New Delhi: The Government of India’s Information Technology spend in 2022 is projected to increase by 8.6 percent over 2021 to reach $8.3 billion in 2022, research firm Gartner said on Thursday.
“Digitalization initiatives of the Indian government organizations took a giant leap in 2020 because of the global coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic which forced the government to shift priorities as supply chains and revenue streams dwindled,” according to Apeksha Kaushik, Senior Principal Research Analyst at Gartner.
The Indian government organizations, both local and national, will increase spending on all segments of IT in 2022, except in telecom services, media reports said.
The software segment is expected to achieve the highest growth of 24.7 percent in 2022 as the adoption of citizen service delivery applications with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning will improve across citizen initiatives.
As India braces for the 5-G rollout, the telecommunication market will have to be more innovative to offer quality services to citizens, and pricing. Hence, the focus on investing in telecom services will be lower as compared to the other segments in 2022.
Since individual digital solutions do not correlate to overall digital maturity, the overall performance of the Government of India’s organizations is low compared to its western counterparts. A general shift from the physical to the digital will be a major reason for the expected IT spending growth in 2022.
“As vaccination rates increase throughout the country and public health improves, the governments will focus on furthering the digitalization efforts on concerns such as citizen experience and digital inclusion,” Kaushik said.
Initiatives like digital licensing, online judicial proceedings, and digital taxation, started as a knee-jerk reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, will take time to achieve full potential as digital inclusion is not fully met in the country.
The forthcoming 5-G spectrum auction in India will be aimed at solving some of these challenges related to digital inclusion in 2022.
As cloud deployments and implementations further the digital agenda, privacy, and security continue to be government CIOs’ top concerns in the country.
Key technologies that government CIOs in India will be prioritizing their spending on in 2022 will be digital workplace and business continuity solutions, business intelligence, and data analytics, responsible AI and blockchain along with improved data privacy and data sharing tools.
(VP)
