Referring to the protectionist move in the US against outsourcing of business processes to India, minister for
disinvestment, communications and IT Arun Shourie recommended certain remedies to the Indian software industry
to ensure that things go smoothly. "Be scrupulous in visa issues. The NASSCOM and MIT are working together on this issue. Put to work those
firms in the US benefiting by outsourcing to India and most importantly, we are
taking up the issue with the US authorities," he said. He was addressing a
press conference after inaugurating the third annual Baramati Initiative on
ICT and Development being held at Baramati, Maharashtra from May 30 to June
2. The meet is organized by Digital Partners in association with Vidya Pratisthan's Institute of Information Technology.
The minister stated that such a reaction was only natural since India had
built up a major presence in IT." We should not be surprised and instead put
ourselves in the same position. We are the largest users of anti-dumping measures in the world. We
have 167 of them," he said. Shourie pointed out that the incidents that had occurred at Malaysia, Indonesia and Holland were
not connected. " In Indonesia, it was a commercial dispute and in Malaysia,
it was wrong information that lead to the raid. In the case of Holland, a wrong visa," he explained. The minister said that the five bills in the US
were akin to the private member resolutions in India. The only bill to worry
about is the bill moved in Washington by a representative from Seattle, which is backed by the Technical Staff Union, he added.
Asked to comment on the debacle of Media Lab Asia (MLA), Shourie said that
MLA was now over since the basic assumptions were not fulfilled. "The salary
scales were way out of line and the head of MLA took home a salary that was
19 times more than head of the Indian Space mission K Kasturirangan. We have
terminated the contract and relationship with MIT and have raised a revived
proposal to the cabinet to continue the project on a reduced scale. Research
projects will continue," he said. "I would much rather prefer a technical advisory committee consisting eminent Indian scientists assess the
projects and fund these. They can also work on an overview of research in IT," he
added.
On the debate of propagating the use of open source code versus proprietary
solutions, Shourie believed that it would not be a good idea for the government to indicate a preference. In government contracts, it is better
to be technology neutral.
Earlier, he praised the Baramati experiment and said that we must learn to
exchange ideas that have worked. In India, we have many success stories and
don't know about them. Computers are no longer `elitist' and are tools for
empowerment, he said, offering the services of his ministry to Sharad Pawar,
the man behind the Baramati initiative.