CONNECT 2003 projects TN as world BPO hub 

CONNECT 2003, the Information Communication Technology show of Tamil Nadu was inaugurated to showcase its strength on IT, ITES and communication technology. The third in its series the event was inaugurated by D Jayakumar, Minister of Law, IT and Electri-city, Government of Tamil
Nadu. 

CONNECT, which till now had been focusing on IT and IT services is focusing on BPO this year. Delivering the inaugural address the minister said, “We have been gaining from our experience and so Connect 2003 is bigger, a business 2 business event and will showcase Tamil Nadu as the BPO hub to the world. With this objective, a delegation from Tamil Nadu visited Singapore, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. The response we got was fantastic and has confir-med our firm belief that Chennai is definitely going to be the biggest Business Proce-ssing Hub of this region.” 

The Connect exhibitions, the State software exports, share in the national level, the number of companies has all seen massive growth in the last two years, remarked Jayakumar. The number of delegates and participants has grown subs-tantially from Connect 2001 till Connect 2003. The share of software exports of Tamil Nadu has also grown from four percent to 17 percent today. Software exports in the last two years alone have jumped from 0.67 billion US dollars to over 1.5 billion US dollars. 

Inspite of so many credits, why is it that Chennai is maintaining a low profile. According to Vivek Harinarain, Secretary (IT), Government of Tamil Nadu, “It is all in the culture of this place. We are not that aggressive as we are progressive. Here work is worship. And when you worship you tend not to make noises.” 

The audience witnessed a sale presentation of Tamil Nadu by Harinarain who said that Tamil Nadu is one among the four states in India, which has been ranked as the e-ready states. The Society for Electro-nic Transactions and Security (SETS), was looking to set its headquarters in India. 

Nine states competed to get SETS set their headquarters in their state. But today SETS is working out of Chennai. Simi-larly World Bank was looking upon 100 plus countries before it looked at India. And in India they selected
Chennai.

Cyber News Service