Maran woos Silicon Valley investors to India

Union minister for communications and information technology, Dayanidhi Maran invited entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley to invest in the Indian IT sector and reap rich dividends of the booming sector.

According to him, India was poised for 30 per cent growth in the sector.

A Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) statement said that Maran had addressed over 200 entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, US, in connection with a road show on Connect 2006, the annual information communication technology (ICT) event of the CII southern region to be held between September 8-10 in Chennai

Maran said that the growth of the IT industry had been equally supplemented by the growth of the telecom industry. He told the participants that India was adding over five million new telephone subscribers every month and was in the top five countries having over 100 million telephone connections.

He said that both the telecom and the IT sector contributed tremendously to the country's GDP growth of 8.5 per cent.

Maran also said that the call charges in India had come down to 2 cents per call and the talk time had increased considerably, making telecom services affordable.

Maran was accompanied by Gopal Srinivasan, chairman, Connect 2006, and director of TVS Electronics Ltd, Madhavan Nambiar, joint secretary (IT), M Sahu, joint secretary (telecom), and Sanjay Murthy, private secretary to the union minister among others.

Srinivasan, who made a presentation on Connect 2006 at the road show, said that the theme of Connect 2006 would be "Creating a Knowledge Driven Ecosystem".

The conference sessions would focus on topics such as IT-driven growth in tier II Indian cities; knowledge satellite cities; Tamil Nadu "� the emerging electronics manufacturing hub of Asia; the talent challenge; research and development clusters and industry-institute collaborative research and ICT in entertainment.

"Taking Silicon Valley and a few others as models, we plan to examine the issue of creating a knowledge ecosystem from the points of view of industry-institute collaboration, creation of world- class infrastructure and leveraging the benefit of industrial clusters such as collaboration between IT and other industries like healthcare & bio-technology," he said.