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already been doing for IT products. At the macro-economic level the agreement aims at
reducing the cost of hardware
—
therefore, leading to a subsequent positive impact on the
cost of service provisioning. Although the hardware sector in the country may have
misgivings with this, so far as e-commerce and the
software sector is concerned, this
movement should result in cheaper products and, therefore,
growth in e-commerce
services. For consumers, this means cheaper products and services, and for the
economy a possible impetus to the growth of networks.
For the country as a whole,
however, this could possibly mean two things:
(a) that the new opportunities in the ICT sector and hardware may be swamped by
multinationals,
(b) that the IT sector becomes even more software and e-commerce centric.
The last few years have shown that in the first some Indian companies are also benefiting
from the opportunities; so far as the second is
concerned, that is the country’s primary
competitive advantage and the software industry should benefit from the growth in the
market of standardized software products and applications.
