Pakistan's information technology industry is quite young. It is in very early stages of development compared to the much older and bigger Indian IT industry, which had a significant headstart of at least a decade over Pakistan. During the lost decade of the 1990s under Bhutto and Sharif governments, Pakistani economy stagnated and its IT industry did not make any headway. However, the industry has grown at 40% CAGR during the 2001-2007 period, and it is estimated at $2.8 billion as of last year, with about half of it coming from exports. This pales in comparison to over $5 billion revenue a year reported by India's Tata Consulting alone.
Here's some data on Pakistan's IT industry:
"The State Bank of Pakistan for 2007-08 reports the export figures of software and Information Technology-enabled services to be US$169 million which shows a consistent annual growth. State Bank of Pakistan adopted BPM 5 reporting system to report the IT exports revenue, which restricted the export figures to US$169 million only in 2007-08. In India, the Reserve Bank of India follows the BPM 6 (also called MSITS) Reporting System, which raises its exports to billions of US dollars. BPM 6 includes sales to multinationals, earning of overseas offices & salaries of non-immigrant overseas workers to export revenue. Using the MSITS Reporting System, Pakistan IT Industry exports are estimated at US$ 1.4 billion while the industry size is estimated at US$ 2.8 billion. It is significant to note that Pakistan IT exports growth in each of the last few years has been more than 40%."
According to a report by the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB), the top five companies that have contributed the most to the IT sector are Netsol Technologies(NASDAQ: NTWK), Ovex Technologies, TRG Private Ltd, Systems Private Ltd, and Elixir Technologies.
The revenue per employee for the top Indian IT firms of Wipro, Infosys and TCS ranges between $40,000 and $50,000 per employee per year...about $20 t0 $25 per hour per employee, according to Gartner. The Indian revenue per employee is quite competitive relative to the US firms IBM Global Services, EDS, ans Accenture whose revenue per employee exceeds $150,000 per year, about $75 per hour. In comparison, the average figure of $28000 per employee per year (or $14 an hour) is extremely competitive for Pakistan's IT industry average. Probably the higher-end firms make more while others make less.
Pakistani colleges and universities produce almost 1.2 million skilled graduates annually. The Musharraf government announced a $1 billion spending plan over the next decade to build 6 additional state-of-the-art science and engineering universities. If the current government follows through on it, then the scheme would be overseen by the Higher Education Commission for completion in a few years time.
In terms of enrollment, the 2005 Pakistan Education Census reported 43,801 students enrolled in 4-yr engineering institutions, another 37,635 students in 3-year colleges offering Information Technology degrees, and 69,719 studying in three-year polytechnic institutes. 53% of the students out of the total 1.16 million enrolled in colleges are girls, according to the 2005 Census.
Over 10,000 of the current 1.2 million graduates are engineers with 4-year degrees. In addition, Pakistan also produces at least 25,000 polytechnic inst graduates with three year diplomas (according to recent news in the Nation newspaper) who have less than 4 years of college.
A number of reports inflate the number of engineering graduates in India, as these numbers includes both 4 years and 2-3 years degrees. While it is claimed that India graduates over 200, 000 engineers a year, a Duke study concluded that half of these are 2 or 3-year degrees.
So, for apples to apples comparison, the number of India's engineering graduates is closer to the US's 70,000 engineering grads. And of course, the quality of US graduates is much much higher because they graduate from some of the best schools in the world. Other than about 5000 grads from IITs , the rest of Indian grads are from second and third tier schools that bear no comparison to engineering schools in the developed world in terms of quality. The cost advantage that India offers will still favor a continuing growth based on outsourcing of business and engineering services from the developed world. 
Currently, Pakistan is struggling with a powerful insurgency and a stagnant economy that is taking a heavy toll on the nation. If, however, the political and military leadership succeed in creating a semblance of peace and stability in the nation of 170 million, then there can be an expectation of a bright future ahead for the IT industry in particular, and an innovation-based knowledge economy in general.
Related Links:
ICT: Hope or Hype?
