Promoting IT sector to make TN as hub of South Asia: Govt

Tamil Nadu was actively promoting the Information Technology sector with the objective of making it an Information and Communication Technology hub of South Asia, state minister R B Udhayakumar said here on Tuesday.

The state was creating an ecosystem thereby leveraging entrepreneurship and was promoting a socially inclusive growth to achieve 25 per cent share in the domestic ICT industry, the minister for revenue and disaster management and information technology said at the 19th edition of Connect 2020 organised by CII Tamil Nadu.

Listing out some investments received in the ICT sector, he said during the second edition of Global Investors Meet in January 2019, the state signed Memorandum of Understandings with various companies worth Rs 11,974 crore in the IT sector.

"The Government of Tamil Nadu is activelypromoting Information Technologyin the State with the objective of becoming the ICT hub of South Asia by creating a knowledge driven ecosystem," he said.

Software exports in Tamil Nadu increased by nearly 12 per cent to Rs 1. 39 lakh crore in 2019-20 as against Rs 1.23 lakh crore recorded the previous year, he said.

The Minister said the government was investing around Rs 500 crore to set up high speed internet facilities across the state under the TamilNet project.

The rural broadband project-Bharatnet was being implemented at an investment of Rs 1,815 crore through which 12,524 villages would be connected through optical fibre network, he said.

Udhayakumar said Chief Minister K Palaniswami unveiled an electronic hardware manufacturing policy on September 7 with an objective to increase the electronics industry output in the state to USD 100 billion by 2025.

The policy would undertake skill training for more than one lakh people by 2024 to meet the incremental human resource requirement projected by the National Skill Development Corporation in the electronics and hardware sector, he said.

The minister urged captains of industry to take advantage of the policy initiatives by the government in order to set up new IT industries in emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and blockchain, thereby increasing employment opportunities in the state.

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The Special Economic Zones established by the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) have contributed Rs 21,700 crore of exports in the IT sector and created 94,000 jobs, he said.