At the SDPI’s annual sustainable development conference held last week, advisor to the PM, Dr Ishrat Hussain brought to fore an agenda whose significance is still not truly appreciated by citizens and public servants alike: technological disruption. Dr Ishrat pointed out how Covid-19 has changed both society and economy through increased IT-usage, digitization, e-commerce, online education, tele-health and others – all geared to improve efficiency and productivity. His perspective on this meta trend is spot on!
Speaking at the annual GITEX moot in Dubai earlier this month (GITEX being the region’s biggest information & technology summit) Charles Yang, Huawei’s president of the Middle East region, pointed out that by the end of November 2020 the total number of 5G subscribers in the Middle East had exceeded 1 million – and that happened in less than a year’s time since the Middle East joined the first wave of global 5G roll out.
“We know that because of the pandemic everything has moved online; in China and in the Middle East. Internet traffic has increased 40 percent which makes high speed connectivity all the more important…actually in the Middle East region the 5G rollout has accelerated because of the pandemic,” said Yang in his press conference.
Similar sentiments have been echoed before in this space as an effort to emphasize on the need to embrace latest technologies, be it for education, manufacturing, socio-economic datasets and surveys for better public and private sector decision making as well as effective implementation of public policies, and so forth. (Read BR Research’s Covid-economy: Big Data should be Pakistan’s New Deal (Apr 16, 2020); Post-coronial economy (Sep 29, 2020); Fast-tracking finclusion (Oct 29, 2020) ; The future of Make in Pakistan (Jul 17, 2019)
Thankfully, Pakistan has a minister who seems to understand the importance of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Speaking to BR Research at the sidelines of GITEX 2020, Fawad Chaudhry, Minister of Science & Technology said, the latest technologies “should not be construed as too fancy for Pakistan; if you cannot adopt it, you will be out of race,” he said. This begs the question what is the federal cabinet doing about it other than banning the likes of TikTok. (Read also: Tic, toc, toc (Nov 05, 2020)
“We are coming up with a policy on drones and other technology, including 3D printing, and a framework for other disruptive technologies. The policy is ready, and we are just waiting for the PM’s approval as he is yet to take a presentation on it, Chaudhry told BR Research, adding the government will be offering progressive regimes for taxation, customs duty and transfer of technology.
While one hopes for urgent implementation of these policies, the question is can Pakistan venture into 4th Industrial Revolution without the critically necessary 5G, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other infrastructure? “This has been my long-time demand from the Ministry of IT actually that they must focus on broadband and spread and stability of the internet, where the need for having 5G broad band and fiber optic is immense,” said Chaudhry.
Here an important consideration that policy makers must not lose sight of is: inequality; something to which Dr Ishrat alluded to in his plenary address at the SDPI summit last week. Whilst Pakistan has reduced poverty between 1990 and 2015, income inequality and regional disparity has surfaced; “globally as well capital has been rewarded disproportionality very high where of the top ten companies by market cap, eight are tech companies,” said Ishrat. This concentration of wealth and economic power is risky, and can be somewhat mitigated with the help of regulation as well as by ensuring that wider population has training to become the work force and entrepreneurs of the future.
To this end, Fawad Chaudhry says he intend to upgrade 25 technical institutes in Pakistan by setting up “technical institutes for A-class advanced training facility for disruptive technology”. “I want to train engineers and electrical engineers, computer engineers into modern disruptive technology, for which I have requested Huawei to be a partner with the Ministry of Science of Technology (MoST).
Knowing Pakistan’s poor history of government-run training facilities and the need for bigger scale, the MoST would do well to come with a framework that allows private sector to set up such facilities. All sorts of tech companies and institutions – and not just one or two companies - should be allowed to venture individually or collaborate to produce Pakistan’s next wave of disruptive technology producers, trainers, certification providers, system integrators, talent development partners and others from the wide ecosystem, which is estimated to have a global market value of about $3 trillion over the next decade.
Simultaneously, since technological capitalism is prone to much higher risks of inequality than commercial capitalism and financial capitalism, Pakistan must rev up aggressively on changing the ICT education and digital literacy landscape where price points for 5G and other technologies must ensure inclusion. Failure would only exacerbate inequality!