May 10, 2002 | 1940 IST
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Money > Reuters > Report May 10, 2002 | 1940 IST |
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NASSCOM ups IT-enabled services forecastIndia's top software industry body said on Friday it expected the country's booming IT-enabled services sector to cross $20 billion by 2008, raising its earlier estimate of $17 billion made about three years ago. Arun Kumar, chairman of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, said the bullish forecast was based on a 70 per cent surge in the $1.5-billion sector in the past year to March. "It will be a 20 per cent plus upward revision from that old figure which was $17 billion for ITES," Kumar told reporters on the sidelines of a news conference. The remote processing industry includes labour-intensive back office work such as customer-support, accounting and financial claims processing. The industry has grown at an impressive clip in India because of the country's cheap English-speaking workforce and is expected to grow further due to a sharp fall in domestic telecom rates. The sector is projected to expand 65 per cent in the next year, said Kumar, who is also the managing director of Hughes Software Systems. In 1999, a joint study done by NASSCOM and management consulting firm McKinsey pegged the ITES market to grow to $17 billion by 2008 and create some 1.1 million jobs in a nation of over a billion people. The industry employs over 100,000 people and pays anywhere between Rs 10,000 and Rs 12,000 as monthly salary in a country where 44 per cent of the people live on $1 a day. General Electric, Citibank and American Express are among the many global firms that have benefitted from shifting their back office operations to India. On Friday, NIIT, Asia's largest computer skills training firm, entered the remote processing sector by launching a training module for people keen to enter the industry. Last month Hughes, a leading communication software developer, also announced its foray into the sector which already included software bluechips such as Wipro Ltd and Infosys Technologies Ltd, the nation's second and third-largest software exporters. ALSO READ:
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