IT - West Bengal

The State considers IT as a basic mission that can help the people uplift the standard of social life. It is clear that people will embrace IT only if it is able to add value to their daily life. The State will strive for a situation where every citizen is able to leverage IT. However, individual ownership of the facilities by all the citizens will remain a utopia. Therefore, the State's approach will be to provide community possession of IT hardware, software and accessories that will be adequately networked with the external world.

The State has undertaken an aggressive e-Governance policy to connect almost 3600 local self-governments (Gram Panchayats ) and all the Municipalities. These democratically elected Panchayats and Municipalities, empowered with IT, will ensure community participation of people. This IT network will provide all necessary information of the State to its people, and simultaneously allow the people to provide inputs to the State’s decision making authorities. This, in turn, will guarantee a true participatory and transparent decision making process. The State's long tradition of a truly decentralised development approach will enable IT to reach its people. With this, the State will have emerged as an IT-enabled State in its fullest meaning.

The state plans to create a conducive environment for the participation of NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) to take the impact of IT to the common man. In this regard, we plan to encourage NGO to take up specific initiatives.

West Bengal has registered steady growth in the IT sector with a CAGR of 90 % in the period between 1996-2003. Currently (2003), its STPI export revenues stand at Rs 840 crore. It has also managed to attract major ITS and ITeS players to West Bengal like Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant Technology Solutions, ITC Infotech, Computer Associates, SchlumbergerSema, Siemens, The Chatterjee Group, IBM, Wipro, Spectramind, Samsung and United Airlines. The state recognizes that the potential is far higher, given its intrinsic capabilities. It has, therefore, set significantly higher targets in both IT Services and ITeS.

A study by McKinsey&Company has helped create the state’s IT vision and draw up a roadmap for success in the sector. The aspiration set for West Bengal is to rank among the top-3 IT States in India by 2010 and contribute 15-20 per cent of the country’s total IT revenues. The focus in the long term will be on high value-added IT work, developed through intellectual leadership and supported by Government initiatives. This approach emulates the approach displayed by the world’s premier technology hubs (such as Boston, Dublin and Singapore) that have developed through a combination of corporate leadership, intellectual leadership or government leadership.

The vision is in tune with the goals set in 2000 to “build on the state’s creative intellectual wealth and focus on one or two areas of excellence for rapid growth as well as stimulate the growth of IT enabled services and back office support services”.

The vision has been broken down to targets at the segment level. In IT services, the state is targeting 10-15 per cent of software services exports, 25 per cent of all product development/R&D outsourcing and 5-10 per cent of domestic software services and products. In ITeS, it is targeting 15 per cent of BPO[1] revenues (transaction processing and customer interaction services, including call centres) and 10 per cent of revenues in other service segments like animation, knowledge services and engineering and design services (including a leadership position in knowledge services and animation). Assuming growth the India IT space as per projections made by Nasscom, we believe ITS & ITeS will be able to create employment opportunities for 400,000 people. In terms of revenues of IT companies, the state’s vision will translate into total revenue of US$ 15 billion by 2010. This will imply a CAGR (cumulative annual growth rate) of 65-75%

The state is well positioned to achieve this vision. It has a high quality and low cost talent pool of graduates and engineers. Its IT policy offers incentives that can greatly reduce the one-time and recurring expenditure of IT companies. West Bengal is the only large state with surplus power and its telecom infrastructure is comparable with all other IT destinations. The state also recognises the strategic imperative faced by IT companies to be vertical focused. The state intends to support this over the longer term by helping development of centres of excellence in key industry verticals. Initial focus will be on developing four verticals: financial services and banking, insurance, discrete and process manufacturing and retail and distribution. Besides, the state has a strong creative tradition of different field of entertainment related IT and ITeS activities e.g. animation that will significantly help it in attaining its vision.

From the beginning, the state has realised that government initiatives to increase IT usage will play an important role in creating internal demand and spurring growth in the industry during the formative years. Some broad initiatives were identified in the goals set in January 2000, namely:

In the last three years, the state has made significant progress against these initiatives. Today, WBSWAN (West Bengal state-wide WAN), developed by WEBEL and Tata Infotech, connects Kolkata to over 19 district headquarters and nine other important townships in the state. In the second phase 340 blocks and 3,600 panchayats are planned to be covered.. This network forms the state’s IT backbone and over time can offer the opportunity for private companies to leverage it to connect to their suppliers, distributors and consumers.

The Department of Information Technology facilitates the development of IT in the state. Specific e-governance projects undertaken include the use of the ASP[2] model and government portals in collaboration with TCS to provide public interface to government information, GIS (geographical information system) for municipalities and computerisation of government departments (including land records). The state has already introduced significant computerisation in several government departments, district offices, field level agencies and local bodies. Some of the key Departments like Finance, Home including Police, Land and Land Reforms, Panchayat & Rural development, Transport, Commerce & Industries, IT, Labour, Environment, Higher Education and School Education have implemented major eGovernance initiatives in recent years. . It has also introduced a 'state of the art' computerised system in the Directorate of Commercial Taxes, full automation in all treasuries, smart cards for registration certificates and driving licenses, digitisation of land records in all blocks and is piloting a kiosk based land records data retrieval system.

The state has also launched an aggressive IT literacy programme in schools and colleges in collaboration with IBM, Wipro, NIIT and others. Some initiatives include the provision of hardware and software to schools as part of the school IT literacy programme (500 schools have been covered); the training of school and college teachers, the setting up of 10 polytechnics for courses in IT and computer science and technology and a distance learning programme with IBM. The school IT literacy programme is being extended to all schools in phases. Phase-I is already complete, Phase-II will have 2,500 schools covered by 2003-04 and during the next three years all 11,000 schools are proposed to be covered.

The state has also made progress in terms of high quality infrastructure through the STP and privately promoted software parks. And the November 2001 incentive scheme and the August 2002 ITeS policy are by far the most generous fiscal incentive and regulatory support package currently being offered to investors in India.

[1] Business Process Outsourcing

[2] Application Service Provider