When you proclaim you’re 365 days on a holiday, it’s kind of dodgy to—in the same breath—ask businesses to come set up serious shop in your State. They’d assume you’d been out sunbathing a tad longer than sensible. That’s perhaps one of the reasons why Goa has been late off the blocks in wooing the IT services and IT enabled services industries to set up base on its pristine shores; and been reluctant too to hold out a begging bowl, like some other states unabashedly do, each time a visiting CEO is doling out the dollars.

Of course it didn’t help much that while the rest of the country was going gaga over the success of the Indian software industry, Goan politicians were busying themselves in toppling each other over—13 chief ministers in a decade, surely that’s Guinness-world-record level material.

But it’s been 26 months now that the BJP government, headed by IIT-Bombay alumnus Manohar Parrikar, has held its own in Goa. And over this time, albeit in its inimitably unhurried style, Goa has been working on policies and initiatives that seem set to make the tiny state a model for the rest of India to follow, in terms of utilisation of information technology to meet the needs of society.

Sounds fishy? Well, for starters, Goa’s draft IT Policy is refreshingly different from what most others have put out. The broad mission is to enhance the state’s capacity for “quality decisions” in every sphere, whether at the government, corporate or individual level. There’s an InfoTech Corporation that has been set up to serve as a single window for implementation of all IT initiatives by the government, and an InfoTech Council to facilitate creation, development and implementation of India’s first R&D park, co-locating several R&D laboratories on a single campus.

Throughout, the emphasis of the policy is on IT for development rather than a blind leap onto the software exports bandwagon. Yes, the document does talk of investment incentives and concessions, but the difference is that everything’s directed at making Goa the R&D hub of the country.

The behind-the-scenes groundwork done so far culminated earlier this month in the hosting of The Goa Agenda—a conference jointly organised by the Goa Chamber of Commerce & Industry and the government—that brought together powerful minds from all over the country to deliberate on how the state should take the lead in utilising IT for the benefit of the common man in its society.

Good intentions have already been translated into actual action in some areas. For instance, every single one of the secondary schools in Goa has at least one computer in place. Some have many more, thanks to the largesse of expatriate Goans and other well-wishers abroad—almost 400 donated computers were distributed to schools via the Goa Sudharop NGO and the Goa Schools Computers Project recently. And next year, every student in the science stream at the pre-university level will be eligible to purchase a computer from a government agency for a paltry thousand rupees.

Interestingly, many of these computers in the schools run the open-source alternative operating system Linux. One local expert estimates that Goa has the highest density of Linux-based PCs and users in the country. Complementing this alternative experiment is the fact that Goa is getting wired up pretty quick, with optical fibre criss-crossing the state and high bandwidth availability already a reality. It’s been suggested that Goa should go all out to provide WiFi Hotspots (802.11 access points to use with wireless LAN devices) across the state as soon as the 2.4 GHz band of the spectrum is completely delicensed for outdoor use.

Goa is an ideal state in which to experiment taking IT to the masses with these alternative technologies and innovative devices, for several reasons. For one, it’s tiny—just about 105 km long and 35 km wide, with a population of around 1.4 million spread over only about 2,000 square kilometres of the entire area. Literacy is over 80 percent, with a high proportion of English-language fluency and a per capita income double the national average.

Can Goa become India’s first “intelligent” state, completely IT literate and fully wired? Well, The Goa Agenda showed that quite a few intelligent and dedicated individuals are working towards this dream. But they will have to go far beyond pitching Goa’s salubrious environment alone as the USP, if they are to come even close to realising it. No doubt, there are already some success stories—like that of D-Link, the networking gear manufacturer that is one of the few companies in the hardware sector doing real manufacturing; ControlNet, with successful forays into chip design and embedded computing; and Zenith, which continues to hold high the ‘Indian PC brand’ banner from its factories in Goa. But if the state can add even one really big name to this roster on the R&D front, the floodgates could well be opened.

Any which way, it’s going to be a long journey ahead. For now, I’ll let Goa’s Information Technology Minister, Francisco D’Souza, have the last word. He sat through most of the sessions at the two-day conference and stated at the end: “If we cannot make Goa a very very IT-savvy state within the next five years at the maximum, then I think we’re not capable of handling anything in Goa.”

Now nothing could be more categorical than that, could it? We wish you all the very best, Mr Minister.

- Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com