India's IT professionals must have the courage to innovate and take risks so as to surge to the head of the global technology pack.

"India's growth is being limited by one drug and that is the service drug," said Tushar Dave, co-founder and managing director of New Path Ventures LLC, which is developing semiconductor design and related software companies.

Dave urged software service companies such as Infosys Technologies and Wipro Ltd. to "give up that drug and take lot of risks" in their offshore and onsite development and applications work for global clients.

Most Indian software companies, taking advantage of cheap labour and the largest English-speaking pool of personnel outside the United States, have beefed up revenues recently by taking up outsourcing work.

The National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) said software exports grew 26.3 percent to 9.5 billion dollars in the year to March over a year earlier -- narrowly missing the 30-percent growth target set for the period.

"The global software industry is worth 450 billion dollars and we do not even have a 10 percent share. India needs to multiply and there should be more and more firms like Infosys," Vinod Dham, co-founder of New Path Ventures, told a recent business conference on the semiconductor industry in Bangalore, India's technology hub.

"Indians are generally risk-averse. It is culturally embossed. But there is no reason why Indians should fail once they embark on a journey," added Dham, who as the leader of Intel's Pentium team in the early 1990s earned the sobriquet "Father of the Pentium."

A company like Infosys was valued at six billion to 10 billion dollars, compared to the 60 billion to 80 billion-dollar price tag on Oracle, Dham noted.

"If we deliver a solution to the world instead of being told to deliver a particular solution then there will be a dramatic difference in the way we are being perceived," Dham said.

"Silicon is an opportunity. India's silicon industry is in the same stage as when Y2K transformed the software industry. Silicon has become a commodity and price has become a significant factor. That is why Intel and others are setting up bases in India," Dham said.

According to the US-based Semiconductor Industry Association, worldwide semiconductor sales are expected to grow to more than 180 billion dollars in 2004, marking a 16.8 percent rise against projected sales for 2003.

Global chip sales are seen rising to 180.9 billion in 2004 compared with an estimated 154.9 billion dollars in 2003, it said.

Anant Agarwal, chief executive officer of Insilica, which designs tools for chips, said the reverse brain-drain caused by Indians returning from the United States to set up their own companies could be channelled into designing chips.

"This could take India to an entirely different platform as far as chip designing is concerned," Agarwal said.

Dham sought to spur India to act quickly and take full advantage of its existing assets.

"If we look back 10 years from now this will be a turning point for India. I am sure in another five years there will be more chip heads than software geeks in Bangalore."

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