NIIT's Pawar appointed Nasscom chairman


NEW DELHI: Technology industry body National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) sees a strong revival of demand that could not only help meet, but exceed growth expectations for 2011-12.

Newly-appointed Nasscom chairman for 2011-12, Rajendra S Pawar , said in an interaction with ET: "We are coming back to growth levels seen prior to the slowdown and in the near term we see lot of headroom to catapult this growth.''

When asked whether this means Nasscom will revise its 15-17% growth target for the year for the $70-billion technology and business services sector, Pawar said, "It's too early to comment, but we are on track to exceed this target.''

Pawar, 60, co-founder and chairman of education software company, NIIT , took over as Nasscom chairman from Harsh Manglik. Nasscom also appointed N Chandrasekaran as vice chairman of its executive council. Chandrasekaran is CEO & MD of TCS , the largest Indian technology services company.

As chairman of the executive council, Pawar will lead and assist Nasscom in catalysing the growth of the Indian ITBPO industry and enabling the fulfillment of its future goals and aspirations. Towards this end, Pawar wants to focus on two areas. First, how Nasscom can facilitate growth of the small and mid sized companies.

"There are lots of SMEs focused on software products, telecom, internet space, driven by IP. By the end of this decade, we see quite a few of them becoming very big,'' Pawar said.
 
GAURAV KUMAR
PGDM-2nd Semester