Bangalore: Information Technology icon N R Narayana Murthy on January 6 called for doing away with subsidies for higher education which, he said, must function as an industry in a free-market environment.

He told the Indian Science Congress in Bangalore, India's industry and academia have to partner in building competent and industry-savvy education system. "The only function of the government must be to regulate the quality of higher education by setting standards," Murthy, Chairman and Chief Mentor of Bangalore-headquartered Infosys (NASDAQ-listed) company, said.

"Further, there should not be subsidies for higher education. The government should focus on basic education. However, basic education must also function in a free-market environment," he said at a plenary session on "Information Science and Technologies for a Knowledge Society".

For the masses to derive the benefits of IT, India needs to focus on developing applications that support local languages, Murthy said. In addition, increased use of voice applications will let the people interact with computers using the spoken language.

He also said that the government should take steps to reduce tariff levels for hardware in India, noting that currently, the cost of hardware is significantly higher as compared to the rest of the world.

Developing countries such as India, he said, should leverage the power of IT to leapfrog poverty barriers, and promote economic and social development. He stressed that it is important to bridge the "digital divide" that threatens the poor in India. Government needs to partner with the private sector in building a knowledge infrastructure.

"With an overall literacy level of around 65 per cent, India clearly needs investment in education", Murthy underscored.

Saying that the biggest contribution of India's software sector is that it's for the first time that an industry has looked at global benchmarking, Murthy strongly pleaded with other sectors of the economy to follow suit and be globally competitive and better.

"If China can flood Indian markets with low-cost products, why can't India flood markets in China and the Middle-East similarly?" he asked.

According to him, China is progressing further than India in all sectors, and praised the Chinese leadership for raising the confidence of all sections of their society, corporates and academia, among others.

President of NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies), Kiran Karnik, said an E-governance mission, including a re-engineering of government processes and procedures, needs to be launched to provide corruption-free and efficient citizen services.

"A broader initiative to use information and communication technologies (ICT) for development is also needed, focusing on such applications as tele-medicine, e-learning, online expert advice to agriculturists, among others", he said.

PTI