Haq's Musings
Truth About India's IT Revolution
Education in Pakistan
Musharraf's Legacy
Quality of Higher Education in India, Pakistan
Pakistan's IT Industry Takes Off
Pakistan Launches UAV Production Line
Pakistan's Defense Industry Going High-Tech
Pakistan's Software Successes
Pakistan's Industrial Sector
Pakistan's Financial Services Sector
Auto Sector in India and Pakistan
Pakistan Textile Industry Woes
Pakistan Software Houses Association
Threre are more reasons to migrate to Canada
1 year ago
82 comments:
"which had a significant headstart of at "
Pak also had a significant headstart over India in the auto industry. Japanese companies were assembling cars in Pakistan. Pak never took that opportunity to start developing auto parts industry, nor the skills. India started much later and today has a billion dollar auto part industry with exports to US auto makers (Bharatforge, Sundaram Clayton).
Now India also exports cars to Europe.
And Pak made cars. Where are they?
"So, for apples to apples comp, the number of India's engineering graduates is closer to the US's 70,000 engineering grads. And of course, the quality of US grads is much much higher because they graduate from some of the best schools in the world. Other than about 5000 grads from IITs , the rest of Indian grads are from second and third tier schools that bear no comparison to engineering schools in the developed world."
Why is it assumed that all of american schools are top class. In my working experience, a smart graduate from 2-tier or 3-tier is better than a mediocre from top univ. The indian success story in IT and Engineering is not restricted to IIT alone. Even next rung colleges like Birla Institute of Technology and even some R.E.C have produced some top class successful people.
You will not like it, but I will say that even the top most college/univ in Pakistan can only be compared with 3 tier Indian univ/colleges.
A Pakistani colleague of mine once mentioned that he worked for Habib Bank, Dubai which was the s/w development house for their European branches. Almost entire senior IT staff was filled with Indians.
Anon: "India started much later and today has a billion dollar auto part industry"
Pakistan's auto parts manufacturing is also a billion US dollars a year industry. Sixty percent of its output goes to the motor cycle industry, 22% is for cars, and the rest is consumed by trucks, buses & tractors.
Anon: "Why is it assumed that all of american schools are top class. In my working experience, a smart graduate from 2-tier or 3-tier is better than a mediocre from top univ."
There have been a number of studies that have concluded that, unlike in the US and Europe, there is huge gap between India's tier and tier 2 universities.
An MIT survey of human resource professionals at multinational corporations in India revealed that only one quarter of engineering graduates with a suitable degree could be employed irrespective of demand (Farrell et al., 2005). Another survey of employers shows that only a handful of the 1400 engineering schools in India are recognized as providing world-class education with graduates worthy of consideration for employment (Globalization of Engineering Services, 2006). These results suggest that engineering degrees from most Indian colleges do not provide signaling value in the engineering labor market. Hence, low quality (in the labor market sense) engineering schooling has come to predominate in the education market. The current situation, with an abundance of low quality engineering schooling, is considered problematic by many in the Indian polity and it could stifle growth of the Indian economy (Globalization of Engineering Services, 2006).
"Pakistan's auto parts manufacturing is also a billion US dollars a year industry. Sixty percent of its output goes to the motor cycle industry, 22% is for cars, and the rest is consumed by trucks, buses & tractors."
The figure I quoted was export figures. This is taken from a chinese web site
"In recent years, India's auto parts exports have maintained a more than 30 percent growth rate. In 2002, India's auto parts exports was only 578 million U.S. dollars, and by 2005 this figure had risen to 1.4 billion U.S. dollars. For example, in the past five years, only the United States from India on the procurement of auto parts from 179 million U.S. dollars to 463 million U.S. dollars (compound annual growth rate of 26.8 per cent)."
http://www.china-lutong.com/d_news/572.html
Are you saying Pak exports auto parts worth a billion dollar. Any website to back your data.
As for quality of Indian Univ,
I generally don't care much for any surveys. I go by what I see and what is actually happening.
If you are unbiased (big if), then you will agree that right from 1947 Pakistan took a wrong approach. They went for import for no transfer of technology. Take the case of building rail locomotives. It is neither as difficult as building an airplane nor is it same as making a car. No wonder there are less than 20 countries which makes locomotives. India is one of them.
In 1950s when India floated tender to build diesel locos, both GM and ALCO lobbied. GM locos were better but they refused to transfer technology. ALCO did. India learnt how to build locos and that served the vast network of Indian railways and they even export. Malaysian rail uses Indian loco. And so are many african countries.
