The industry forecasts a robust growth in 2004-05 financial year contributing more than 4 percent to GDP compared to 3 percent in the previous fiscal and just 1.3 percent in FY 1997-98, according to President of National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) Kiran Karnik.

The IT industry earned 21.5 billion dollar in revenue in FY 2003-4 and has all chances to cross 28.3 billion dollar in 2004-05 largely due to growth in information technology related services and software developments, he said.

India's software and service exports recorded a growth of 33 percent for 2003-04 fiscal year earning a revenue of 12.8 billion dollars and this sector is projected to experience a 35 percent growth to take the revenue earning to 17.3 billion dollars during the 2004-05 financial year, Karnik said.

On the export front, North America represents nearly 70 percent of India's software exports in 2003-4 and Europe came second with 22.25 percent.

North America also remains to be the top market for Indian IT-enabled services and business process outsourcing (BPO) activities with 80 percent.

In the domestic IT market, information technology services and products are estimated to reach 4.3 billion dollars, IT enabled services-business process outsourcing 600 million dollars, hardware 5.3 billion dollars reaching the total domestic IT market at 10..2 billion dollars in 2004-05.