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President mourns death of charismatic tech evangelist

President K R Narayanan paid rich tribute to the country's chief technology lobbyist Dewang Mehta on Thursday, saying the loss was huge for the sector.

Calling him one of the bright stars on India's IT revolution firmament Narayan in a statement said, "His untimely death is an irreparable loss to the country's nascent IT sector."

The 38-year-old Mehta, president of the industry body National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), was found dead in his hotel room in Sydney where he was on a networking trip.

Shocked captains of India's technology industry paid glowing tributes to the charismatic Mehta who, with his persuasive skills and friendly demeanour, evangelised the cause of their young industry during his decade-long stewardship of NASSCOM.

Indian software services firms have grown over 50 per cent in recent years and are expected to top $6.0 billion in exports in the year ended March 2001, up 55 per cent from the previous year.

A darling of the stock markets as well as government policy makers, the software sector has been boosted by friendly government polices and tax concessions which industry leaders said was helped by Mehta's effective lobbying.

But the sector has recently been gripped by an economic slowdown in its key market, the United States, which accounts for about 60 per cent of sales.

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Vinay Deshpande, president of the country's hardware industry body, the Manufacturers Association of Information Technology, said Mehta would be missed by the software sector at a time when he was needed most.

"His personal leadership will be particularly missed in the current scenario when the Indian industry will have to contend with the downtrend in the West," Deshpande said in a statement.

Indian Information Technology Minister Pramod Mahajan, who was with Mehta in Sydney, said the NASSCOM chief was one person who deserved the most credit for promoting the industry in India.

"I am only the minister for IT in the legal sense. He was the real information technology minister of this country," Mahajan told Star News television from Sydney.

Heads of software firms said Mehta was the man behind raising the visibility of the industry.

"Not only did he put India on the global map but he worked closely with state governments for rural upliftment through technology," said Rajendra Pawar, chairman of tech education and software services firm NIIT Ltd.

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