Visakhapatnam: Vizag's loss is new capital Amaravati’s gain. Brushing aside the demands from Vizag for the setting up of an IT centre by the Directorate of Standardisation Testing & Quality Certification (STQC), the AP government had recommended Amaravati as its base.
The STQC functions under the Union IT and Communications ministry. Vizag MP Kambhampati Haribabu too wrote to the IT & C, seeking such an IT centre at Vizag that would have helped create the right ecosystem to attract IT companies to Vizag and also produce skilled personnel. Lack of skilled and quality human resource has become a deterrent to the IT sector growth in Vizag. STQC’s IT centre offers testing of IT solutions for functional and non-functional parameters. These centres follow international best practices and are equip-ped with requisite software tools and competent manpower. An STQC IT centre also trains youths in software testing tools. Across the country, there are round 10 STQC-run IT centres including one in Hyderabad.
“Action has been initiated for setting up of a seed IT centre in Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh, as recommended by the state government. The space for the centre is to be allocated by the state government. The centre will cater to the promotion of St-andards, Software Testing and Quality Assurance in areas of IT. The sustenance of the centre will be worked out jointly by the central and state governments,” said Union IT & C minister Ravi Shank-ar Prasad in Parliament recently.
STQC directorate is an attached office of the Union ministry of electronics and IT, that provides quality assurance services in the area of electronics and IT through a countrywide network of laboratories and centres. The services include testing calibration, IT & e-Governance, and training and certification to public and private organisations. STQC laboratories are having national/International accreditation and recognitions in the area of testing and calibration.
Two IT test laboratories, at Bengaluru and Kolkata, have received accreditation from The Amer-ican Association for Lab-oratory Accreditation (A2LA), it being the first outside the USA. “An STQC centre would have helped the local IT companies and also in finding a skilled workforce for the IT sector in Vizag,” said O. Naresh Kumar of Vizag Devel-opment Council (VDC), which had been pursuing STQC’s IT centre along with C-DAC and National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT).
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These centres are co-located with respective Electronics Regional Test Laboratory (ERTL) or Electronics Test & Development Centre (ETDC).
In November 2014, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu wrote to the Centre seeking to establish the Research & Development (R & D) institutes related to IT and electronics sector like Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) directorate, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT) in Andhra Pradesh.
