Incubating service exports

"I see service export opportunities for developing countries in three areas - traditional areas such as tourism and engineering design software, and web-enabled services. I do agree that infrastructure and telecommunications are very important. But in India its success story in software export involved incubator services, providing direct satellite links in just six locations, to provide software exports. At these cities there was guaranteed 24-hour connectivity. The government provided space and zero customs duty to import as well as export and zero income tax. The whole country did not have good telecommunications or the Internet. But at these six places the software could be exported.

All the data could be collected because software was going out only at these few points. Because there was zero duty there was an incentive to declare everything. So there was no problem with developing it. But not every country can do this. We were lucky because we had the software engineers who had the contacts in the US. We consider the brain drain that took place from India as actually a brain gain û the software engineers who went out to the US or Europe were the contact points for getting business, they are the people who came back and set up the companies and created the US$6 billion software export business."

-- Alwyn Didar Singh, e-commerce specialist, Chandigarh, India.