Be self-reliant: Kalam to IT firms

President A P J Abdul Kalam underscored the need to attain self-reliance in the infrastructural software sector with knowledge products, where the domain applications can be developed and deployed for services sector.

Addressing Infoscians at the Infosys Global Education Centre in Mysore on Sunday, he said economic growth for India was fundamentally tied to societal transformation in the knowledge products and service sector. This, in turn, strengthens agriculture and manufacturing through innovation and value addition.

"Our movement towards a developed India 2020 is to generate revenue not only from raw material, agriculture and industrial products, but to move up to an information and knowledge society through knowledge-intensive products.

"We should have both the manufacturing sector and high value agriculture-based on new knowledge and skills. Information and communication technology have to be widely deployed in our transformation strategy along with newer technologies like biotechnology, nano-technology, advanced materials in addition to new approaches of clean technologies," the President said.

Kalam said the share of GDP had undergone a considerable change. Contribution of agriculture to India's GDP has fallen from 39 per cent to 22 per cent from 1979 to 2004. Contribution of manufacturing sector has moved from 24 per cent to 27 per cent and the contribution from the services sector has increased from 37 per cent to 51 per cent. It includes ICT sector too.

Similarly, there has been considerable changes in the employment pattern too. The percentage of people employed in agriculture has come down from 64 per cent to 54 per cent.

 In manufacturing, it has gone up from 15 per cent to 19 per cent and in the service sector from 20 per cent to 27 per cent.

"This trend has to continue and by 2020 our employment pattern should aim at a transformation in the contributions of the different sectors to the GDP. The shares of the different sectors should be 44 per cent from agriculture, 21 per cent from manufacturing and 35 per cent in service sectors," Kalam suggested.

He called on ICT companies to set up their units in Tier II cities and PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas) complexes.

Referring to the convergence of technologies taking place, the President said that nano-technology is knocking at our doors and it will replace microelectronics. It has tremendous potential in the areas of medicine, electronics and material science.