Indian High Commissioner to Nigeria, Mr. Mahesh Sachdev, has urged Nigeria to leverage on the success story of Indian’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector, disclosing that sooner than expected, there would be Indian handsets vendors in the country.
The high commissioner, made this call at the 2011 edition of
the West African ICT Congress which ended in Lagos at the weekend, declaring
“Soon in Nigeria; Indian Handsets Vendors.”
He also said in his paper entitled ‘Leveraging India ICT for
Nigeria’ that India which has a population of 1.21 billion and assumed the
second largest nation has a landmass of 3.2 mn sq kms, which tagged the 7th
largest in the world.
He noted that currently the Nigeria-India relationship has
resulted in India being the second largest trading partner worth $13.0bn, about
N2,065 trillion in 2010 till date, stressing that India is the largest investor
in Nigeria in 2010 with over $5 bn, an estimated N794.4 billion.
Sachdev further said that India ranks second largest
employer with over 100 Indian companies
operating in the country across pole spot in Information Technology (IT),
health, steel, power X-mission.
India’s ICT Sector, he said, has telecom as number 1 with
current status of 850 million phones and ranks the second largest network in
addition to being the world’s fastest growing subscriber base with 15 operators
taunted as the world’s lowest call tariffs.
He pointed out that with the 2011 National Telecom Policy,
there is an anticipation broadband-on-demand will reach 175 million by year
2017.
According to him, with raising of Rural Teledensity to 60
per cent by 2017, which is driven by
indigenise telecom equipment, and consolidation among telecom operators.
He noted that Nigeria-India ICT ties could be tracked down
from, Multi-links to Airtel, lowering thresholds in the nation’s telecom
sector, adding that wide presence of Indian telecom experts, while offering
training of IT personnel in the country through NIIT and ApTech.
The
National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) delegation,
he said, visited Nigeria in 2009 and 2011 to partner and mentor some local IT
stakeholders.
Remmy Nweke
ITREALMS Online ... delivering news for ICT4D
No comments:
Post a Comment