Indian government to spend in $8.3 billion on IT, maximum budget for software: Report

India government IT spending is projected to total $8.3 billion in 2022, an increase of 8.6% from 2021 according to a latest forecast by Gartner. Individual digital solutions do not correlate to overall digital maturity. As a result, the overall digital maturity of Indian government organizations is low compared to its western counterparts, it said.
Moving from legacy systems to digital will be a major reason for IT spending growth in 2022. For initiatives, such as digital licensing, online judicial proceedings, digital taxation, that were initiated as a knee-jerk reaction to the pandemic in 2020, there is still a long way ahead to achieve full potential as digital inclusion is not fully met in the country. The forthcoming 5G spectrum auction in India will aim at solving some of these challenges related to digital inclusion in 2022.
“Digitization initiatives of Indian government organizations took a giant leap in 2020 because of the global pandemic. The pandemic forced the government to shift priorities as supply chains and revenue streams dwindled. As vaccination rates increase throughout the country and public health improves, the governments will focus on furthering the digitization efforts on concerns such as ‘citizen experience’ and digital inclusion,” said Apeksha Kaushik, senior principal research analyst at Gartner.
Indian government organisations, both local and national, will increase spending on all segments of IT in 2022, except for telecom services. The software segment is forecast to achieve the highest growth of 24.7% in 2022 as the adoption of citizen service delivery applications with use of artificial intelligence and machine learning will improve across citizen initiatives.
“As India prepares itself for 5G rollout, the telecom market requires deep pockets to make an impact on innovation, quality of services to citizens, and pricing. Hence, the focus on investing on telecom services will be lower as compared to the other segments in 2022,” it added.