Sunday, July 5, 2009

Israeli cos eye slice of India’s e-gov pie

BANGALORE: Israeli technology firms are joining the race for India’s e-governance projects, seeking to offer solutions for the unique identification
card programme. “Israeli companies may bid along with Indian ones as we always need local partners for e-governance projects”, Consul General of Israel Orna Sagiv said . Sagiv was heading a delegation of 14 Israeli software companies to Bangalore to explore the opportunities in the Indian market and find local partners. Trade between the two countries is at $4 billion in 2008, up from $3.3 billion in 2007. Israel will be looking to partner the Indian technology giants especially because the country has e-governance solutions like e-payment, e-documentation, registration of population and citizen smart cards already running. “Many governments around the world came to Israel to see how we did it,” said Katrin Melamed, business development manager at the Israel Export and International Co operation Institute (IEICI). India is among top three trade partner for Israel in Asia and one of the top 10 trade partners globally. “This year our government decided to put special effort and give incentives to Israeli businessman who want to explore the Indian market,” said Ms Sagiv. Ms Sagiv said that the global crisis just showed Israel that the future is not only in the US and Europe, which are its traditional market. “ India and China are our markets now which are growing”, she said. With about 3,000 indigenous IT firms, spanning hardware and software, the Israeli hitech industry has grown exponentially as the export of software from Israel has reached to $5.8 billion against $90 million in 1990. Some 40% of the revenue comes from the US, 20% from Europe and rest from other nations.” I am expecting Asia will account for more than 30% this year and India will play a significant role,” said Ms Melamed of IEICI.

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