HYDERABAD: Recording a 9.32 percent of growth rate (YoY), IT/ITES exports from the State has increased from Rs 85,470 crore in 2016-2017 to Rs 93,442 crore in 2017-2018.
Terming the departments' functioning as "transparent and accountable", Information Technology, Electronics and Communication (ITEC) Minister KT Rama Rao presented the fourth annual report of the department.
The IT sector directly added 43,417 jobs in the previous financial year, the report read. The total personnel in the IT sector stayed at 4,75,308 in 2017-2018 compared to 4,31,891 in 2016-2017.
"Nobody asked or demanded us to bring transparency and accountability, neither the media or the people asked but we ensured that the department outgrew the national average (7-9 percent)," said KT Rama Rao while adding that indirect jobs of over 7.5 lakh people were created through the sector at a cumulative annual growth (CAGR) of 15.6 percent since its formation.
The minister recalled an announcement he made in 2014 when he said that IT exports would get doubled in five years. "We are on our way to reaching our goals. The IT exports in 2014 were at Rs 52,258 crore, it has now come close to getting doubled," he said. The department aims to create 4 lakh of direct employment while achieving a target of Rs 1,20,000 crore of IT exports at CAGR 16 percent by 2020.
'Look East' for the IT corridor
With concentration of IT companies largely restricted to the west zone of the Greater Hyderabad, leading to an increase in occupancy and creation of new buildings in that region, the ITEC department of the State is going to launch a policy that would incentivise growth in the East zone now.
"The IT sector in Hyderabad should not be restricted to Gachibowli and Kondapur. There is metro connectivity to Uppal and through SRDP flyovers, the time it would take from Gachibowli to Airport and Uppal to Airport would almost be the same. The Look East (LE) policy would answer it," KT Rama Rao said. It would also aid in decongesting the traffic and improve the overall quality of life, he added.
Launch of several initiatives
The department has called for an Aadhar based attendance mechanism, TSTS-ABAS (Telangana State Technology Services - Aadhar Based Attendance System), to eliminate gaps in government scheme expenditure, reduce bogus expenses and increase student-teacher ratio.
Aimed to be implemented, primarily, at welfare schools, the new mechanism of rolling attendance would be launched in 10,000 schools in 12 districts. The department is already witnessing 1 lakh authentications every day, informed GT Venkateswar Rao, Commissioner, Electronic Service Delivery (ESD).
"We take complete responsibility of the initiative. There have been several pilot projects that have been done - JNTU, welfare schools and GHMC sanitary workers, and we have decided to be the nodal agency in bridging the gap in providing a device, connection, and authenticity," Rao said.
The department has also upgraded broadband speed in mandals across the State through its T-SWAN (Telangana - State Wide Area Network) architecture. The speeds have been increased from 4 Mbps to 20 Mbps in an attempt to have efficient transactions at government institutions.
T-Web (Telangana Website), an electronic web portal which integrates all government websites to a single portal has been launched.
Along with it, the department has announced the creation of T-SOC (Telangana Security Operations Centre) to create a threat detection infrastructure and respond to them so that security is not compromised. Currently, in phase- 1 its capacity would be to track 20,000 events.
The EDS has signed a MoU with Indian Farmers Fertilisers Cooperative (IFFCO) to launch an e-commerce portal. Its use is aimed to aid farmers in accessing agriculture inputs are no additional costs. The process would be aided by Mee Seva centres.