R Chandrashekhar has completed an eventful year at the helm of Nasscom. As President of the industry lobby, Chandrashekhar has been at the forefront of representing the Indian IT industry’s position in countries such as the US, Australia and Canada. He spoke to BusinessLine on the sidelines of the Nasscom-DSCI Annual Information Security Summit recently. Edited excerpts:

What role is Nasscom playing in ensuring that the security and data privacy aspect does not get sidetracked in the Centre’s Digital India campaign?

We have been engaging with the government on several security aspects related to the Digital India campaign. In the physical world, security has been viewed as a government function. However, treating cyber security as purely a government function can end up being detrimental to security. More importantly, private sector capabilities need to be leveraged not only for securing the Internet but also ensuring the cyber safety of government institutions. The need is to have a framework on how governmental and non-governmental capabilities can be harnessed to address security issues related to the Digital India campaign.

Nasscom had said the new US immigration system will be beneficial to Indians living in that country. Are there any more irritants that need to be addressed?

The issue of immigration of high skilled workers has still been left on the backburner. Whether it will come on its own or as part of the comprehensive immigration overhaul remains to be seen. The real question is whether the economic interests of both US and Indian technology companies are covered. The interests of both Indian and American companies, we believe, are in perfect harmony with each other.

In this year’s placement season at the various Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), dozens of start-ups are making a beeline for top talent. Recently, four IIT-Kanpur students are said to have turned down salary offers of ₹1 crore per annum. Many bright students are turning entrepreneurs…

It’s a very interesting and a positive trend. If India has to achieve the objective of becoming a digital economy, we need the country’s best brains to not only focus on application of technology but also identifying problems that can be best addressed by technology. So, I am glad that more young kids are becoming technology entrepreneurs. ‘Digital India’ will not happen by simply by taking technologies that have evolved elsewhere and applying them here. What we require is a combination of those technologies, along with a dash of innovation closely linked to the Indian reality. That is where budding entrepreneurs can make a difference.

India is not the most favourable place to do business for technology companies as there are several infrastructure challenges and regulatory bottleneck. How do you create a Silicon Valley equivalent here?

When I last visited Japan, one Japanese company official told me that it is easy to run a start-up in India. Now, this person wasn’t saying that there are no infrastructure bottlenecks here.

His entire argument was that you have a huge number of young techies who do not hesitate to become entrepreneurs. Folks who have been working for 2-3 years are willing to run/join a start-up.

So, the most important enabler in the country is the willingness to take risks and the desire to make a direct impact using the knowledge gained in the process. Infrastructure and other regulatory issues are truly problems, but they are not showstoppers.

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