*OT*India sitting on $1-trillion goldmine, says IT expert Michael Dertouzos (MIT)
NEW DELHI, Feb. 8
INDIA is sitting on a $1-trillion opportunity in the unfolding Internet-facilitated business world, especially if it can offer information services to the industrialised world's economy, according to Prof. Michael Dertouzos, Director, MIT Lab for Computer Sciences, US.
He said 50 per cent of the industrialised world's economy, which works out to $10 trillions is ``blue-collar work', which can be processed and delivered through the Internet.
The 50 million Indians who can read and write English and deliver office work (who will each get a minimum of $20,000 annually), have the potential of converting this into a business opportunity, Prof. Dertouzos, an IT consultant to several Fortune 500 companies, said at the IT-Asia expo here.
Indian entrepreneurs and professionals can sell their information services, expertise in jobs such as medical transcription, processing insurance documents, educational activity, etc, quite effectively in the IT market place, enabled by the Internet, he added.
The exciting feature about the unfolding IT market place is the vanishing of geographical boundaries and time-zones for delivering work.
India is well-positioned to seize the opportunities since it does not require to do much on basic skill development _ the human resource is virtually readymade.
``The million-dollar question, however, is what is holding back India from grabbing this golden chance? It is time the Indian Government, educational institutes and industry seriously pondered over it.'
The second huge potential Prof. Dertouzos sees for India is in leveraging its storehouse of knowledge in traditional medicine and spiritualism to the Western world.
He said Western corporates are looking for insights to cure several contemporary and emerging diseases and India's traditional medical systems, which have survived over 5,000 years, may help.
The MIT Professor, who is credited to have predicted the ``Internet' 15 years before its time, said: ``We are entering into an information marketplace where three things are happening _ buying, selling and freely exchanging information. The Internet-generated business has already grown from just $2 billions in 1997 to $210 billions till January, 2000, excluding all capital flows.'
The information marketplace will be very big and characterised by the dollar and non-dollar components. The commercial dollar-earning activity would be restricted to around eight hours in most business houses or professionals, while the non-dollar activity involves e-mails, chats, free exchange of information on various topics and leisure activity, he said.
Prof. Dertouzos characterised the IT revolution as ``just about taking off. We have just developed 10 per cent of the technologies that are predicted in the future. The revolution will have meaning only if the technologies developed become part of improving lifestyles, reducing human drudgery and impact on the socio-economic aspects than transporting humans into a different space.'
Left to itself and market forces, the IT revolution has immense potential to exacerbate the already existing rich-poor gap in the world, he warned. ``When rich-poor gaps grow, history teaches us that there will be bloodshed.'
Only 2 per cent of the six-billion strong global population _ 150 million people _ are inter-connected today, for the majority of the rest the television and print media has to give voice.
Presiding over the function, the Director-General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, said: ``One dot.com India requires to capitalise on the IT revolution is hasslefree.com, which will make things happen, and a change in mindset.' |
