The Tamil Nadu Department of Information Technology has been renamed as the Department of Information Technology and Digital Services, Minister T. Mano Thangaraj informed the Assembly on Wednesday. He also said a new IT park would come up at Kanniyakumari at a cost of ₹50 crore.
Two ‘plug and play’ facilities for startups are also on the cards. One facility, measuring 30,000 square feet, would be established at the ELCOT-Special Economic Zone at Gangaikondan in Tirunelveli district at a cost of ₹6 crore. The second facility, measuring 27,461 square feet, would come up at ELCOSEZ, Hosur. The cost of setting up these two facilities would be borne by the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT).
Mr. Thangaraj said an Integrated IT Signature Complex, measuring over 2.6 lakh square feet, would be established at a cost of ₹150 crore at Kotturpuram in Chennai. Sources in the department said this complex would house a co-working space, startups and IT firms, among others. “Around 100 new services would be provided by the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency through its e-sevai centres. This is in addition to the 192 and 72 services currently being provided through online and offline modes,” the Minister said. It has been proposed to arrive at estimates of expenditure incurred and allotment of investment in every department as part of measures to digitise all government departments.
The Minister said the Information Technology and Digital Services Department would contribute $100 billion towards Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin’s vision of making the State a $1 trillion economy by 2030. He said the government would help entrepreneurs adopt future technologies, and new investments would be encouraged in this space.
“We have received proposals from educational institutions and software companies to create software tools for Tamil Virtual Academy. These proposals would be studied, and those that would be beneficial would be implemented by Tamil Virtual Academy at a cost of ₹2 crore,” he added.
A postgraduate course would be established at Tamil Virtual Academy at a cost of ₹29 lakh for graduates to pursue higher education in Tamil literature, grammar, culture, tradition, heritage and the arts. The State government would also create a Digital Cultural Atlas and compile visible and formless artworks and document them on the internet through videos and sound and light shows and present them to the people. In the first phase, a Digital Cultural Atlas for the districts in Madurai Zone will be created at a cost of ₹1 crore by Tamil Virtual Academy.
The Minister also said the Tamil Nadu government would explore the possibility of establishing a SaaS Accelerator Centre and a Startup Fund to help create 10,000 startups by 2030.
