STPI looks at transforming India into a software product nation

DR OMKAR RAI, DIRECTOR GENERAL, Software Technology Parks of India, in conversation with Sandhya Michu shares how an autonomous society like STPI, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, is building a sustainable startup ecosystem with a pool of industry collaborations and chief mentors to make India a software product country

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Can you explain the transformation journey of STPI from its inception days?

STPI was formed in 1991 in order to ease out import and export hiccups. Software exports was not recognised by the customs department and that’s when the ministry created this platform to ease this system and we were the only single window to look after it. Secondly, the most challenging aspect at that point of time was to provide internet to the software exporters as many businesses required to get in touch with their counterparts and required high-speed secure internet connections.

STPI was licensed to provide them satellite-based internet gateways and provided small and medium entrepreneurs the opportunity to work with it. The idea was to facilitate import-export, and we did well, if you look at the export made by STPI in 2018-19 it has crossed ₹4 lakh 24 thousand crores and this is almost 50 per cent of the total exports from India. Now the point is that since India has 56 per cent of the total share in outsourcing IT service globally, but in terms of software products, the growth is not significant. As of now in terms of software products market, India is about US$ 512 billion, so the country’s share was nearly 8.2 per cent globally, till 2019.