The Government of India, recognising that the impressive growth the country has achieved since the mid-Eighties in Information Technology is still a small proportion of the potential to achieve, has resolved to make India a Global IT Superpower and a front-runner in the age of Information Revolution. The Government of India considers IT as an agent of transformation of every facet of human life which will bring about a knowledge based society in the twenty-first century. As a first step in that direction, the following revisions and additions are made to the existing Policy and Procedures for removing bottlenecks and achieving such a pre-eminent status for India.

The revisions and additions are aimed at accomplishing the following basic objectives:
 

i) Info-Infrastructure Drive: Accelerate the drive for setting up a World class Info Infrastructure with an extensive spread of Fibre Optic Networks, Satcom Networks and Wireless Networks for seamlessly interconnecting the Local Informatics Infrastructure (LII), National Informatics Infrastructure (NII) and the Global Informatics Infrastructure (GII) to ensure a fast nation-wide onset of the INTERNET, EXTRANETs and INTRANETs. 

ii) Target ITEX - 50: With a potential 2 trillion dollar Global IT industry by the year 2008, policy ambiance will be created for the Indian IT industry to target for a $ 50 billion annual export of IT Software and IT Services (including IT-enabled services) by this year, over a commensurately large domestic IT market spread all over the country.

iii) IT for all by 2008: Accelerate the rate of PC / set-top-box penetration in the country from the 1998 level of one per 500 to one per 50 people along with a universal access to Internet / Extranets/ Intranets by the year 2008, with a flood of IT applications encompassing every walk of economic and social life of the country. The existing over 600,000 Public Telephones / Public Call Offices (PCOs) will be transformed into public tele-info- centres offering a variety of multimedia Information services. Towards the goal of IT for all by 2008, policies are provided for setting the base for a rapid spread of IT awareness among the citizens, propagation of IT literacy, networked Government, IT-led economic development, rural penetration of IT applications, training citizens in the use of day-to-day IT services like tele-banking, tele-medicine, tele-education, tele-documents transfer, tele-library, tele-info-centres, electronic commerce, Public Call Centres, among others; and training, qualitatively and quantitatively, world class IT professionals.