IT Sector Can Start Partial Work from April 20

On Wednesday, the government made an announcement to exempt the information and technology (IT) industry and certain other sectors from the nationwide lockdown with some conditions in place.

The Ministry of Home Affairs ordered that the IT and IT-enabled services can start work from April 20 with 50 per cent strength.

Apart from this, the suspension has also been lifted from industries in IT hardware manufacturing companies.

The IT industry has welcomed this move and players in the sector have said that their business strategy would also need to undergo changes in this current scenario.

Senior Vice President and Head, Center of Excellence (CoE) at Clover Infotech, Neelesh Kripalani said that because of social distancing and lockdown being observed across the globe, the demand for or moving business-critical workload to the cloud  has increased. Workloads on the cloud can be easily accessed and managed across the organisation.

"This is an apt time for businesses to move their application and the underlying infrastructure to the cloud and reap the benefits of increased speed, efficiency and agility. This gives businesses the assurance that their core application and operations are functioning seamlessly," he said.

Co-Founder and CEO, Saankhya La, Parag Naik said that the utmost priority should be to ramp up investments in the telecom and electronic equipment industry. "We should not just look at investments from MNCs, however the government should focus on making policies that encourage local SMEs and MSMEs to ramp up investments."

"Apart from the setting up of factories and manufacturing units, the need of the hour is to invest in innovation. Countries like China and US dominate the market because they have a large bank of IPs. If India has to compete on the global scale, we have to ramp up domestic innovation. We have a great demographic dividend and we can certainly use it to innovate and build an IPR regime," Naik said.

Talking about the decision to relax lockdown norms for the IT hardware industry, MAIT, the industry body for information and communications technology, said that tho step was the need of the hour as the nation would otherwise be forced to turn towards imports to satisfy its domestic demand.

Nitin Kunkolienker, President, MAIT said: "This move was the need of the hour as all digital and communication highways are built using electronic and ICT products. This was extremely essential as all utilities need these products otherwise imports would have catered to this pent up demand for ICT products estimated at $2.5 billion per month."