By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 25 2001 (IPS)

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has acknowledged India’s phenomenal success in the field of information technology (IT) and the giant strides the country has made in high-tech exports.

India’s software exports, he says, exceeded 4 billion dollars last year, and are projected to reach a staggering 50 billion dollars by 2008.

With over a billion people, India’s per capita income has remained at a little over 2,000 dollars. But its international reserves have risen more than threefold over the last six years: from about 10.2 billion dollars in 1993 to 32.6 billion dollars last year.

Arguing that “our future depends on technology – especially new information technology”, Annan says that unlike earlier technologies, this one does not require vast amounts of hardware, financial capital or even energy.

“What it does require is brain power – the one commodity that is equally distributed among the world’s peoples.”

“So, for a relatively small investment – mainly investment in basic education, for girls and boys alike – we can bring all kinds of knowledge within reach of poor people, and enable poor countries to ‘leapfrog’ some of the long and painful stages of development that others had to go through,” he adds.

Annan also cites the success story from a much smaller country – Costa Rica – whose rising 8.3 percent growth rate last year has been attributed to the development of its microchip industry, and whose high-tech products find a ready market in other countries.

In its World Employment Report 2001 released in Geneva Wednesday, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said that given the different speed of diffusion in rich and poor countries, the information and communications technology revolution (ICT) is resulting in a widening global “digital divide”.

“The ICT revolution offers genuine potential, but also raises the risk that a significant portion of the world will lose out,” says ILO Director-General Juan Somavia of Chile.

The ILO points out that the east Asian economies of China, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and others, for example, have been able to make rapid progress in high-tech areas and were able to capture a significant share of the world market for semi-conductors and other data-processing equipment.

But India alone, it says, has seen its software sector grow by 50 percent throughout the 1990s, creating not just exports, but thousands of domestic jobs and a technological talent pool that is drawing international attention from industrialised countries and large multinationals.

Annan says that some African countries too, are learning the lesson. Mauritius uses the Internet to position its textile industry in the global market. Mali has established an intranet to provide better administrative services. And Senegal and South Africa have seen a growth in “telecentres”.

In the World Economic and Social Survey 2000 released last month, the United Nations said that the Indian software industry, like its pharmaceutical industry, owes its success largely to human capital.

India had built up the critical mass of educated people necessary to take advantage of new developments in information technology.

In 1996/1997, over 6 million students were enrolled in India’s tertiary education sector, the largest number among any developing country.

Yet, by comparison with other developing countries that have not enjoyed such spectacular successes with new technology, India’s enrolment ratios are not exceptional.

For instance, says the report, its gross enrolment rate for tertiary education, at 6.4 percent in 1995, was lower than the average of 9.1 percent for all developing nations.

However, the Indian educational system produced graduates of a very high standard, with many of them being sought by both Indian and foreign information technology companies.

The report also said that the example of software exports by India highlights the fact that support to all levels of education, including the highest, is essential to the development of high-technology industries.

Largely because of their connections with Silicon Valley in the United States, some highly motivated and qualified Indian entrepreneurs were able to exploit the advantages that came from the existence of this highly trained labour force, the study said.

Indian entrepreneurs built up a software exporting industry of nearly 900 firms, employing about 280,000 engineers, the second largest group of software engineers in the world, after the United States.

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