Nasscom president Kiran Karnik (left) with Bengal IT minister Debesh Das in Calcutta on Friday. Picture by Kishor Roy Chowdhury

Calcutta, Sept. 7: The information technology sector will generate four lakh jobs this year, an increase of 25 per cent over the previous year, trade body Nasscom said here today.

The number of jobs is expected to double in three years, it added.

Nasscom president Kiran Karnik said: “We have to generate adequate manpower and infrastructure to keep up with this growth. We have an employee shortage now and are doing our best to gear ourselves up, so that by 2010 we can effectively employ an additional eight lakh people in this sector.” Karnik was in the city for the inauguration of the city office of Nasscom.

“Last year, the revenue from the IT industry was $32 billion with a workforce of 1.6 million,” he added.

The growth came at a time when the industry was saddled with minimum alternate tax as well as taxes on employee stock options and service apartments.

“These measures are just accounting exercises. There will be no impact in the short run, but in the long run these will hamper the growth of start-ups. Large companies, however, will not be affected,” Karnik said.

He also said the industry has not approached Nasscom on the issue of 12 to 15 per cent wage hikes in IT and BPO companies, which are plagued by high attrition rates.

“We are against cartelisation of any kind as far as salaries are concerned. We believe in free play of market forces. This hike, however, is more because of demand and supply mismatch of skilled workforce,” Karnik said.

The salary scale will even itself out as the shortage gets addressed through training programmes, he added.