The Telangana government has decided to accord preference to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the IT and ITeS sector registered in the State and got impacted by COVID-19 in the projects of its departments.
A move aimed at helping such entities emerge from the crisis, which hit their revenues and in some cases triggered layoffs, it is likely to be rolled out soon. Towards facilitating the process, the State government has constituted an Advisory Committee with representation from the IT Department, TSTS, Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association (HYSEA) and IT industry body Nasscom.
While the GO on the committee came on Saturday, work in the direction of helping the home-grown companies had been under way for sometime, IT Secretary Jayesh Ranjan said.
“There is a need for government of Telangana to provide appropriate and timely support to these MSMEs in ways like channelising government IT projects to the competent MSMEs in the State,” the GO said. The State government is also expected to come up with other possible ways of support for the MSMEs to get them ready for the new normal, it said.
‘Clear thinking’
According to Mr. Ranjan, the thinking in the government in this regard is clear. The committee will help with the implementation guidelines. There are an estimated 800 such IT companies in the State but only those impacted by the COVID-19 will be considered.
The committee will come up with/modify domestic preference guidelines to ensure that all IT projects awarded by the State government go to companies registered in Telangana. It will also suggest measures for IT MSMEs to take up projects as a consortium; get them a share of works in projects awarded through open tender to large companies; moderate pre-qualification norms; and evolve a mechanism to create visibility of all IT projects/spend by government in the form of a dashboard.
The first set of works to be awarded as part of the approach could be those pertaining to the ease of doing business (EoDB) compliance process such as new portals, new dashboard required to be implemented by various departments.
On whether any time frame has been fixed to extend the preference, the senior official said it would be an ongoing process till COVID impact recovery was 100%.
HYSEA president Bharani Kumar Aroll said though the projects may not be big they still were important for the companies that were moving through the crisis.