Move for global services hub

The government is working on a strategy to turn India into a global services hub. A committee of secretaries has been set up with the objective of considering measures to make the country competitive in services exports.

While India has already made progress in the information technology and knowledge-based sectors, the government intends to put in place an action plan to make India leap frog into the big league for services, like the financial sector, education, healthcare and accounting.

"The objective of setting up the committee is to undertake a survey of the potential of India's service exports and suggest domestic reforms, if any, which are required to give such exports an added push. We will undertake an in-depth analysis of service exports," a senior government official told Business Standard.

In case of the financial sector, the commerce department was working on setting up an International Financial Centre in one of the special economic zones.

While overseas banking units, which were part of the plan, are already in place, the department has suggested measures to give a fillip to investment in the insurance business.

In case of healthcare, the government is of the opinion that India can emerge as an affordable and high quality destination. While a number of patients from Asian countries are calling on Indian shores, one strategy is to help hospitals pitch for assignments from the United Kingdom's National Health Scheme.

In case of accounting, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India is pushing for mutual recognition agreements with other countries. While this will result in movement of natural persons to provide services in other countries, a lot of tasks can be achieved through electronic means and a chartered accountant sitting in India can provide the service.

Officials said at a recent meeting of the committee of secretaries it was decided that the ministries, which were service-centric should come up with suggestions on how they could leverage their service exports. The ministries had been asked to come up with their suggestions within a month, an official said.

Collection of data on services is another area being examined by the committee of secretaries.

Though the Reserve Bank of India compiles the data on services, the committee is examining ways of how this collection can be made more comprehensive.