Q. Mauritius has been developing a fifth pilar of their economy to augment the sugar, textile, tourism, and banking industries that it already has. Can you talk about the government's involvement in building a 'cyber city' in the hopes of making the island a regional information technology (IT) center?

A. We are relying to some degree on a strategic relationship and partnership with India as a start. The Indians have extended us a $100 million line of credit for us to start the cyber city. We want to get in the waters and from there build on and around this nucleus, this embryo of technological activities. The subsequent phase of development will need more strategic orientation, we then hope to get the World Bank in to help us. Right now we are involved with the actual nuts and bolts of getting office space, the telecommunications systems, the housekeeping, the hardware... I think that the success of India comforts us in that they can lead the way; we will allow them to hold our hand for a little while until we can go own way, in our directions.

Q. What kind of help would you envision in the future?

A. Two kinds: finance and major infrastructure development. IT requires software, buildings, sophisticated telecommunications equipment. Secondly, and more importantly, I think, is the strategic orientation, in particular market niches to follow. This is a very competitive area. I think Mauritius will find it hard to compete in computer hardware, so we know we have to go in the direction of software and software enabled services. What they call IT enabled services, starting from the lower-end of the computer technology market, which is call services and call centers up to high value-added activities like software development, Internet development and so on.

Q. Why borrow the money from india?

A. Well the money comes with technical support and expertise. The Indians have set up software technology parks in India and we want them to replicate that experience in Mauritius.

Q. What's their interest?

A. They would be better placed to answer that question, but we can guess what their motivation is. Mauritius provides a very good environment to turn their software industry global. We are, this month, going to have a very high speed connection, SAFE [a project that has been laying fiber optic cable lines along the bottom of the Indian Ocean which Mauritius has signed onto]. I think that is of strategic importance: that's one reason. The second is Mauritius is a very convenient, good environment for Indian software experts to work in. It's not a coincidence that the industry was initiated in Bagladore, India because it is a very pleasant environment. Indian expatriots coming back from the US prefer to work in a pleasant environment which reminds them of California or Silicon Valley. I think Mauritius can offer that to them, and is within five hours flight to the Indian subcontinent. The style of living is very much midway between what some of them may have experienced in the US and what they may have experienced in India.

Thirdly from Mauritius they can exploit the francophone software market which has been virtually untouched by the industry so far. Software development expertise constitutes 10 percent of Indian exports in total and they're all in America or other English speaking countries. If we were to do French software development it could increase their export capabilities and Mauritius has the advantage of being bilingual. We can offer very good support in the French language for software development. And then there's a fourth reason in that we have excellent bi-lateral relations between our two countries and it's an example of cooperation.

Q. What do you think is the greatest challenge to the Mauritius economy?

A.There are a number of challenges... Certainly how to improve the educational system, and educated output. We have a system that, ironically, can produce some very good people that can easily go to American universities and come out with doctorates and MBAs. That might leave the impression that the Mauritian educational system is first rate, but it's also a system that produces only a handful of good and skilled human resources. Most of the population goes through the system and comes out of it without any employability prospects of any sensible kind. Mauritius is a country without any good resource base, except human resources. This is aggravated by the fact that even the small number of people that come out of it well trained and skilled, many of them leave for developed countries. This kind of brain drain effects Mauritius tremendously. So our first challenge is to ensure that we have a large numbers of people that come out of a highly improved educational system. In fact we have started that. We will be building a number of schools in the next two years. We have made massive investments in education, especially introducing information technology on a large wide scale in schools. We've started a second university, the Mauritius Institute of Technology. So we hope in the next five years or so we will have accomplished our task in equipping Mauritius with a very good, qualified human resource base. Once you have intelligent people, the rest happens on it's own.

But nevertheless the second thing that we need to have is good infrastructure. Better transportation systems, good and efficient supply of telecommunications, of electricity, water... and we are effecting a number of improvements in this regards. Developing infrastructure in Mauritius requires large amounts of investment plus foreign management technology. We have started tackling this by engaging in strategic partnerships, starting with France Telecom taking 40 percent of Mauritius Telecom. We have others now in the Mauritius energy sector and also in the port sector. Which will be followed by foreign strategic partnerships in other sectors which will hopefully bring infrastructure in areas where these foreign partners will bring in the management, and technology.

The third is the need to ensure economic development is very broad-based and that it touches every section of the Mauritian population, that it touches every income level, men or women. The more that the fruits are shared equally, the more any kind of poverty is eradicated. So there is a need for social reform programs, as well. Social support programs in housing, in encouraging the poor to get out of the viscous circle of poverty by their own means, including access to finance or microfinance. No society can better the lot of its population in an equal way, some get ahead of others, but the gap between them should not be too wide. We must narrow the differences, the economic and social differences, that still persist so that society can develop more harmoniously. These are the three priorities that we will have to tackle as a government, and in fact, as it happens the three priorities we emphasized in the last budget.