MeiTY May Introduce A Software Product Council Soon

MeitY, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, is reportedly working on creating a Software Product Council which will work on implementing a software product mission. This mission is part of the National Policy on Software Products, introduced in February this year.

The council will include members of the government, academia and industry. “We have taken certain inputs from major stakeholders, and based on their inputs we have proposed an architecture,” a senior MeitY official said in a media report.

The government approved the National Policy on Software Products 2019 with an outlay of INR 5,000 Cr fund. The initiative is aimed at nurturing 10K startups in the software product industry and generate 3.5 Mn employment by 2025.

The National Policy on Software products is also aligned with other government initiatives such as StartUp India, Make in India, Digital India and Skill India. It aims to make India a $70 -80 Bn software products industry by 2025.

As part of the policy, the government has said to initially outlay INR 1,500 Cr to implement the programmes for software development and research, for over a period of seven years.

Earlier in 2013, IT services trade body Nasscom, constituted a Software Product Council to promote the Indian IT industry. At that time, the Software Product Council was set up on the recommendations of an expert committee headed by Infosys founder Narayana Murthy. Girish Mathrubootham of Freshdesk, Manav Garg of Eka Software and Kishore Mandyam of Impel were also the members of the council.

It was the same time when nearly 30 Nasscom members had also formed a separate think tank (iSpirit) to further develop the software products industry in the country.

Since then, the Indian software products industry has come a long way.

Today, the Indian software products sector, which is estimated to be worth $7 Bn is growing at a rate of 9.5% annually.  Also, it had around 19.8 per cent share in Indian IT sector revenues in FY18, revealed a July 2018 IBEF presentation.

It further predicts that the Indian software product industry is expected to reach the mark of $100 Bn by 2025. Indian companies have set up over 1,000 global delivery centres in about 80 countries over the world.

According to a February 2019 media report, at the end of FY19, the industry had revenue of $181 Bn, including local sale and the industry is currently chasing a target of $225 Bn in revenues by 2020.

[The development was reported by Business Standard.]