Mumbai: A new Gartner report on Thursday stated that the Indian government's IT spending is expected to show an increase of 8.6 per cent from this year, to reach $8.3 billion in 2022, as the digitalisation initiatives took a giant leap in 2020 amid the 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.
Moving from legacy systems to digital will be a major reason for IT spending growth in 2022.
"As vaccination rates increase throughout the country and public health improves, the governments will focus on furthering the digitalisation efforts on concerns such as 'citizen experience' and digital inclusion," Kaushik added.
The software segment is forecast to achieve the highest growth of 24.7 per cent in 2022 as the adoption of citizen service delivery applications with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning will improve across citizen initiatives.
Initiatives such as digital licensing, online judicial proceedings, digital taxation that were initiated amid the Covid pandemic in 2020, also aided to explore digital inclusion in the country.
The reports also noted that the forthcoming 5G spectrum auction in India will aim at solving some of these challenges related to digital inclusion in 2022
"In India, with increasing investments on cloud and cyber-security, the prime focus of IT spending by government organisations is on building collaborative partnerships, along with technology solutions," said Kaushik.
Meanwhile, privacy and security continue to be government CIOs' top concerns in the country, as we move for cloud deployments and other implementations to further the digital agenda, he added.
Nevertheless, the report elaborated that digital workplace and business continuity solutions, business intelligence and data analytics, responsible AI and blockchain along with improved data privacy and data sharing tools, will be the key technologies that government CIOs in India will be prioritising their spending on in 2022.