New Delhi: The Karnataka government's initiative of digitisation of land records under Project Bhoomi has been conferred the Pathbreaker of the Year 2007 award by Dataquest, the premier magazine of the IT industry published by the CyberMedia group.

The award that was presented at a glittering ceremony at the Taj Palace Hotel in the national capital Tuesday evening is aimed at recognising the e-Governance initiative that has benefited about 6.7 million farmers and landowners in Karnataka.

Besides, HCL Infosystems Chairperson and CEO Ajai Chowdhry was conferred the award for IT Person of the Year 2007 and Infosys Chairman and Chief Mentor N R Narayana Murthy was presented the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Talking about the awards, Dataquest Chief Editor Prasanto K Roy said, "The year 2007 awards are significant because for the first time in this decade the Dataquest Person of the Year is associated completely with the domestic IT industry."

He further said that the foundation of future growth of the overall IT industry as well as of the economy and GDP will be the local market and industry.

The Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Narayana Murthy for his role in building an institution that has been recognised globally and changed the IT scenario of the country.

Under the Corporate Award section, Hewlett Packard (HP) grabbed the Top PC Vendor with its shipment of 744,686 personal computers last year.

HP was also the unchallenged leader in the printing and imaging segment with a greater market share than its competitors.

Ingram Micro won the Top Distributor award with revenues of over Rs 680 billion (approx $17 billion) and NIIT was honoured as the Top IT Training Company as it offers IT education across the world.

Cisco Systems won the Top Networking Vendor award with 81 per cent market share in routers and 73 per cent in switches, while IBM India emerged as the Top Server Company in India.

India's Biggest Software Exporter Award was awarded to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) that posted a growth of 33 per cent in revenues to gross Rs 180 billion revenues.

TCS, which has posted 87 per cent growth in software exports, also won the Best Employer Award for the year 2007.
—iGovernment Bureau