Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom, National Bank of Pakistan, Intel Pakistan Corporation and Bearing Point signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) here on Thursday.
Under which about 5 million government employees including pensioners and employees of NBP will have financing options to purchase desktop personal computers (PCs) and notebooks on as little as Rs 485 a month instalment and will have a variety of PC packages to choose from suiting their budget.
Launching the multi-billion "Pak PC" programme, the IT minister Awais Ahmad Leghari said that the government and the private sector could play a crucial role in creating a skilled, educated and intelligent workforce that could galvanise the current developments in our country. "The Pak PC programme makes PCs more affordable and ambitiously aims to bring Pakistan close to the government vision of One Home One PC" he added.
Leghari said that another massive programme would follow the Pak PC programme whereby Urdu desktop and applications would be developed to enable the 85 percent Urdu literate population of the country to benefit from the Internet facility.
He said the IT ministry had planned to use the Universal Service Fund (USF) to take basic telephony and internet connectivity to the far flung areas of the country and it was aggressively working to use the USF to provide 1.5 million broadband connections within the next two years.
The minister said that one of the main initiatives taken by the ministry in recent weeks was to set up career placement offices at 25 reputed universities for the purpose of picking up promising IT graduates for their further placement in the sector.
"We are aiming to create 200,000 job opportunities through this programme whereby we shall place young IT graduates in leading companies and the government will bear 50 percent of the cost on a three-year internship-cum-training of these graduates," he stated.
He said that e-government is yet another area in which the government had invested heavily in an attempt to introduce a paper-less economy. "We are coming up with huge e-government projects in the next 6 to 12 months and the government will out source entire IT functions and processes to the local industry to create demand for the IT-related work," Awais added.
The minister said that the government considered large-scale computer usage a vital area for the promotion of IT-related services and it had already set up 1,100 IT laboratories in high schools across the country.
"We have decided to put up such state-of-the-art labs in 3000 more schools to promote computer usage," Awais said, adding the ministry would also impart training to instructors to run these labs in an efficient manner.
In his speech, NBP executive vice president Aamir Siddiqui said that the project would be a success and subsequently include all those who have a specific criterion to benefit from this scheme.
He said that NBP has emerged as one of the most successful and profitable banks internationally and it was providing best service to over a million customers around the world.
Speaking on the occasion, Rodney Rahman, Managing Director of Bearing Point, said his company was proud to collaborate with the government and the Intel Pakistan on this initiative. "We hope this initiative will go a long way in the promotion of computer literacy and IT awareness in Pakistan," he said.
Shahzad Aslam Khan, country manager Intel Pakistan, said his company had already worked with various governments in successfully launching similar programmes in more than 20 countries globally and within Pakistan it had launched three such similar programmes.
Later, the minister gave away computers as prizes to position-holders in the FA/FSc examinations conducted by Mardan and DG Khan Boards.
Comments
Comments are closed.