There is increased demand for digital products and the digitalisation services that Indian IT has to offer which is a huge tailwind for this sector. Shivendra Singh, Vice President and Head of Global Trade Development at NASSCOM discussed the prospects.

Share Market Live

NSE

“Tech sector has probably performed the best during the COVID-19 recovery period,” he said in an interview with CNBC-TV18.

“Not only in India but around the world, the tech sector has more seamlessly moved to a work-from-home with 95 percent of the 4.4 million work force. We also were a net hirer of more than 1.1 thousand in terms of the net hirers. So given that, I think the expectations are very robust. The expectations for the growth of the industry is very robust and we are very positive that this is going to grow as we move forward,” he mentioned.

“When we look at the unemployment figures overall, it has nearly doubled from February 2020 to February 2021 which is about 3.5 percent to about 6.2 percent. Importantly, there are about 750,000 job vacancies as of March 30, 2021 in the computer occupation area which is a clear testimony to the fact that the existing workforce which are unemployed are not being able to fill these job vacancies,” he added.

IT companies are working hard in upscaling talent locally, he said.

On IT budgets, he pointed out, “The specific areas where you are going to see the growth – when it is sector growth, you will see growth in healthcare, banking financial services, insurance, telecom, you will see companies scale up through platform-isation of services, you will see growth in cloud, you will see outcome-based pricing which is going to grow, you will see cybersecurity as the key digital growth factors, these are the areas where you are going to see a fair amount of growth happening.”

“Bank, retailer, healthcare are technology companies. We have a clear indication that there is going to be growth in specific areas and that is going to drive a lot of growth going forward,” he stated.

The technology industry comprises nearly 8-9 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of India and in terms of exports it is about USD 150 billion industry, he further mentioned.

“We will see growth which will lead to growth in numbers. We are well placed on the demand side in terms of employees and scaling up and digital employees’ availability is going to be critical, so talent again becomes very critical as we move forward. We are strongly positioned to be able to deliver and make the global economy as good as it is,” he emphasized.

For the entire conversation, watch the video.

(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)