‘India is value service provider’
BANGALORE: Pramod Bhasin, Vice-President, Genpact Technologies, on Wednesday said that the education sector in the country needs to change quickly and radically in order to reshape the IT and knowledge industry. He was speaking at the second Knowledge Summit.
“Surveys show that only 10 to 15 per cent of all applicants are capable of being hired. China has committed to building 40 world-class universities and are on their way to doing it,” said Bhasin.
He also added that it is necessary to focus on domain expertise and product delivery instead of being mere service providers. “The world now sees India as a high value service provider and not a labour centre,” he said.
He also said that the IT industry in the country is still in its nascent stages.
“Fifteen or 20 years are very short for an industry to mature. NASSCOM has predicted 13 to 15 per cent growth which is an astonishing number,” said Bhasin.
Speaking at the summit, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Executive Co-Chairman of Infosys Technologies, highlighted the fact that the country has come a long way in the past 25 years. “From a closed marketplace with no workforce specialising in computer science, today the industry is valued at $100 billion out of which $70 billion are exports,” he said adding that the IT and knowledge industry are adding two to three lakh jobs a year and have currently employed a total of 25 lakh people.
Taking the example of Amazon, he said that it is possible today for a person to hire 10,000 computers for the duration of 1 second for the price of a dollar.