Ganesh Natarajan, CEO of Zensar, and President of NASSCOM, gave a talk last week about how the Indian IT/ITES industry is tackling the recession. It was full of facts and figures about the state of the industry, and the initiatives that are being taken by NASSCOM. This talk was given during the IndicThreads conference on Java technologies. I’ve already included this in my overall report on the IndicThreads Conference, but thought that it was interesting enough and important enough to warrant a post on its own.

The basic point he made was that we are not going to affected as badly as the rest of the world because of the following reasons:

• We had already been tightening the belt for almost an year now, so we are in much better shape to handle the recession than those who weren’t being so prudent
• We are creating new products, tackling new verticals, and focusing on end-to-end service (and these claims were all backed by facts and figures), and this diversification and added value makes us resilient

And he spent a lot of time pointing out that to do even better, or primary focus needs to be the tier 2 / tier 3 cities, 43 of which have been identified by NASSCOM and whose developement will get some attention. Also, our tier 2 / tier 3 colleges are sub-par and a lot of work is needed to improve the quality of students graduating from there. NASSCOM has started a number of initiatives to tackle this problem.

His full presentation with a whole bunch of interesting graphs, facts and figures from NASSCOM is here. Definitely worth checking out.