Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori will visit Bangalore, the bustling Indian version of the U.S. Silicon Valley, during his forthcoming trip to the South Asian country, government sources said Wednesday.

The sources said Mori's planned visit to Bangalore, in the southern Indian province of Karnataka, will be aimed at demonstrating his resolve to promote an information technology-related industry as a means of galvanizing the slowly recovering Japanese economy.

Mori will make an eight-day tour of South Asia starting Aug. 19 that will also take him to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. He will be the first Japanese prime minister to visit the region since Toshiki Kaifu went there 10 years ago. The specific itinerary of Mori's South Asian tour has not yet been formally announced, however.

India is attracting many industrialized countries as an abundant source of IT-related human resources, such as computer software engineers, that are badly needed for the development of their own IT-related industries. Japan is no exception.

In early May, Takashi Fukaya, the then international trade and industry minister, visited New Delhi and agreed with Indian leaders to start regular talks at the sub-Cabinet level as early as this autumn to discuss ways to increase cooperation in the IT area. Fukaya was the first MITI chief to visit India in five years, but did not visit Bangalore.

Mori chaired the Okinawa summit of the Group of Eight countries last month, in which the G8 adopted the so-called IT charter as a common guideline for promoting IT-related services while addressing the "digital divide" — a widening economic gap between countries or individuals who have access to IT and those who do not. The G8 comprises the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Japan.

Immediately before the G8 summit in Okinawa, Mori also set up the IT Strategy Council to advise him on specific measures to promote Japan's IT-related industries. The council comprises prominent private-sector experts and is headed by Nobuyuki Idei, chairman and chief executive officer of Sony Corp.

But all of this does not mean that Mori is well-versed in IT. Before the G8 summit in Okinawa, Mori had to receive intensive training on operating a personal computer and also once pronounced IT "it," according to the government sources.

Therefore, the planned visit to Bangalore may provide Mori with a good opportunity to deepen his knowledge of high technology and make him the kind of IT-savvy leader he apparently hopes to be.