IT task force plan to cost $ 50 bn

NEW DELHI, Aug 22: While the Information Technology (IT) task force has come out with a beautiful plan to increase the country's IT liter...

NEW DELHI, Aug 22: While the Information Technology (IT) task force has come out with a beautiful plan to increase the country’s IT literacy levels and to increase IT exports from the current $ 1.6 billion to $ 50 billion in a decade, what it doesn’t spell out is what this will cost.

According to the New Delhi-based Skoch Consultancy Services, who put a figure to each of the grandiose recommendations, implementing these would cost around $ 50 billion, or around Rs 2,25,000 crore over a period of five to ten years.

It is clear the people who prepared the report didn’t spend too much time evaluating its impact. For if they did, they wouldn’t have made some of them. To take some of the truly ridiculous ones first:

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A token fee of one rupee shall be charged from all internet service providers after 5 years. Setting up a bureaucracy to collect this money and to maintain records will cost a lot more, and appears meaningless since the government clearly won’t get much money from here.

Five hi-techhabitats will be implemented in cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi and Bhubaneswar. When most of the Software Technology Parks already set up are doing badly and have few takers, setting up even more glamorous, and costly habitats, makes little sense.

Rs 700 crore shall be made available as corpus for setting up a Y2K fund, to control the problem of the millenium bug, and sensitise organisations to this problem. The point, however, is that the Y2K problem affects only mainframe computers, and India has less than 25 such installations. Most of our organisations are PC-based.

A look at the cost-impact of some of the others:

Student subsidy schemes. Roughly a subsidy of around Rs 10,000 per computer will have to be given to around a lakh students in year one, to make an impact. Assuming that there is a growth of around 25 per cent per year, this will add up to a cost of $ 1 billion over the decade.

One-stop non-stop services of Electronic Kiosks, etc will be provided. Even ifyou take a very conservative figure of one centre for every 20 lakh people, that means 4000 centres and a cost of Rs 20,000 crore. All this, of course, is just the one-time cost of buying equipment for these installations. What is then required is that this equipment be serviced, upgraded, and loaded with software. While the international rule of thumb is that you multiply the original cost by a factor of 30, Skoch has taken much lower multiples. For the education-related hardware they’ve taken a factor of three. And for the others, a factor of two.