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NASSCOM to submit ISP policy suggestions to DoT

NASSCOM Excecutive Director Dewang Mehta told reporters in Bangalore today that the draft suggestions are ready but NASSCOM wants some more interaction with the member companies before finalising recommendations.

He said NASSCOM has drawn resource from the ISP policies of other countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The most liberal ISP policy is in New Zealand, he added.

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He said the Association wants the DoT to provide ISP to anyone who seeks it as it wants Internet to percolate down the population to the maximum extent possible. NASSCOM will also suggest allocation of bulk lines to any major company which could then provide it to ISPs.

Mehta said NASSCOM wants the government to put a restriction of only 10 connections per DoT line. However, there should not be any restriction on the number of ISPs in a city as in the case of other telephone value-added services.

He said, in a memorandum to Prime Minister I K Gujaral recently, NASSCOM had asked the government to provide free Internet connections to schools. According to a study, 82 per cent of the schools in the country have no libraries and 97 per cent no computers.

In the first phase, at least those 3 per cent schools which have computers could get Internet connectivity, he hoped.

He said with the achievement of throwing open Internet connectivity to the private sector, the task for NASSCOM would be to go in for call centres in the country. This would need some policy corrections. Call centres are emerging as a big business and places such as Hawaii, Caribbean Islands, Australia and the United Arab Emirates are earning a good income from them. A number of airlines are interested in locating call centres in India. British Airways alone spends and annual $5 million on call centres, he added.

Mehta said NASSCOM's dream of setting up an institute of software professionals on the lines of those for charted accountants and company secretaries would become a reality next year.

The government has given a grant of Rs 50 million and a number of states including, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and west Bengal have shown interest in locating it.

This is in keeping with NASSCOM's aim to make India a global leader in software development by 2015, he claimed.

He said Indian software exports have been continuously growing at a rate of over 50 per cent in the last six years and the first quarter of this year has seen a 65 per cent rise.

He said there is tremendous potential and this increase could easily be around 200 per cent as the country has the necessary brain-power to get to that figure. There is now a need for greater research and development orientation among software companies, he said.

UNI

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