Government commits Rs 80,000 cr FDI in IT, Telecom sectors

New Delhi, Mar 2 (UNI) The government today said Rs 80,000 crore (19,820 million dollars) have been proposed to be invested in the country's booming telecom and IT sectors, with IBM alone planning to put in six billion dollars for expanding its software and telecom R&D facilities.

''An amount worth Rs 80,000 crore will be invested in the country's IT and telecom sector in two year's time,'' an official statement said.

Other investment include SemIndia which has committed three billion dollars for setting up a semi conductor manufacturing unit in Andhra Pradesh.

SAP Labs will set up a one billon dollar R&D and telecom research centre while CISCO has committed 1.1 billion dollar for a host of facilities including a lab and e-governance networking facility in Chennai.

CISCO will also invest in venture capital investments, leasing and other soutions, technical services and rural connectivity.

Vodafone will invest two billion dollars in mobile networking.

Intel will invest 1.06 billion dollars for its R&D facility while Microsoft has committed 1.7 billion dollars.

Motorola has invested 70 million dollars for manufacturing GSM phones in Chennai and another 100 million dollars for its handsets manufacturing facility in the same city.

Similarly, Nokia has pumped 200 million dollars for its handset manufacturing facility in Chennai, Aspocomp 200 million dollars in PCB manufacturing, Jalil Circuit 70 million dollars in OEM manufaturing at Chennai, Samsung 100 million dollars for manufacturing LCD TVS at Chennai, EMC2 500 million dollars for storage technology and Siemens telecom equipment at a cost of 100 million dollars.

UNI