ITeS emerging as a key player: Survey

NEW DELHI: Lauding the growth of IT enabled services that led to India emerging as the most preferred destination for business process outsourcing, the Economic Survey today said with $3.6 billion exports, it has become a major player in the Indian economy.

Inspite of slow down in the recent past, the IT sector posted an impressive 18.2 per cent growth in 2003-04 to clock a turnover of Rs 1,14,650 crore, the Survey said adding there had been some welcome acceleration in the hardware sector with a sharp deceleration in the rate of decline of hardware''s share in electronics and IT industry.

"The share of hardware and non-software services in the IT sector has declined consistently every year in the recent past. While software exports continue to dominate, the size of domestic market in software has consistently declined over the years", the Survey said.

Value of software and services export is estimated to have increased by 30 per cent to $12.5 billion in FY04.

All the sub-sectors of the non-software component of electronic and IT industry grew at over eight per cent in 2003-04, but this was far below the rate of growth of software services.

Overall after declining precipitously from 61.4 per cent in 1998-99 to 40.9 per cent in 2001-02, the share of hardware in the important industry declined only marginally to 38.2 per cent in the two subsequent years.

The size of domestic market in software relative to the export market which was 54.2 per cent in 1998-99 after declining to 29.8 per cent, further fell to 27.7 per cent the last two years.