IT and telecom sector still has lot of untapped potential

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan IT and Telecom sector has been a success story with a lot of untapped potential. It’s time the MQM Minister in-charge Maqbool Siddiqui, who is expected to rejoin soon, takes charges and rebuilds the momentum in this all-important sector.

The PML N had a very focused IT minister in the last government who oversaw the introduction of 3G/4G services. Pakistani broadband users shot up from 3 million to over 50 million and a huge free-lancer community grew on back of 3G/4G. Pakistan has fourth highest earning IT workforce in the world.

Minister for IT Maqbool Siddiqui has a huge task on hand as and when he joins back. He has to harmonise the work of two talented and experienced senior IT professionals who are heading Digital Pakistan and Digitisation and Automation of Government. Tania Aidrus, a senior Google executive, has recently been made the Special Assistant to PM on Digital Pakistan. Shabahat Ali Shah, the CEO of National IT Board, is a highly experienced professional having worked at senior positions in Oracle Corp in US and a number of other leading international corporations besides good entrepreneurial projects. Shabahat has played a pioneering role in Nadra CNIC/NICOP projects and is serving on the Board of a number of IT and Telecom companies on behalf of Government of Pakistan.

Minister Maqbool Siddiqui has the challenging task of overseeing the execution of important projects under Digital Pakistan and under NITB. He also has to oversee the work of Universal Service Fund (USF) including broadband access in under developed area, IT education projects, service quality and consumer protection in different IT and mobile services besides a number of other projects. India already has a Digital India projects for last many years which provides a number of digital services to citizens and Digital Pakistan project aims to provide a number of services to citizens. Under the NITB, major projects include switching to paperless work by ministries and divisions, web portals, data protection and archival, trade support services, e-commerce initiatives etc. The NITB is already playing a major role in PM, President Office management, BoI, Ahsas Programme, Youth Project Loans besides other projects.