CIAO DATE: 04/02

Accessing Venture Capital in India

In recent years, India has made good progress in the export of information technology (IT) software and services. Many other countries now look to it as a model. At the same time, India's concentration of low value-added services, the near-absence of technology develop-ment, and the total absence of hardware development suggest that IT exports are not fulfill-ing their potential, either in terms of innovative content or of possible sustainability. The Indian government has set aggressive targets for the high technology industry, including an annual export growth rate of 33 percent for the next decade, compared with 50 percent over the past five years. These goals will translate to substantial dollar increases in software and IT services exports–from $3 billion in 1998 to $50 billion in 2008. Can this ambitious figure be achieved? Or, perhaps, is it too low, given India's current growth trajectory?

To discuss these issues, 110 scholars, practitioners, regulators, multilateral agencies, and policymakers from India and abroad (including Israel, Taiwan, and countries in Europe and Latin America) met on June 1, 1999 at Stanford University in a one-day conference. The program had the following stated objective: to inform and educate India's IT policymakers and practitioners about India's enabling environment as it relates to regulation, governance, access to capital, and technological capabilities. The title of the conference, "Accessing Ven-ture Capital in India," used the word "capital" in the broadest sense, to include both human and financial capital. The word "accessing" was used to mean facilitating the creation of capital through appropriate regulation and governance.

Full Text of Conference Proceeding article (PDF, 32 Pages, 196Kb)