India may lose $21bn IT investment

Poor infrastructure could result in a loss of $21 billion of investment to other competing countries in Asia and this was a major threat to the realisation of India's projected IT vision for 2008, a Confederation of Indian Industry paper said.

India needed to enable the creation of adequate infrastructure in the form of national backbone, integrate telecom policies to roll out data transmission and rationalise tariff structure for bandwidth, the CII paper stated.

It said adequate long distance bandwidth at competitive rates was critical to the growth of IT-enabled services.

Immediate connectivity and high levels of redundancy is essential in the it-enabled service business in all customer services and mission-critical applications which require 100 per cent standby power back-ups, mirror data centres and high bandwidth from service locations, the paper said.

Downtime in indian telecom networks varies from 3-15 per cent against the global benchmark of 0.1 per cent.

"Even on india's international circuits, the downtime is two per cent against global standard of less than 0.3 per cent," the paper said.