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The first meeting of the India-Japan ICT Ministerial Forum will be held here tomorrow in which Shri Dayanidhi Maran, Minister of Communications & Information Technology and Mr. Taro Aso, Minister of Internal affairs and Communications, Japan will lead their respective delegations. The Japanese delegation will comprise over 100 members representing the Government of Japan and the Japanese industries while the Indian delegation will be comprising of members from leading Indian ICT companies, government and R&D agencies. Dr. Shakeel Ahmad, Minister of State for Communications & Information Technology will also participate in the meetings.
The India-Japan ICT Ministerial Forum is the outcome of a programme of cooperation, comprising of eight fold initiatives chalked out by the Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, and the Prime Minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi during the latter’s visit to India in March 2005. The New Delhi meet will mainly aim at the opportunities for increasing ties between Indian and Japanese institutions and industries in the fast growing sectors of IT and telecommunications and the need to leverage the complementarities of each other.
The Ministerial Level meeting will witness the signing of a joint statement for bilateral cooperation in communications and information technology, wherein both sides will seek to develop joint proposals in R&D, HRD in ICT sector, E-Governance, IT enabled services, E-Commerce, communications and IT Software, Rural Telecommunication and Ubiquitous Network Society, and so on.
The ICT forum will also witness the signing of three separate MOUs by Dr. Nagao Makoto, President, National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT), Japan with Mr. S. Ramakrishnan, Director General, C-DAC, Mr. Vijay Madan, Executive Director, C-DOT and Dr. Gautam Barua, Director, IIT Guwahati, to undertake joint programmes in R&D and HRD in the ICT sector. The MoU between NICT and C-DAC envisages the cooperation of the two organizations on information and telecommunications research through the exchange of scientists and information, fellowship programmes, organization of symposiums and the conduction of joint research projects in all fields of mutual interest to strengthen mutual cooperation on technology management and long time cooperative research.
The second part of the session of the India-Japan ICT forum will witness the presentations by representatives of both the Indian and Japanese industries. The presentations on behalf of the Indian delegation will be delivered by Mr. Kiran Karnik, President, NASSCOM, Mr. Anil Ambani, Chairman and MD, Reliance Infocomm, Mr. Ramadorai, CEO, TCS, Mr. Ramalinga Raju, Chairman, Satyam Computer Services, Mr. Sunil Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Telecom, Mr. Lakshminarayan, CEO, Cognizant Technologies, Mr. Rajkumar Dhoot, MP and MD, Videocon and Mr. Ramaraj, CEO Sify and member ISPAI.
The Japanese delegation will feature presentations by prominent leaders of the Japanese ICT industries such as Mr. Yoichi Morishita, Chairman, Matsushita Electric Industrial Company Limited (Chairman of Asian Broadband Promotion Council), NTT East Corporation, NTT DoCoMo, Sanyo Electric Company Limited, Toshiba Corporation, Mr. Hajime Sasaki, Chairman, NEC Corporation, Mr. Tsutomu Kanai, Chairman, Fujitsu Limited, Mr. Makoto Nagao, President, NICT, among others.
The ICT Forum will also constitute Working Groups, to be primarily led by the industry on areas of Broadband, Mobile Communications, E-governance, Information Security, R&D and Ubiquitous Computing. The groups will evolve a detailed action plan for implementation of the Joint Statement and would guide the implementing agencies to achieve a meaningful outcome from the India-Japan cooperation. In order to review and monitor the activities of the Working Groups and the implementing agencies, a Joint Task Force will be set up under the ICT Forum.
According to Shri Maran, ‘India is emerging as a major global player in the field of ICT with a strong success story so far in IT and ITES. Indian software industries’ competitiveness lies in its low cost, size and strength of its skilled engineering manpower. These are reflected by the growing exports and consistent recognition of this segment and the setting up of research and development centers in India by global ICT majors.’ He further adds: ‘India’s telecom infrastructure is world class with market penetration growing enormously in some segments. It is India’s endeavor to promote R&D work in public private domain to position India in the global R&D hub in ICT. It is part of India’s commitment promote India’s innovation economy which can produce sustained benefits in the competitive world. In this context, India would like to establish a win-win partnership with Japan to follow a well crafted approach to public private partnership by setting up world class centers. The Chennai hub as an Indo Japanese center for R&D training in ICT is a step in this direction.’
The Japanese Minister is also expected to extend ODA assistance to India to take ICT to schools with an objective of stimulating millions of young minds in information and communications technologies. This is likely to assist in meeting the growing challenge of the quantum of resources needed to take ICT to schools, and lead to strong business collaborations between India and Japan.
RM/AMA- 230805 ICT Curtain raiser
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