Monday, June 4, 2001		Article

PAKISTAN said it would offer it’s neglected but nascent information technology sector a major boost, aiming to increase software exports to over $1 billion annually within the next five years.

Atta-ur-Rehman, Minister of Science and  Technology, Pakistan

Science and Technology Minister Atta-ur-Rehman told Reuters in an interview the country’s IT sector showed tremendous potential.

"If we talk about software exports we are aiming to have about 40,000 software engineers developed in the next five years so that we can have a multi-billion dollar export figure," Rehman said.

Pakistan’s existing software exports are put at between $50 million to $100 million a year.

Military ruler General Pervez Musharraf, after seizing power in a bloodless coup in October 1999, hand-picked Rehman, a chemistry professor and a noted scientist, to spearhead his government’s drive to boost the IT sector.

Since being hired in 1999, Rehman has turned around what he calls the "criminal neglect" of the sector to make a priority of the military government with the belief that it could be an engine of economic growth.

In the current financial year that ends on June 30 the budget for science and technology was raised to 4.8 billion rupees ($76 million) from a meagre 200 million rupees the previous year.

For the next year starting in July, Rehman hopes the budget for his area of responsibility would be again raised by up to 35 per cent, most of it for the Information Technology sector and the rest for other scientific and research programmes.

"But Information Technology is getting the highest priority because it is here we feel the maximum impact on the society will be," Rehman said, citing a long list of government achievements made in the last eight months.

"There is a dramatic growth taking place right now in the IT area in Pakistan," he said referring to 400 Pakistani cities, towns and villages which have been wired for the Internet in the last eight months, from a mere 20 before that.

"This dramatic and unprecedented expansion of the Internet, which is unparalleled in any country of the world, shows what we Pakistanis can do when we are determined," he said.

The membership at the country’s private Pakistan Software Houses Association has risen to 150 from 110 in October 2000. "The new companies which have come in a short period of eight months is also unprecedented in the last 10 years," Rehman said.

Similarly, the number of medical transcription companies in Pakistan has risen to more than 100 from just a couple a years ago, and Rehman said legal transcription companies were also springing up as more and more manpower became available.

"But this only a beginning. The key would be the development of Human Resources with the right quality and quantum if you want to go for a multi-billion dollar export," Rehman said.

"We have therefore given the highest priority to strengthening our computer science departments," he added.

Pakistan plans to set up seven Information Technology universities in the next five years, including one virtual university that should start courses in the autumn of 2001.

I wish we had started doing this five to 10 years ago. But we have started doing it now and I hope that within the next three to four years we would have made very, very major advances in the field of Information Technology," Rehman said.