India poised to become trillion dollar digital economy by FY26: Govt

Ministry of Electronics & IT in a report on “India’s trillion-dollar digital opportunity” stated, India is poised to be a trillion dollar digital economy and could support 60 to 65 million digitally enabled jobs by 2025-26.

As per National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), the projected requirement of manpower by Indian IT industry itself by the year 2026 would be around 95 lakh, for India to maintain the growth momentum in IT sector and also of which 55 lakh will be digitally skilled across key digital technologies such as cloud computing, AI, big data analytics and IoT etc.

MeitY in its release also mentioned, as per (NASSCOM), Indian Information Technology (IT) Industry directly employs around 51 lakh persons in FY 2021-22, most of which are IT skilled.

In addition, with increasing digitalization under the Digital India program in the last 7 years, other economic sectors have created large opportunities for digitally enabled jobs.

MeitY informed about some of the steps taken by the IT industry to increase revenue and expand employment opportunities. The steps included, increased fresher hiring and expanding operations to tier-II/III cities.

Moreover, to develop the future work force in emerging digital skills, Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY) and National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) have jointly initiated a programme titled “Future Skills PRIME (Programme for Re-skilling/Up-skilling of IT Manpower for Employability)” which aims to create a re-skilling/up-skilling ecosystem in futuristic technologies.

Under the Future Skills PRIME program so far, 8.20 Lakh candidates have registered on the Future Skills PRIME Portal, out of which, 1.36 Lakh candidates have completed their courses. Further, as per NASSCOM, some of the measures taken by industry for manpower planning and skill development training include alliances with academia for training the employee base, innovation and research & development across areas of emerging technologies, internal re-skilling programs and platforms, collaborations with other education technology companies.

In addition to employment prospects, according to the data shared by the ministry, the total revenue earned by the IT industry in FY2019-20 was 190 billion US dollars (USD), which jumped to 196 billion USD in FY2020-21 and is estimated to rise up to 227 billion USD in 2021-22.

This infromation was issued by Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar replying to a question raised in parliament today.

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