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Laloo does a volte face, hails IT now

Soroor Ahmed in Patna

Taking a significant break from his earlier anti-infotech stance, RJD chief Laloo Yadav - along with his wife Bihar Chief Minister Rabri Devi - will walk along the IT superhighway.

At a press conference organised to announce that the Bihar government will host an international seminar on biotechnology and information technology in Patna on November 25 and 26, Laloo Yadav said that he had never pooh-poohed information technology.

He also took a dig at the electronic media for projecting Bihar 'wrongly'. He said that his statement ("Yeh IT-waity kya hai") had been taken out of context and blown up unnecessarily.

He said that he was not against the IT sector and clarified that when asked in a particular context he had said that 'IT is certainly not the solution for all the problems plaguing us'.

However, he added that in the field of agriculture much could be done with the help of information technology.

Sources said that the who's who of the IT world will grace the function. Notable amongst those likely to attend are Wipro chairman Azim Premji, Infosys Technology chief N R Narayana Murthy, noted NRI industrialists Kanwal Rekhi, Kailash Joshi, Prithviraj Singh and Mohan Roy, and the Union IT Minister Pramod Mahajan.

However, sources say that the most important guest will be Sailesh Kumar, Laloo Yadav's son-in-law.

A software engineer, earlier associated with Infosys Technologies, Sailesh Kumar also voiced his concern at the state of the infotech sector in Bihar.

"The move will be the beginning of a long journey," he said. He also hinted that he was thinking about setting up a unit of his firm in Bihar.

He has a software development firm in Noida, in Uttar Pradesh.

The international seminar will be held in collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Industry, the IT Society of India, the Bihar Industries Association and San Francisco-based The Indus Enterpreneurs.

The RJD cheif also said that the state government would extend all co-operation to make this conference a success.

Ramesh Yadav, a San Francisco-based IT whizkid who played a key role in organising the 1995 NRI meet in Patna, said that Bihar produces a huge number of IT graduates, but due to non-availability of proper avenues their service could not be utilised.

Meanwhile, opposition leaders like Sushil Kumar Modi of the BJP, while talking to rediff.com opined that this is just 'a design to promote his son-in-law Sailesh Kumar politically and business-wise.'

Sailesh, however, strongly denied that he had any plans to take a plunge into politics and made it clear that his father-in-law has never exerted any such pressure on him or his wife -- Misa Bharti - to join politics.

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