KERALA ALL SET TO BE BECOME FIRST E-LITERATE STATE

KERALA ALL SET TO BE BECOME FIRST E-LITERATE STATE

Infosys co-founder and executive co-chairman Kris Gopalakrishnan has said that Kerala is well positioned to become the first fully e-literate State in the country.Talking at a sectoral session on IT and ITES at the Emerging Kerala summit in Kochi on Friday, Mr. Gopalakrishnan said that all round support of the people is very vital to take the State to the forefront of the IT sector.That calls for people to get aligned to the vision of taking Kerala to the forefront of the IT sector.Mr. Gopalakrishnan said that informed people of the State have an opinion on everything and are argumentative.But they should not argue about that vision but about how to make that vision better. He was confident that the State can scale up its achievements and reach the next level of growth in the IT industry if that support is forthcoming.Innovation is very important and more than money it calls for the support of the people.

He urged the State to reap the opportunities of what he termed as the next revolution in the IT sector when personal computers are replaced by non-personal computers, data centres by cloud computing, Internet connecting 2.5 billion people to 60-70 billion devices being connected to the Internet.Mr. Gopalakrishnan said that Kerala has already emerged in the IT sector. It has several parks, host of who’s who of IT companies, and employs about 80,000 persons.Now that growth needs to be scaled up. The space needs to be leveraged to create better and bigger jobs translating the number of jobs from the existing 80,000 to eight lakh. Mr. Gopalakrishnan said that it’s possible for which creation of infrastructure is important.World class space needs to be created for people and the State government has an important role in this. He said that successive governments have supported the growth of the IT industry.The State, he said, is rich in terms of human resource. Infosys has been recruiting from the State for many years.Mr. Gopalakrishnan said that more students need to be encouraged to take up entrepreneurship. There needs to be an enabling environment, a cultural change and a sense of adventure of risk taking and acceptance of failure.School children should also be encouraged to take up IT, which is going to drive every aspects of life in the future, he said.

Prof. John Kurakar