Pune, January 27, 2004

Mr. Kiran Karnik, President, National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) inaugurated C-DAC's Common Campus Placement Program (CCPP) for its students today. Inaugurating the event, Mr. Karnik expressed his happiness to "share the dais with C-DAC", which "has done the country proud" through its "exciting and pioneering work" and "delivered what the country needed". Speaking on the IT industry, he stated that the IT industry was "doing extremely well", grossing around 10 billion USD last year. He said that this year the IT industry was targeting a figure of 12 billion USD in exports alone while expressing that the figure should touch 50 billion USD by 2008.

Commenting on the Common Campus Placement Program (CCPP), Mr. Karnik said that the initiative will "not only will help the students in having so many IT companies coming together to recruit but the industry will also benefit as they can choose from a large number of students gathered at one place from so many C-DAC centres." He had a special mention for C-DAC's flagship Diploma in Advanced Computing (DAC) course conducted by its Advanced Computing Training School (ACTS) and said that "The industry is impressed with the DAC Course on three counts: firstly, the quality of input in terms of the faculty is superior, secondly, the students selected are inherently bright and finally, the syllabus is very relevant to the needs of the industry". On the industry-institute interface, he was of the opinion that C-DAC already had the necessary linkages, and NASSCOM could only "provide information on areas such as the demand for IT professionals, say 2 years from now and like wise". NASSCOM would like to keep its hands away from initiating any process for facilitating human resource development, as it neither has "the ability, bandwidth or the funds for this kind of expenditure". He said that NASSCOM could assist only in facilitation "and leave the rest to the training institutes like C-DAC".

Allaying the fears of students about job opportunities in this sector, Mr. Karnik stated that despite the recession, India's IT industry has been registering a growth of around 26 percent every year as compared to negligible or no growth in other countries. He said that there has been "an upsurge in recruitment" this year with the IT industry needing close to 1,50,000 trained personnel to meet their demands. He also sought to clear the myths associated with the BPO sector, perceived as being low end and of low intellectual value. While agreeing that a large majority of the sector remains non-technical, he also stated that there were organizations which were coming up for specialized domain areas such as Bioinformatics, Equity Analysis of industries and so on.

There were opportunities for India in new technologies like embedded systems, VLSI and so on, where it was far ahead of countries like China. However, Indian IT professionals had some homework to do in terms of soft skills, which has become a vital pre-requisite these days, he observed.

The CCPP is a unique endeavor of C-DAC ACTS to bring its students on a common platform for the entire IT industry. The event aims to minimize the individual logistics and management efforts of each centre by collectively utilizing its resources for campus placements in a single window mode. This will not only allow prospective employers to select from a vast pool of talented and ready-to-deploy manpower, but also provide an opportunity to a large number of students to interface with the industry, who would otherwise lose out on the opportunity owing to remoteness of their centres and the reluctance of organizations to visit them.

As many as 39 leading IT organizations like Wipro, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, L&T, Kanbay, Seimens, Cognizant and so on, have already confirmed their participation in the two week placement program, concluding on February 8, 2004.

The CCPP also marks the tenth anniversary of C-DAC's Advanced Computing Training School (ACTS), since its inception in 1993.

Dr. S.C. Purohit, Director, C-DAC also addressed the students during the inauguration.

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