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It was 22nd May 1998, when the PMO announced that IT has to be driven and directed from the top so that the IT industry as well as the users reap its benefits, and conducive policies are created. There was a bit of euphoria. The BJP Government set up a National Task Force on IT and Software Development with big-wigs like Jaswant Singh, Chandrababu Naidu, Narayana Murthy, Dewang Mehta and Sudheendra Kulkarni as members. The objective was to make India one of the largest generators of software in the world.

As one would have imagined, over a period of time this Task Force became all encompassing. There were several sub-groups formed including development of R&D in IT; human resource development for developing the industry as well as the market; chalking out plans and policies for citizen-IT interface; content development; manufacture and exports of hardware; high-speed inter-varsity data networks; and national technology parks. The euphoria toward the Task Force formation can be sensed from the fact that within a period of two months, more than 10,000 people responded from all over the world with ideas and suggestions.

To drive and motivate the task force, an organizational structure was proposed. Besides recommending a Ministry of Informatics (to be formed by the merger of DoT, DoE, and Ministry of Information & Broadcasting), other recommendations included a key advisor to the Prime Minster on Informatics on the pattern of some other countries including the US; an IT advisor for the planning commission; Chief Knowledge Officers for each Ministry; an Inter-state IT Forum; and a very high level committee of extremely prominent people to oversee and guide the Task Force. This high-level team was to be chaired by none other than the Prime Minister of India himself.

After the formation of this high-powered IT Task Force in May 1998, the last significant meeting was held in April 1999 and by that time there were 108 recommendations given. Not much is known as to what happened to all those recommendations, except that DoT and DoE merged and a ministry of Communications and IT was formedand the I&B ministry is still separate. After that the Congress party came into power but nobody really mentioned anything about the IT Task Forceeither in its original form or in any new avatar.

If ten years ago, these issues could have been addressed, I am sure the picture of IT in India would have been very different. But it is never too late. I believe that need for a task force is even more pressing now. Plus it should look at IT, communications, as well as content as a whole. We actually need a national convergence task force now.

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