BANGALORE, India – Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao began a tour of India’s hi-tech capital and called for closer cooperation to launch the “Asian century” of information technology.
India’s software skills combined with China’s dominance in hardware can trigger a tectonic shift in the global technological landscape, Wen said at the offices of Tata Consultancy Services, the country’s biggest provider of software development and outsourcing services.
“Cooperation is just like two pagodas. One hardware and one software. Combined we can take the leadership position in the world,” Wen told reporters on Sunday.
He will also visit the Bangalore offices of Huawei Technologies, China’s largest telecoms maker which employs 800 Indian and 30 Chinese and plans to invest 100 million dollars in the country.
Wen will also tour India’s national space agency and the Indian Institute of Science and Technology in Bangalore.
He arrived in the city on Saturday from Sri Lanka on a tour of South Asian nations that also included Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The Chinese premier is scheduled to meet Foreign Minister Natwar Singh in New Delhi later Sunday, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday, to discuss a possible free-trade agreement and a long-running border dispute that led to a brief war in 1962.
China, the world’s fastest-growing major economy, is a manufacturing hub for mobile phones, textiles, cars and industrial equipment and is eyeing cooperation with India to expand its access to software.
“If India and China cooperate in the information technology industry we will be able to lead the world technology industry and when that particular day comes it will signify the coming of the Asian century of the IT industry,” Wen said.
India’s software sector contributes four percent to the country’s gross domestic product and grew 43 percent during the fiscal year to March 2004. The industry is expected to earn 75 billion dollars by 2008.
The technology sector has added 45 billion dollars to India’s foreign exchange reserves since 1998 and employs 850,000 people, according to government figures.
Wen noted that India’s growth in software mirrors China’s efforts in manufacturing.
“Just a few years ago we used to produce five million cellphones anually and now we are producing more than 100 million phones. Now China has more than 500 million phones of which 50 percent are fixed lines and 50 percent are mobile phones,” he said.
On his arrival Saturday to Bangalore Wen said he hoped to narrow differences on the border dispute and take to a “new high” ties between the two economic powerhouses.
Indian officials say the agenda for talks will be topped by business including a possible free trade zone encompassing 2.3 billion consumers, one third of the world’s population.
But as Wen touched down from Sri Lanka about 120 Tibetan students who have been put under house arrest began a 24-hour hunger strike to protest against the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
The spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, the Dalai Lama, fled his homeland in 1959 after the Chinese occupation and set up a government-in-exile in the northern Indian city of Dharamsala.
“The strike is still continuing,” a spokesman for the Tibetan National Democratic Party said.