Pak still imports and it utterly clueless about making locos. All they have in Risalpur is plant for refurbishment.
Is it any surprise that india, after many failures, now has
the skills to build rockets for moon explor. When recently NASA quoted Chandrayan for the discovery of water in Moon, it was a matter of pride for India.
WSJ reported that Japanese auto makers want to make India as the global hub for sub compact cars. Nissan is reselling Maruti Suzuki cars in Europe under their brand. What a matter of pride?
I hope each and every educated Paksitanis takes this in right spirit and hope to match India in this, instead of in nukes and missiles (which anyhow is only repainted)
Here's a story about the tale of two India' on the BBC South Asia website:
Bangalore is an Indian city where hi-tech and crippling poverty live side by side.
As the rate of development in Bangalore gathers pace, some fear that the many impoverished communities that also call the city home may be left behind.
Since the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, the Indian tech sector has expanded rapidly.
The major players - including Microsoft, Infosys, Cisco and Google - exist in enormous "tech parks" crammed with tall, shiny office buildings.
Meanwhile on the same block, piles of rotting rubbish, beggars and stray dogs surround traffic that is heavy with pollution and often locked in a loud and aggressive jam.
Contrast in this city is not new; the levels of poverty are growing faster than the tech industry as migrant workers from other states join the population to aid the development.
There are concerns that this impoverished population could be left behind in the city of the future, unless big businesses acknowledge that the local infrastructure is under a great deal of pressure.
Ethical business offline
Many foreign businesses have set up outsourcing hubs in Bangalore and beyond - India is a leader in this type of business.
Meanwhile non-governmental organizations and aid workers struggle to support the poorer aspects of society, and many believe that big businesses could have a more influential hand in helping those who are not doing so well out of the tech boom.
Azim Premji is the chairman of Wipro, one of the largest companies in India. He recognized the issues of his local communities and created the Azim Premji foundation.
It is a separate venture to his corporation and privately funded. It addresses methods of education in the hope that supporting youth will mean creating a better society in the long run.
Anon: "The figure I quoted was export figures. This is taken from a chinese web site"
No, the figure I gave you is for domestic use, and it shows the capability of Pak auto industry.
Anon: "As for quality of Indian Univ,I generally don't care much for any surveys. I go by what I see and what is actually happening."
Anecdotal evidence is no substitute for real data.
Anon: "Pak still imports and it utterly clueless about making locos. All they have in Risalpur is plant for refurbishment."
It's not necessary nor sensible for every country to manufacture everything they need.
Anon: "When recently NASA quoted Chandrayan for the discovery of water in Moon, it was a matter of pride for India.'
India couldn't have done it without NASA equipment and help in data analysis. The mission was a failure.
Anon:" instead of in nukes and missiles (which anyhow is only repainted)"
This is just nonsense perpetrated by the Indian propaganda machine. It's part of the false and racist Brahman pride to underestimate and miscalculate, something that could prove to be extremely dangerous between India and Pakistan.
"India couldn't have done it without NASA equipment and help in data analysis. The mission was a failure."
Only a Pakistani would call a mission failure when it sent close to 90% of the data for which it was sent. Your standards are very high.
"It's not necessary nor sensible for every country to manufacture everything they need."
Pak seem to carry this principle in practically everything except rudimentary things.
You didn't get it. Manufacturing skills is acquired over a period of time. Japan use to be horrible after WW2. It was americans who taught them quality management and now they can teach americans few things. You remember how bad Korean cars were in 1980s.
If Pak goes for the easy business of importing everything, well you will forever remain a technology backward country.
"This is just nonsense perpetrated by the Indian propaganda machine. It's part of the false and racist Brahman pride to underestimate and miscalculate, something that could prove to be extremely dangerous between India and Pakistan."
Your A Q Khan has himself admitted that without China there would have been no nukes and missiles.
And there is nothing wrong in having a pride, provided you achieve something. I admit Pakistanis show little arrogance, because deep down their heart they know that are a failed nation. However it is bit annoying when they expect Indians also to have a low esteem.
"A.Q. Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear program (and midwife to a few others), likes to point out what a feat it was that a country "where we can't even make a bicycle chain" could succeed at such an immense technological task. He exaggerates somewhat: Pakistan got its bomb largely through a combination of industrial theft, systematic violation of Western export controls, and a blueprint of a weapon courtesy of Beijing."
