The technology industry in India expects the Union Budget to further push digitisation, and feels that a fund should be set up to promote emerging deep technologies. At the same time, there should be strong emphasis on building digitally skilled human capital in order to fill in the digital skill gaps in the technology industry in the country.
Many experts feel that it is equally important for the government to keep the innovation momentum going by creating incubation centres, organising national level hackathons, and augmenting the early stage funding ecosystem to give a fillip to the technology industry.
Industry representatives are of the view that software exports from India at $148 billion is more than oil exports from Saudi Arabia. It is expected that digitisation in India is set to accelerate and India is expected to leverage its expertise in developing products and solutions to digitally connect the country to the last mile.
“It will be encouraging if the budget can introduce steps towards building digitally skilled human capital at a much faster pace and enhance the infrastructure and connectivity measures further. It is also imperative for us to keep the innovation momentum going by creating incubation centers, national-level hackathons, and augmenting the early-stage funding ecosystem further to solve problems at scale and put technology to the best use,” remarked Kunal Nagarkatti, CEO, Clover Infotech.
Many industry experts have also expressed views about the skill shortage in the cyber security space and observed that over the last few years, there has been an exponential growth in cyber attacks. The ongoing pandemic and work from anywhere models have further increased the attack landscape for cyber criminals. In addition to this, organisations are facing cybersecurity resource crunch and stringent budgets.
“Our expectation from the Union Budget is on aspects such as cybersecurity skill gap and cybersecurity awareness. We are hopeful of the government increasing spending on cybersecurity awareness and training initiatives to empower cybersecurity resources. Eventually, this focus will help create employment as well as good defense against cyber criminals,” said Sunil Sharma, managing director, sales, Sophos India and SAARC.
A few representatives are also of the view that there is an urgent need for the government to continue its focus on technology infrastructure spending to boost the economy and increase employment opportunities, especially in emerging technologies. Experts feel that there should be efforts to give further push to develop the digital infrastructure in the country. India's digital push and exponential data growth in the last two years have resulted in strong demand for digital infrastructure. Industry reports estimate that the Indian data centre industry will surpass $8 billion by 2026 and its cloud computing market is expected to reach $7.1 billion by 2022.
“There are certain challenges that need to be addressed in order for India to become a global data hub. The country needs a robust ICT infrastructure, with investments in undersea fiber networks, linking the country with other nations, between and within cities, and cable landing stations, all of which are vital for a digital economy. There is a need for significantly larger investment to lay additional fiber for an increase in capacity and redundancy. To support 5G deployment, all base stations and mobile towers must be connected over fiber for improving bandwidth availability to users and thereby accelerating growth in data consumption. In addition, investment is also needed to lower the bandwidth costs of connecting data centers across the country. The industry is looking forward to favorable changes in the policies which will encourage new investors like OTTs , cloud service providers and data centre service providers among others to deploy new age fiber networks within the country to meet the growing demand,” observed Manoj Paul, managing director, Equinix India.
Many feel that there should be effective measures to create a fund for emerging deep technologies. “It will be great to see the Union Budget allocate funds toward incentivizing the use of emerging deep technologies like artificial intelligence, intelligent automation, blockchain, augmented and virtual reality etc., among businesses. Today, businesses across verticals are generating large amounts of data, which when harnessed through the use of new age technologies can be better leveraged to solve challenges faced by citizens. Promoting digitisation is the need of the hour and while we have made significant progress in this area in the last few years, we still have a long way to go. At this juncture, incentives, tax benefits, and provisions for optimisation of cloud services can greatly help in building a truly ‘Digital India',” said Puneet Gupta, managing director and vice president, NetApp India.
