Enthused by India's tremendous growth prospects, global software company Oracle on Thursday launched an e-governance centre of excellence in association with Hewlett Packard at Gurgaon and announced its plans to double its headcount in the country to 6,000.

"Both Indian and Chinese economies are running rapidly and there is a growing competition between the two, with a certain amount of overlap. But most companies are going for outsourcing of manufacturing activities to China and outsourcing of services to India," Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle Corporation said while announcing the launch of the first Oracle-HP e-governance centre in the world.

Addressing a summit in Delhi attended by Oracle's partners, customers and IT industry representatives via satellite from Oracle's global headquarters at Redwood Shores, California, Ellison pointed out that India's speciality lay in professional services such as software, accounting and telesales.

"We see professional services moving to India. We do have software engineering teams in China but a larger team in India. We currently have 3,200 people in India and plan to more than double it to 6000 in near term," Ellison said.

Lauding India for its skill-sets in the service arena, he said, "We expect more companies to move (to India) and our company to expand here."

Drawing out an ambitious vision for India, Ellison said technology could be used by the government for higher efficiency and to deliver better quality of service to its citizens.

By using computer in its healthcare sector, India would not only save time and money but more importantly lives of people, he said.

"Healthcare records about citizens should be stored in a national database... this would be the lowest cost place to store records and a national database could also be a reservoir for critical healthcare related information on medicines and diseases," he said.

The e-governance centre launched on Thursday is a virtual centre, which can be accessed from anywhere in the world through Internet, enabling governments across the world to witness the best e-governance applications.

Oracle has taken the initiative to bring together the relevant applications on a single platform, allowing both government and the solution developers to understand the scope of offerings and possibilities that IT offers.

The centre will support the e-governance initiatives of central, state and local government bodies in India. It would also provide a platform for the development of model e-governance applications as well as such applications by Oracle, HP and its partners.