Well AQK himself told the capability of Pakistanis. U need more proof?
http://iranandworld.com/showarticle.asp?id=4844
"Anecdotal evidence is no substitute for real data."
except if William Darrlym is telling something.
Anon: "Well AQK himself told the capability of Pakistanis. U need more proof?"
You only believe AQ Khan when it is convenient for you. I guess you are very selective what you believe even from someone you find is a thief with little credibility.
Anon: " "Anecdotal evidence is no substitute for real data."
except if William Darrlym is telling something."
I have not quoted Dalrymple as a substitute of real data from credible sources, but rather as an addition to it.
To the anon poster (presumably Indian) who wrote that manufacturing skills are gained via experience - Hats off. You are spot on.
Please be assured that there are many pakistanis (self included) who understand that India took the right approach towards industrialization and is reaping rewards as it moves up the value chain.
Pakistan, as they tend to do always, goofed up on this and surprise - they remain far behind india in manufacturing capability.
Here is one glaring example. Boeing would not trust an indian company unless it is 100% sure that the plane will not crash.
Dow Jones Newswires
MUMBAI -- Boeing Co. Thursday said it signed an agreement with Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. for part assembly of Boeing 777 aircraft.
Hindustan Aeronautics will manufacture flaperons, an airplane structure that controls its maneuverability, Boeing said in a statement.
The parts will be made in the southern city of Bangalore, Boeing said.
Write to Dow Jones Newswires editors at asknewswires@dowjones.com
Anon: "Please be assured that there are many pakistanis (self included) who understand that India took the right approach towards industrialization and is reaping rewards as it moves up the value chain"
As you rightly praise India's success in manufacturing, pleas find out more about Pakistan's engineering engineered goods manufacturing as well. You will find that it has a lot to offer. Here are some links:
http://www.engineeringpakistan.com/EngPak1/PakistanInvestment.pdf
http://www.alibaba.com/countrysearch/PK-suppliers/Manufacturer_of_spare_parts.html
http://www.riazhaq.com/2009/03/pakistans-growing-defense-industry.html
And look to China for inspiration. It's industrialized faster than any other nation in the history of the world. How? Check this link out:
http://www.riazhaq.com/2009/06/militarys-role-in-pakistans-industrial.html
In yesterday's M&A news involving NEDian and Wichorus founder Rehan Jalil, U.S. network equipment maker Tellabs Inc (TLAB.O) said on Thursday that it planned to buy wireless infrastructure gear manufacturer WiChorus for $165 million to bolster its next-generation wireless technology and take advantage of growing smartphone sales.
The move comes on the heels of an announcement by industry leader Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) that it would acquire wireless gear maker Starent, a much bigger rival to privately owned WiChorus, for $2.9 billion. More deals are expected to follow.
WiChorus specializes in 3G and 4G infrastructure products, which support advanced mobile services including Internet access and mobile TV.
Wichorus maintains a development center in Karachi, Pakistan. It has a number of positions open in its Karachi office for software engineers.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/art-culture/09-waziristan-musician-prays-for-taliban-defeat--szh-06
Riaz
Do you think in this background any pakistani would like to go back to pakistan leave alone foreigner to come and invest.
Anon: "Do you think in this background any pakistani would like to go back to pakistan leave alone foreigner to come and invest."
Yes, I do. A number of Pakistani-Americans are contributing to Pak economy by opening offices of their companies in Karachi and hiring people there, in spite of all the problems.
Take a look at some of the firms, including Wichorus and PixSense hiring in Karachi.
The FDI in Pakistan has dropped 58% in most recent quarter because of fears but it's still a few billion dollars.
The best time to invest is when others are afraid and selling short, as happened in 2001 in Pakistan. KSE-100 increased ten fold 2001-2008. Even after 50% drop in 2008-09, those who kept the faith are still ahead by 5X.
Riaz,
It is strange.. You start article showing some data between India nad Pakistan and claiming if situation in Pakistan improves, Pkaistan will match India's software success..
The movement above argument is questioned, you present the data showing Bangalore is also city where poor people recides .. So ?? Is that stopping IBM to go there? is that stopping Society General increasing its captive presence there.. BBC is screaming about everything in SOuth Asia .. it screams about incresing Terror in pakistan and also poverty, land reforms long pending in Pakistan so lets Talk about that..
