Google offers 15,000 youth scholarships/year

TOKYO: Google has offered to provide 15,000 scholarships annually to talented Pakistani youth, which can revolutionise the country's high potential IT sector, a senator said on Monday.

“The American tech giant wants to invest $3.5 million in Pakistan,” said Senator Dr. Afnanullah Khan, a member of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT) talking to The News.

He said similarly, the sale of 5G licence would bring in billions of dollars in foreign exchange, while heavy venture capital investment would also be made in the private sector.

 “With modest planning, Pakistan's IT exports can easily be increased to $10 billion in the next few years,” the senator said.

He also shared with The News that South Korea had allocated a loan of $1 billion for Pakistan's information technology sector at an interest rate of 0.1 percent only. “There are many areas in IT that Pakistan can focus on to emerge as an IT power in the region very soon.”

The senator further said he was trying to bring revolution in the IT sector in the country along with the government as well as individually. “I want to use my higher education in the field of information technology for the benefit of the country.”

Senator Khan has a PhD in Information Technology from Oxford University and has experience in completing IT projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He said the leadership of PML-N were aware of the plight of the people of the country and wanted Pakistan to develop more in the IT sector because compared to any other sector investment in the IT sector paid off very quickly.

He said that the export of IT manpower to a country like Japan was also an important project that was currently underway. “Therefore, every effort will be made to increase the focus of the government on this sector so that the obstacles in the way of foreign investment can be removed,” he added.