India's 2020 vision: a $10 BEELION software industry

India’s all-powerful IT body NASSCOM wants the country’s burgeoning software industry to generate $10bn in revenue by 2020, in a move designed to "rejuvenate" India’s sprawling IT industry.

The body’s newly unveiled 2020 plan will require India’s software market to grow its revenues almost five-fold from the estimated $2.2bn generated in 2013.

As part of its plans to turn the country’s software industry into a major world force, NASSCOM also launched a dedicated unit, the Product Council 2013-15, to oversee development.

“NASSCOM has been a transformational institution that has consistently evolved with the changing environment,” said chairman Krishnakumar Natarajan in a canned statement that imagines an Indian software industry selling "high value, innovative, next generation products which are enjoying robust sales traction and are establishing category / IP leadership in both domestic and international markets."

NASSCOM has actually been criticised in the past for failing to adapt quickly enough to an ever-changing IT industry.

Back in February, a group of 30 software companies joined together to form iSPIRT – a separate group designed to foster innovation and promote India as a global software hub.

Although NASSCOM at the time claimed this was not a breakaway group, some commentators claimed that the fact some members felt the need to create iSPIRT was symptomatic of an industry body that had become too bloated and preoccupied by the interests of its larger members like Infosys and TCS.

The new 2020 vision would seem to address these concerns and continue to drive the transformation of India’s vast IT industry towards a non-linear growth model by slowly transitioning from services to software.

It should be noted, though, that even by 2020, software will only contribute a small percentage of the whopping $300bn NASSCOM expects India's IT industries generate in aggregate revenues. ®