors - nine.

Inviting hardware manufacturers to Chennai, Ms. Jayalalithaa outlined the qualities that made the city and State the "most preferred investment destination" in the country.

"Chennai is clearly a city on the move... I can assure you that taken together — infrastructure, talent pool, connectivity, security and quality of living — Chennai is India's best investment destination today... International players in the ICT hardware sector have not only found Chennai and Tamil Nadu extremely cost competitive but are quite excited about our strategic location on major air and sea routes to the European and Middle Eastern markets. My Government has taken steps to enable a new international airport to be built together with an additional runway," she said.

Second IT park

She said since the IT park at Siruseri had run out of space, and there was huge demand, the Government was moving ahead with establishing a second IT park at Siruseri. In all, about 5.2 million sq. ft. of space was under construction to house the IT industry in the city. "There are more than 40 IT parks that are coming up in the public as well as private sector." She said work on an IT park in Coimbatore would commence shortly. ELCOT had been allotted land for constructing the park.

Ms. Jayalalithaa handed over documents of the Knowledge Industry Township to S. Raman, co-founder, HCL Technologies, A.L. Rao, Chief Operating Officer, Wipro and B. Ramaraju, managing director, Satyam Computer Services.

R. ParasuRaman, chairman, CII (southern region), outlined various public-private partnerships the organisation had with the Government and said it was now focussing on facilitating the process of industrialising the southern districts.

B. Santhanam, chairman, CII, Tamil Nadu, said the conference would discuss strategies to accelerate the Indian IT industry.

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