"We hope to stimulate the penetration of ICT through these and various other measures so that we can repeat what the cellphone revolution, where we are adding three million new connections every month," he said at an entrepreneurs' partnership summit organised by Microsoft in Chennai.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesh were among those, who attended this summit, which was closed for the media.
A copy of Maran's speech was made available later. Stressing that the government laid great emphasis on adoption of e-governance, Maran said, "We are trying to improve delivery of citizen services using ICT."
However, India's concerns and needs were different from the developed countries. "We have, therefore, formulated a national e-governance plan tailored to our requirements and focussed on service delivery."
Basic connectivity was an issue, particularly in rural areas, notwithstanding the tremendous progress in the telecom sector in recent times, he said.
A scheme of Rs 3,300 crore (Rs 33 billion) on setting up State Wide Area Networks, to provide reliable, broadband connectivity to rural areas, was currently under implementation, he said.
Maran said since most people in rural areas were not IT savvy and could not afford to buy a computer, the government was in the process of setting up 100,000 ICT-enabled common service centres as community access points across the country.
"We have adopted an entrepreneur-driven model leveraging government services to ensure sustainability of the CSCs," he said, adding that the centre was equally keen to see the use of IT within India to improve the competitiveness of Indian companies and the Indian economy in general.
Referring to the announcement made by Gates that Microsoft planned to invest $1.7 billion in India, he said investments like these "are fuelling the robust growth that we are witnessing in the ICT sector in India today."
IT exports touched $18 billion in 2004-05 and was growing at a healthy 30 per cent annually. "Our presence in the services sector on the global scenario is deepening, widening and intensifying. I keenly await Gates' vision of the software and services sector globally," Maran said.
He said in the recent past the country had received a large number of substantial investments from the US. Cisco has promised investments of $1.1 billion, SemIndia along with AMD has committed $3 billion in chip manufacturing facility.
"Intel has assured $1 billion. Flextronics, one of the largest contract manufacturers, proposes to undertake $100 million. These investments are in diverse sector," he said.
India has also emerged as a strong, research and development base. "India is on the move. It is vibrant, confident and now fully equipped to take its rightful place in the global ICT space," he said.
On the area of language computing, Maran said India was a perfect crucible for development of linguistic cross platform for machine aided translation, optical character recognition and multilingual data mining.
"Hence, for pervasive spread of ICT in the country, affordable local language computing support is essential... the Indian Language Technology Mission (launched) early this year (covers) all basic language technology computing tools are provided free of cost by the government to promote ICT culture and bridge the digital divide in the country," he said.
Referring to Gates' remarks on the importance of speech technologies, he said India was actively pursuing research in this area related to Indian languages. Companies have started producing a variety of language technology products.
"We share the global dream of the wealth of knowledge on the web being accessible to people in a language of their own choosing, not necessarily the language of the content creator," he said.
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