In his address at an international conference on information and communication technology in Karachi on Saturday, President General Pervez Musharraf claimed credit for the current boom the IT sector is experiencing in Pakistan, pointing out that when he took over power in 1999, it presented a dismal picture.
While our next door neighbour, India, was engaged in outsourcing activity valued at $4-5 billion with an eye to a target of over $10 billion, he said, ours was not worth even $100 million. Indeed, the credit for the sector's appreciable progress is for him and his choice for the office of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Dr Ata-ur-Rehman, to claim.
Even though our national self-image has almost always called for comparisons with our next door neighbour and traditional adversary, India, our rulers did not take much notice when New Delhi decided to go for IT in a big way as far back as the mid 1980s - soon after Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1984.
They simply failed to grasp its importance and relevance to modernisation and development, and hence took interest in the field much belatedly and, even then, hesitantly.
General Musharraf's government assigned high priority to IT right from the beginning of his rule, earmarking sizeable funds for the sector's development. As a result, Internet connectivity has shown impressive improvement, notwithstanding the recent breakdown of the Internet system due to a fault in the PTCL submarine cable. With the reduction of the ISP bandwidth rates by Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) the user rates have also come down considerably.
Higher connectivity together with low prices, of course, has encouraged more and more people to become part of the knowledge industry that IT is. In fact, the country has already begun to offer competition to India in the international Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) activities, such as back office functions and call centers. The competition, unfortunately, does not go much further.
While this kind of work is to be welcomed since it provides exposure, and more importantly, jobs, to a lot of young people, it is akin to the kind of menial jobs that cheap labour imported from third world countries has performed for long in the service of industrialised economies of Europe and America. We must aim higher than that.
First of all, the government must ensure that the infrastructure stays in full service mode at all times. During the end June-early July breakdown the backup system worked at an extremely reduced capacity offering a shared bandwidth to ISPs of only 2.7 MB in terms of virtual access as against the normal 171 MB. Which for the BPO sector meant a serious setback not only in terms of its ongoing work but newer opportunities for expansions as well.
Hopefully, the government has learnt an instructive lesson from that unsavoury experience and it would allow multiple gateways in the private sector so that the backup system should have 100 percent redundancy at all times. Secondly, having created a support base for the sector, the government must plan for entering the big league.
There is no dearth of talent in this country; in fact some of our hardware as well as software experts have made a mark abroad. The government must concentrate on developing local talent at local facilities. India already boasts expertise in the field of supercomputers.
It would be nice if, for a change, we tried to enter into a race with our neighbour in the productive field of Information Technology rather than the destructive enterprise of evernew weapons of war.