IT cooperation between Canada and India will grow:

Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM

Toronto: Canada and India enjoy a special relationship that will get better when the free trade agreement will be signed next year, Som Mittal, President, India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) said Thursday.

He was addressing a reception hosted by the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce (ICCC) in downtown Toronto that brought together professionals and entrepreneurs primarily from the information technology sector.

Mrs. Preeti Saran, Consul General of India in Toronto was the guest of the honour at the reception.

“We are here to offer opportunities for partnership. Today, the world is interconnected and one can’t gain at the cost of another. It has to be a win-win for all,” Mr. Mittal emphasized in the context of the bilateral relations between Canada and India.

Elaborating on the state of the Indian economy, the NASSCOM President said the India growth story would continue even if the face of the present slowdown which was a fallout of the global recessionary trends.

“There is a shift in our economy and there are some global economic issues so our growth is slowing down but in the last two months, path breaking announcements to continue with the reforms have put us back on track,” Mr. Mittal said.

Naval Bajaj, President, Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce (ICCC) in his Presidential remarks, welcomed Mr. Mittal. He said, “Som Mittal is an institution by himself. He is a technocrat with a heart and the epitome of the new face of rising India. He is playing a key role to enable NASSCOM realize its strategic vision of ‘Transforming Business and Transform India’.”

Advocating intense collaboration between ICCC and NASSCOM, to create synergies in the IT sector, Mr. Bajaj said that the vast potential in the two-way trade between our countries is as yet unrealized, especially in the non-traditional sectors such the IT sector, even though it is growing in significance.

“It will depend upon organizations such as ours to work with the governments to turn the growth potential into reality because governments can only create the right atmosphere and define the parameters of cooperation, finally it is businesses that have to trade and it is people and companies that have to invest.”

The ICCC President said that the Chamber has “identified IT as an important sector of focus” for the forthcoming India Mission 2013 in January.