IT in J&K

Sir,
The biggest issue in J&K is the lack of employment opportunities in the State. Political parties of the State have been falsely promising the non existing Government jobs to the youth. But we all know for sure that the real solution lies in creating a viable private sector for generating employment opportunities. Industry has not been able to offer competitive prices due to various issues including high transportation cost.
One sector which holds promise for J&K is IT and BPO industry due to availability of English speaking and technical manpower and low cost of operations as compared to tier 1cities. You will all agree that skilled youth from J&K is forced to shift to other places in search of employment and in case employment opportunities are available in the state they will agree to work at a lesser salary resulting into viability for the companies. Also the rentals and other cost of operations is almost 50 percent as compared to tier 1 cities.
Now we go into the challenges faced by companies in this sector in the past few years resulting into slow growth despite availability of trained manpower and low cost of operations. In today’s date the technology from us and other countries moves to Delhi on the same day, but it took 8 years for mobile services from 31st July 1995 to 14th August 2003 to reach Jammu from Delhi. Lease line which is the back bone of it sector was commercially launched by MTNL in various cities in June 2004 but after a gap of 10 years we are still waiting for launch of commercial leased lines in most of the locations in Jammu city. Apart from this there have been disruptions in even SMS and other services resulting into lot of hardships. Availability of uninterrupted power and proper infrastructure are other major issues.
NASSCOM President late CA. Dewang Mehta who was nominated to the National Task Force on Information Technology under the then Prime Minister,  Atal Bihari Vajpayee had conducted a snap survey of manpower availability in J&K and was very optimistic about success of it  but due to lack of initiative from State Government and other bottlenecks the initiative could not click. I suggest that a Task Force should be nominated to identify bottlenecks in the path of development of IT in J&K and to recommend measures to remove them. I would like to clarify that we do not want any sops; this sector can survive on its strengths. we only want the Government to remove the bottlenecks and an assurance that  Jammu will become national hub of IT industry due to availability of trained manpower and low cost of operations.
Yours etc…..
CA Pardeep Gandotra
on e-mail

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