Software industry urged to meet growth target

ISLAMABAD: Anusha Rehman, minister for information technology (IT) and telecommunication, on Wednesday asked industry leaders to devise a comprehensive action plan to achieve growth target of $10 billion by year 2020.

 “Time is ripe to take Pakistan forward through ‘knowledge economy’ as the country is well-positioned to take its due pie from the international IT market,” Rehman said during a meeting with the industry leaders.  “We are all up to help bridge the gaps between the talent and industry alongside building an environment of trust and openness to help enable the growth of software exports.” She assured the industry officials of support on behalf of the government in the shape of policies, infrastructure, human resource development and transforming the culture of public sector.

The minister also outlined the plan of providing classroom-based technical trainings in emerging fields like IoT, robotics, analytics, cloud etc along with communication and selling skills to young graduates --this is in supplement of the plan of training one million youth through digit skills program by Ignite. “A digital transformation committee has also been constituted by Prime Minister to supervise, implement, and monitor the vision of ‘Digital Pakistan’ and its associated programmes across the country,” Rehman added.

Sharing a comprehensive plan to increase the IT exports through various measures in the shape of public-private partnership model, Brakan Saeed, chairman Pakistan Software Houses Association (PASHA), stressed that the first and foremost thing was the right reporting mechanism, where IT industry’s true size of over $3 Billion was to be reflected through proper channels.

“This right reflection will help position Pakistan’s Industry in international market to allure international companies for building businesses with Pakistan,” the chief added. Various proposals to build a public-private partnership model to develop infrastructure for IT companies on cost-effective propositions were also discussed during the meeting.