NEW DELHI, Dec 21: Planned foreign investment in India’s booming telecoms and information technology sector is expected to double to $22 billion in 2006, as the world’s top companies focus on the country, IT and Telecom minister said.

“The world is starting to look at India seriously,” Dayanidhi Maran told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

Almost, $9 billion in planned investment has been announced this year, including $3 billion by SemIndia and chip maker AMD, $1.7 billion by Microsoft Corp., and more than $1 billion each by Intel Corp., and Cisco Systems Inc.

“The last three or four investments have come from the United States. So this is very significant for us when companies like Cisco, AMD and Intel, Microsoft are looking at India seriously.

Almost all global telecoms equipment majors, such as Ericsson, Nortel Networks Corp. and Nokia have made a beeline to Asia’s third-largest economy, also the world’s fastest-growing major mobile phone market.

But Maran said he also wanted to see more European companies as well as firms from Japan.

He expected the number of new wireless subscribers to hit between 4 million and 5 million a month in early 2006.

India has 72 million mobile users, more than the population of Italy, having added 3.49 million in November, up from 2.73 million in August.

Only 7 Indians out of every 100 use mobile services compared with more than 29 per cent in China, the world’s largest wireless market.—Reuters