Technology based companies have noted that now more passengers are travelling through airlines from smaller cities, there is an increased demand from regional airports and on the basis of this Government has decided to give a modern look to these airports and to privatize others. They have seen the difference between private and public airports and with the up gradation of IT, now they are having the money to upgrade the airports and focus on customer satisfaction and security.
In September, Government has made an announcement regarding to privatize 6 airports and to develop 34 non-metro airports with new terminals, nearing completion.
SITA, a technology company who has gain specialization in offering their services to the airlines industry, estimates around Rs.37, 000 crore spend on airport IT, globally.
The Airports Authority of India is also working on some initiatives of technology by which airport operations may be automated and in turn; improve the efficiency and few other aspects such as revenue and billing.
In the beginning of this year, NIIT Technologies, New Delhi based company won a 344 crore contract for developing airport automation control centres for the 10 airports in India.
Another company KPIT Technologies, Pune based provider offering their enterprise resource planning system across 125 airports, also looking for other initiatives of technology from airports.
Tech Mahindra is also looking for the same thing, they are expecting that around 200 airports (globally) will make their services automated in the next five years.
According to this technology based companies, now interest is increased in improving the airport operations such as their ability to track luggage and prevent loss, cargo handling and catering, self-booking systems and many more.
On 30 November, 2013 FIR was lodged by IPS officer Amitabh Thakur against some IT companies on a complaint based on the string operation which claimed social media platforms are using in a wrong manner in online campaigning for elections. This news was reported by news portal “Cobrapost”. According to him, many IT companies were making misuse of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and youtube etc.
Cobrapost had claimed that social media platforms were misused by the IT companies to provide popularity to the politicians and malign their rivals. These IT companies create fake profiles of the politicians and their parties and mention false “likes” and their fake list of fans with negative comments for the opponents to create good impression of themselves in the minds of the voters. Proxy codes are used by these companies on their computers, offshore IPs and servers so that source cannot be traced, use internet-based messaging system to circumvent TRAI and hack into the others computer.
It can be said that these companies play with the basic tenets of Indian democracy and create wrong messages and videos, to develop confusion in the mind of the voters.
The FIR was lodged under relevant sections of IPC, IT Act and Representation of People's Act.
Many IT companies got the relaxation in the eligibility criteria to apply for the Rs 10,000-crore incentive programmed that offers refund of up to a quarter of the money spent on expanding electronic manufacturing facilities.
The government has provided this relaxation, as many IT companies are prevented from applying for these benefits, as per the previous eligibility criteria such as their factories must be located within government-notified areas, in brownfield cluster only.
Now this criterion is not taken under consideration. The Modified Special Incentive Package Scheme offers different forms of financial sops so that new electronics manufacturing factory can be set or the existing facility may be expanded by more than 25 percent. It is a very important scheme but this is not easy to apply because most of the manufacturing facilities are not based in a notified cluster.
When refund has decided, the capital expenditure is counted and includes expenditure on tools, plant and machinery, equipment, research and development and cost of intellectual property rights.
