Southern States - Andhra Pradesh-Hyderabad   

Biotechnology boom in the offing, says CM

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD Dec. 17. Even while asserting that IT Enabled Services (ITES) and Business Process Outsourcing will lead to IT growth, the Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, said that developments in biotechnology will bring in another revolution which will be bigger than the IT one.

He was addressing participants of a seminar on "Business Models in an Era of Changing Technologies and Markets," organised by the Indian National Academy of Engineers and Tata Consultancy Services, here on Tuesday.

Even in the post IT-slowdown period, ITES registered 320 per cent growth last year, and 380 per cent in the first half of this year, he said. There was pressure on multi-national corporations to bring down costs and India has tremendous potential and opportunities in this field, because of cost effectiveness of its operations.

Just as businesses need to change their `business models' to survive (in the face of competition), governments across the world were also changing their `approaches' to achieve their respective objectives of governance, he said.

Everyone was talking of reforms and free market economies, though now it was `with a human face'. Even China had adopted a model of `market driven socialism'. Referring to the pace of development and growth in China, he cautioned the business community about the `Chinese challenge' as it seemed to offer better economies of scale and productivity.

Switching over to his other favourite subject, he said biotechnology would change the way people live in the next 15-20 years, and pointed out that we were able to read about 3,000 genes, out of 40,000.

Coming to the Telecom sector, he said he had been supporting reform and making telecom services cheaper and more accessible. "A day will come when all voice services will be free. In the near future we will also start measuring per capita bandwidth just as metering in the power and water sectors," he felt.

S. Ramadorai, Chief Executive Officer of TCS, said IT had slowed down but was still growing at a substantial pace. It registered 36 per cent compounded annual growth rate for the past two years. Emphasising the importance of `real-time information' in evolving technologies, he said IT was only an `enabler of processes', and `good processes' by themselves held the key to success.

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