E-Commerce chiefs press for ‘Make Apps in India’

Mobiles are set to drive the next surge of India's growth and innovation in the online arena with more people taking to the net, say India's e-commerce honchos, Business Line reported.

''Nobody saw the mobile becoming so big two years ago. Today, 50 per cent of the transactions on our site are through mobile devices, from just 5 per cent 12 months ago. Online transactions from desktops will decline and mobiles will dominate in almost everything from transactions to visitors and Web traffic,'' said Sachin Bansal, founder CEO of Flipkart, at the 10th Global Mobile Internet Conference held in Bangalore.

A recent survey by Flipkart, showed that over 50 per cent of the respondents had never accessed the internet on desktops or laptops.

Referring to the prime minister's 'Make in India' campaign and in the context of making mobile technology products in India, Bansal said more value for the country could be generated through  a 'Make apps in India' campaign.

''If we get it right, we can become the world leader in mobile apps.''

According to Naveen Tewari, founder CEO of InMobi, who agreed with Bansal, the need of the hour was to set up mobile app villages or cities to build mobile apps for the country.

''While the world is in phase 2.0 of mobile apps, we in India are at phase 1.0. We are good at doing things, but we need to be good at solving things too. To do this, we need to have design capability, which we may have to import as our design capability is low-end,'' he said.

Stating that the challenges that the country faced over the next five years could be solved through technology products, Tewari said, ''We can either make those software technology products ourselves or import them at $500 billion five years hence. We need to create software products for enterprise, entertainment, education, healthcare, sports and so on, else be prepared to incur a hefty import bill.''

He added, if India was not able to create home-grown software products, the import bill for the same could be one of the highest for the country in five years time, Business Standard reported.

"It's a market opportunity that will be there, whether we have to import it or whether we create it, is a decision we need to take," said Tewari who is also a founder member of Indian software product industry thinktank, iSpirt.

Earlier this week, Thursday, Modi, in an initiative to promote domestic manufacturing, launched the government's 'Make in India' campaign, aimed at making India a manufacturing destination.