The number of information technology professionals in West Bengal would almost treble by next year in view of the expansion in the IT and IT-enabled services sectors in the state, West Bengal Information and Technology Minister Manab Mukherjee said in Kolkata on Thursday.
From the current 23,000 professionals in the current fiscal, the number would go up to over 60,000 by the end of the next financial year, Mukherjee said while inaugurating the fourth Indian conference on computer vision, graphics and image processing.
"By 2010, West Bengal will have at least 450,000 IT and ITeS professionals. Currently at least 205 companies have set up offices in the state, 160 of which are in the IT sector alone. All of them are envisaging expansion and fresh investments," he said.
Low attrition, abundance of talent and low cost of living and operation have been the key drivers for the companies for having chosen the state, which had the fastest growing state domestic product (SDP) rate in the country, he said.
The minister said basic computer literacy projects had been taken up in 1,000 schools out of the 12,000 in the state while 1,000 more would be picked up in the second phase.
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