Indian IT making strides in emerging tech too

​Hyderabad: Contrary to the general perception that Indian IT sector is lagging behind the emerging technologies space like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IOTs), Robotics, genome etc; the sweeping digital evolution taking place in India would create a lot of capacities in the frontier technologies that would help India to maintain its global ICT leadership, said an expert. 

In his keynote address at the two-day Indiasoft 2019 organised by Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC) at HICC here on Monday, Dr Anup Wadhawan, Secretary, Commerce, Government of India, said, “Cutting edge technologies coupled with accelerated penetration of mobile telephony is scripting paradigm shift in how Indians do business, toning up our governance structure, delivery of justice and importantly the ICT exports composition from the country.

The country's merchandise exports in the current fiscal year are expected to surpass the earlier peak of $314 billion in 2013-14. "This year, we are very confident that we will go past our earlier peak, our earlier peak of 2013-14. We will go past that peak quite comfortably this year," Wadhawan told reporters here. 

The achievement comes against the backdrop of a very challenging global environment, Wadhawan said. "The earlier peak was 314 billion. We will be comfortably beyond that. Mind you, that is in a very, very challenging global environment. It's an environment where petroleum prices are coming down and 15 per cent of our exports are petroleum products. So, in spite of that, we are going to achieve a new peak," he said. 

The exports, in general, have been growing almost consistently for the last three years, he said. "In fact, you all know about the downturn of 2008-09 when there was a financial crisis, that hit us quite badly. But then we recovered from that. We reached a peak figure of our exports in 2013-14 and then as you know that global crisis got accentuated," Wadhawan said. 

"The real economy got affected and you saw, countries like China and all also getting affected for the first time. Then again, there were couple of years of slight downturn," he said. 

After that, for the last three years, the country's exports were growing, he added. Pharma, engineering products, petroleum products, gems and jewellery, leather products and even textiles would be among sectors that contribute to the growth in the exports, Wadhawan said.  "India is doing better, because of lot of effort which has been put into it, effort on the policy side, effort on the regulatory side, in terms of ease of doing business, in terms of simplification of procedures. There are so many interventions, starting with making credit available at affordable rates," Wadhawan said.