The most crucial data missing in your analysis is India's human capital.. India is successful because it got the Leaders in IT sectors .. Unless Pakistan has the system to make its own Nandan Nilkeni or Narayn Murthy or Azim premji or Shiv nadar .. you are no where .. All large companies coming to India for IT becuase its how grown companies has prooved its sucess.. India has developed its indigineous IT companies and looking at their success Global companies started coming there manily after 2000.
aniother thing is how on earth you are trying to conlcue the qualities of US engineers is much higher.. I myself an Indian done MS here in US... but I strongly disagrees .. In all my class although not me .. but 8 out of top 10 were Indians .. basically issue is In Indian school system there is special emphasis on Maths which helps students more .. another thing is even in US masters course 40 % of the students are from India. yearly about 70,000 Students come to US for masters and many of these US educated students help india once they start their career.. majority of SV indian enterpreneurs are Indian graduates & post graduated in US ..
"The most crucial data missing in your analysis is India's human capital.. India is successful because it got the Leaders in IT sectors .. Unless Pakistan has the system to make its own Nandan Nilkeni or Narayn Murthy or Azim premji or Shiv nadar .. you are no where .. All large companies coming to India for IT becuase its how grown companies has prooved its sucess.. India has developed its indigineous IT companies and looking at their success Global companies started "
You are 100% right. I think many Pakistanis know this but to false pride don't want to admit this in a public forum. Privately I know few Pakistanis extremely critical of Pakistan's educational standards and society in general towards meritocracy, but ask them to tell this ib public, they would shy way.
about so called china's manufacturing ability
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_44/b4153036870077.htm
Anon: "India is successful because it got the Leaders in IT sectors .. Unless Pakistan has the system to make its own Nandan Nilkeni or Narayn Murthy or Azim premji or Shiv nadar .. you are no where"
India has had at least a decade long headstart in IT, but it does not mean Pakistan lacks the human capital or the business leaders, as you allege.
In terms of human capital, Pakistan produces about 1.2 million graduates, proportionality as many or more than India which has population about 7 times Pakistan's. of these, about 35000 have technical training.
There is one Pakistani university ranked among the top 400 by Times annual ranking, and many more are moving up in the ranks.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Pakistanis working for major multi-national IT consulting firms, like Accenture, IBM Global Services and EDS, now in Pakistan and Pakistan's IT revenue has grown about 40% CAGR from 2001-2008.
Anon: "aniother thing is how on earth you are trying to conlcue the qualities of US engineers is much higher.. I myself an Indian done MS here in US... but I strongly disagrees "
You and others who have had the opportunity to study or work in the US would in fact be considered US graduates. Among the Indian schools, only 6 of them, mostly IITs make it in the top 400 lists produced by USN&WR and Times Higher Ed Supplement. In comparison, the US and UK universities dominate with 25% American and 15% British universities making the lists.
There is only one Pakistani university ranked among the top 400 by Times and USN&WR annual rankings, and many more are moving up in the ranks. But remember, India has 7 times as many people as Pakistan.
Even higher education in India and Pakistan is essentially rote leaning that does not challenge the students to reason. As to the quality of education even at the elite IITs, let me quote Fareed Zakaria, a cheerleader for India, who said, "many of the IITs are decidedly second-rate, with mediocre equipment, indifferent teachers, and unimaginative classwork."
Anon: "about so called china's manufacturing ability"
The Businessweek article is not about China's manufacturing ability; it's about innovation.
The developing countries, including India and China, are essentially follower, not leaders. Their recent success is based on delivering me-too products and services at low cost, not based on original ideas and breakthroughs that they have made in science or technology or trade or management or anything else.
Developing original products and services takes several ingredients: free think and reasoning skills, high-quality education, availability of risk capital etc, the kind of ingredients that built Silicon Valley.
The Chinese are acutely aware of their shortcomings, and they are starting to address them, without political liberalization, which is a tough task. But the Chinese are building world class universities, e.g. ten of the top 200 universities are now in China, the venture capital availability is growing, and the government is encouraging private sector entrepreneurs, etc.
off topic but could not find a better post to send you this link.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmY3MzdiYzRmMDdmMTA2
ZjcxYTdmNGYwNDM5YTUxZDI=
regards
drcruncher: Thanks for sharing it. Just to make sure you know, May is a neo-con Bush-Cheney supporter of the failed US policies of the last 8 years.
