Ex-Telecom Secretary R Chandrasekhar may be the new Nasscom head

NEW DELHI: A former bureaucrat, R Chandrasekhar, is tipped to be the new president of software industry body Nasscom which is trying to cope with strife within and grave challenges without. Chandrasekhar, who retired as telecom secretary in March, has been proposed for the job by a selection panel of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, and his nomination will be announced on Friday, according to Nasscom officials aware of the plan.

Chandrasekhar will succeed Som Mittal as the fourth president of an organisation which represents an industry with annual sales of over $100 billion, or Rs 6 lakh crore. The salary package proposed for him is Rs 2 crore. “He (Chandrasekhar) is the right man for the job. He has agreed to join (as president) after he has been assured of full powers to revamp Nasscom,” said an official of the executive council, a key decision-making body at the grouping.

The 1975 batch IAS officer had helped N Chandrababu Naidu, the former Andhra Pradesh CM, set up India’s first department of information technology and was at its helm from 1997 to 1999. In May, Chandrasekhar’s name came up as a replacement for Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai before the Centre finally named Shashi Kant Sharma to the post. Nasscom did not reply to questions for this story and Mittal declined to comment.

Mittal, whose term was to end in December, was given a year’s extension last June. He was preceded by Kiran Karnik. The charismatic Dewang Mehta, who died aged 39 in 2001, was the body’s founder-president. Chandrasekhar, if he is confirmed, will be taking over at a time of internal dissension over the role played by an advisory body consisting of former chairmen of the organisation. Moreover, some 30 software product companies from the 1,100-plus-member Nasscom formed a new lobby group this year called iSpirt vowing to promote their interests. Since then, though, there has been a perceptible improvement in Nasscom’s engagement with product startups.

Karnik, who declined to speak about any specific individual, said that a new president will have many opportunities as well as challenges. “The need to expand to new markets and new service areas are more pressing than ever before,” he observed, emphasising that IT body will have to remain alert about meeting the expectations of its various constituents, such as BPOs and software product companies. And as the US prepares to make it harder and costlier to issue work visas, he said a key challenge will be find areas of mutual agreement to work with multinational technology corporations such as IBM, Accenture and HP, who may have a divergence of interests.