India government’s IT spending is projected to increase 8.6 percent to $8.3 billion in 2022, a Gartner report said.
Privacy and security will be government CIOs’ top concerns as cloud deployments and implementations further the digital agenda.
India Government will spend $507 million on data centers, $1,394 million on devices, $1,751 million on internal services, $2,005 million on IT services, $1,823 million on software and $819 million on telecom services in 2022.
Digital workplace and business continuity solutions, business intelligence and data analytics, responsible AI and blockchain along with improved data privacy & data sharing tools will be key technologies that government CIOs in India will be prioritizing their spending on in 2022.
“Digitalization initiatives of Indian government organizations took a giant leap in 2020 because of the global pandemic. The pandemic forced the government to shift priorities as supply chains and revenue streams dwindled,” said Apeksha Kaushik, senior principal research analyst at Gartner.
Overall digital maturity of Indian government organizations is low compared to its western counterparts. Moving from legacy systems to digital will be a major reason for IT spending growth in 2022. The upcoming 5G spectrum auction in India will aim at solving some of these challenges related to digital inclusion in 2022.
Indian government organizations, both local and national, will increase spending on all segments of IT in 2022, except for telecom services. The software segment is forecast to achieve the highest growth of 24.7 percent in 2022 as the adoption of citizen service delivery applications with use of artificial intelligence and machine learning will improve across citizen initiatives.
As India prepares itself for 5G rollout, the telecom market requires deep pockets to make an impact on innovation, quality of services to citizens, pricing. Hence, the focus on investing on telecom services will be lower as compared to the other segments in 2022.
“Government CIOs are looking beyond implementation for signs of the impact from the technology, outcome-based futuristic direction they should take and for IT technology/service providers that go beyond provision to partner and collaborate with them to achieve their mission-critical priorities,” said Kaushik.
