The strong trade relations between American industry and Indian suppliers of IT products and services were affected negatively by the recent international economic crisis, driving the Indian IT industry to explore new market outlets to reduce the impact of the drop in American demand. The agreement signed in Bombay in February 2002 between the Chairmen of SMAU and NASSCOM to promote India as a “strategic supplier” of high-quality and low-cost IT services and Italy as a market for entry into Europe for the Indian IT industry fits into this context. The subsequent presence of the Indian IT Minister Mr. Pramod Mahajan at SMAU 2002 and the related institutional meetings with Italian counterparts created the institutional conditions for a coordinated action that led to a more in-depth awareness of the opportunities that India offers and of the contribution that it can make in the development of Italian SMEs, which find themselves faced with an increasingly competitive market in terms of quality and costs.
Bangalore has a leading role on the IT map of India, not only at the national but even international level. At the national level Bangalore is the paradigm of post-industrial India that is, however, yet to solve the fundamental social and economic problems of a developing country. At the international level, Bangalore district is one of the preferred places of multinational firms for investing in the IT and IT-related services sector. At present, the preeminence of Bangalore, with its excellent services and infrastructure and the consequent opportunities that it offers, is largely unknown to Italian firms, both in terms of investment and in terms of trade relations.
This study aims to promote the opportunities that India offers to our enterprises, whether small, medium-sized or large, in the field of IT, and to illustrate, apart from the features of the Indian IT industry, the government policies regarding the sector, the important educational system from which the firms get their IT engineers, and the infrastructure created to support the development of the Indian IT industry.