India's software exports totaled 2.86 billion dollars for the first six months to September and will far exceed a 50-billion-dollar target set for 2008, a top industry official said Wednesday.
Dewang Mehta, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) said software exports for the entire fiscal year ending March 2001 were expected to total 6.3 billion dollars.
The estimate compared to a 1999-2000 export total of four billion dollars.
India had targeted software exports of 50 billion dollars by 2008 and "we will achieve that much before," Mehta told delegates at an international "IT.com" conference in the southern city of Bangalore.
"For the IT industry as a whole we will achieve 87 billion dollars in revenues by 2008," Mehta said.
The Indian software industry earned a total of 2.5 billion dollars between 1996 and 1999 by providing software solutions to fix the millennium bug.
NASSCOM said 62 percent of software exports in the year to March 2000 were to the United States and Canada, and 23.5 percent to Europe -- BANGALORE (AFP)
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