India to address problem of skill shortage: Pramani

India has to address the problem of skill shortage to return to an economic growth rate of 8-9%, said Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman of Microsoft India.

During the previous wave of growth, the skill needed was available but in the next wave of growth, when it happens in the next couple of years, India may see a shortage of skilled people, Pramanik said.

He was speaking on the sidelines of an event to launch Microsoft’s upgraded version of its ‘Office’ suite of products called Office 365 for enterprises in India, which will allow sharing of data across multiple devices such as personal and tablet computers and mobile phones using cloud computing.

“Whether it is a airline or a fast-moving consumer goods or a manufacturing company, they all want to improve the productivity of their existing employees and are trying to use technology to skill and train other people,” said Pramanik.

Despite the fact that Microsoft has been growing faster than the market the past two-three years, the Indian market is underpenetrated from a technology spending point of view, both in terms of enterprises as well as government, he said.

“Typical government spending in most parts of the world is close to 2% but in India it is close to 0.35%. And if I look at the new emerging economies, or the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries, we are very far behind,” he said.

Office 365, which integrates Microsoft’s various services such as SharePoint, Yammer and Lync to provide a platform for organisational collaboration, sells for $6-22 (Rs330-1,200) a user per month and can be installed on up to five devices for a single user.