Cabinet may decide on IT, electronics policies soon: Sibal

The Cabinet is expected to take a decision next week on the proposed national policies on IT and Electronics, Telecom and IT Minister Kapil Sibal said on Wednesday.

These policies aim to raise revenue of both the sectors to $700 billion over the next eight years.

"Yesterday, cluster policy was approved. IT policy will probably come to Cabinet in the next meeting, hopefully as well as the Electronic Manufacturing policy.

"So, I think next week we will have both policy in Cabinet," Sibal told reporters on the sidelines of CII's Cloud Summit.

Under the Electronics Manufacturing Cluster scheme, approved by the Cabinet, the government will provide incentives of up to Rs 50 crore (Rs 500 million) for setting up of each of the 200 EMCs, which will provide the ecosystem for manufacturing specific types of electronic products.

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology has circulated Cabinet notes for both policies.

The Draft National Policy on IT envisages increasing revenues of IT and IT-enabled services industry from $88 billion at present to $300 billion by 2020.

The draft National Policy on Electronics aims to achieve a turnover of about $400 billion by 2020, involving investment of about $100 billion and employment to around 28 million people at various levels.

At the Confederation of Indian Industry event, Sibal asked industry players to work out details on cloud computing services, one of the thrust area in National IT Policy, which will facilitate computer user to access softwares, store data and other such services on remote devices without purchasing them.

"Industry should work with government to evolve standards for cloud computing on things like who can set-up cloud services, evolve standard for contracts that need to be signed for providing services.

"Privacy issues will come through legislation," Sibal said.

The minister said the most important issue is security as cloud services will host key data vital for various sectors and individuals.

"Key data is heaven for hackers.

"Therefore, most important is security. Industry should work on what are the necessary pre-condition for cloud security," Sibal said.

The minister said there will be cloud computing services for public, private and community use and guidelines of these services will have to be prepared jointly by the government and industry.

Image: Kapil Sibal