India is set to increase its IT spending by 6% by 2021, reaching $81.9 billion from this year’s funding. The rise will be in hopes to boost the country’s enterprise software and IT services. This was confirmed by research firm Gartner at the start of the week. 

Gartner research vice president Arup Roy said, “The COVID-19 pandemic stalled many digital transformation projects for Indian enterprises, mainly because of the market uncertainties and reduced cash flows.” 

Spending on IT is also expected to be 8.4% lower than that of 2019, at $79.3 billion. 

“The pandemic situation was a wake-up call for many organizations to relook and revive their IT strategies and increase their spending on IT in 2021.” As a result of the pandemic, devices and data centre systems segments struggled this year, with predicted declines of 26% and 1.2% respectively being made. 

“The ‘Digital India’ mission will turn a new leaf in 2021 as enterprises across all sectors start spending more on IT. The pandemic provided an opportunity for Indian CIOs to test long-pending projects such as remote working, which delivered on-promise for many enterprises and helped them stay afloat in the most testing times.” 

A ‘survival necessary’ strategy will be used in 2021, to ensure the return of IT spending growth.

Roy said, “Those organisations that were heavily reliant on office based, desk-tied work had to switch to remote work set up enabled either through using desktops or laptops facilitated at home. Now, it also means that one has to also port your infrastructure and applications so that it facilitates web-based access and/or hosted applications that can be accessed using internet on the web/application/mobile platforms.”