Here is clip of one of May's interviews:
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/cliff-mays-defense-cheney-maybe-sy-hershs
Now, let me share with you a link from the BBC titled "A Tale of Two Pakistans" by Mohammed Hanif, a BBC correspondent and Karachi resident writing from "the bottom of hell" with a thriving social scene.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8318121.stm
Riaz - Not wanting to start another bout of war, but isn't it a fact that the performance of second generation Indian Americans and Chinese Americans in American schools and UK schools is right at the top. We hardly hear the same about the performance of second generation muslim children from muslim countries.
Perhaps all this motivated Obama to say something about competition with Indian and Chinese children in school.
It is absolutely amazing to read about Japanese students getting coached from Indians in Maths via web.
Anon: "isn't it a fact that the performance of second generation Indian Americans and Chinese Americans in American schools.."
Having gone to school in US myself, and taught at Rutgers and NJIT, and having children in some of the best American schools, I do have first hand knowledge of these facts.
Yes, the Indian and Chinese kids are doing very well in US, but so are the Pakistani kids. The reason Indians and Chinese get more attention and more press is because there are so many more of them because of the size of the two nations. Each nation is least 7 times larger than Pakistan.
"I do have first hand knowledge of these facts.
"
In other words, when it suits you, personal anecdotes do become a good substitute for facts. The performane of second generation indians/chinese is recorded in studies conducted. Do you have any similar study for muslim students.
Also in UK there was a study report which showed that among south asians, second and third generation indians are far ahead of their counterpart from pak and bangladesh. In fact indians beat white britishers hands down in a report published in UK which caused some resentment against indians.
I like your spirit of supporting pakistanis and not resigning yourself to fate that pakistanis are under achievers compared to indians. But for credibility sake you have to back up your statement.
Anon: "Also in UK there was a study report which showed that among south asians, second and third generation indians are far ahead of their counterpart from pak and bangladesh"
The immigrants from South Asia to UK are different in terms of education levels and accomplishments than those in the United States.
A 2008 LA Times survey of Pakistani-Americans, conducted on the basis of 2000 Census, found that Californians of Pakistani descent numbered about 28,000, double the population of 1990. Community members say the figure now surpasses 40,000.
The data showed that 56 per cent had undergraduate or graduate degrees, the second-highest rate after Indian-Americans among 16 Asian subgroups examined. Nearly half were home-owners, with the median household income about $49,000, on par with the state-wide average. Two-thirds were immigrants, with a 46 per cent naturalization rate, and the majority were fluent English speakers.
The 2000 federal census counted over 18,000 Pakistanis in metropolitan Chicago, one of the largest concentrations of Pakistanis in the United States. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, community estimates in the late 1990s, however, ranged from 80,000 to 100,000, most of whom were either Urdu- or Punjabi-speaking Muslims. Like other South Asians, Pakistanis have commonly tended to settle in and around major urban areas, especially on the two coasts near New York and Los Angeles. Chicago and other inland cities such as Houston have also developed large and visible Pakistani communities.
Nationwide, Pakistanis appear to be prospering. The census calculated that mean household income in the United States in 2002 was $57,852 annually, while that for Asian households, which includes Pakistanis, was $70,047. By contrast, about one-fifth of young British-born Muslims are jobless, and many subsist on welfare.
Hard numbers on how many people of Pakistani descent live in the United States do not exist, but a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press on charitable donations among Pakistani-Americans, “Portrait of a Giving Community by Professor Adil Najam,” puts the number around 500,000, with some 35 percent or more of them in the New York metropolitan area. Chicago has fewer than 100,000, while other significant clusters exist in California, Texas and Washington, D.C.
You pakistanis are feeling very happy in telling lot of lies. You said except some 5000 IITians all others are just useless. You are 100% wrong.
There are totally 2200 Engineering colleges are there in 4 south indian states. Out of which some 500 colleges are having very good infrastructure , talent and etc etc. Some colleges like VIT are having better facilities then IITs.
These colleges produce best engineers and all these guys will not face any job problems due to campus interviews. Each engineering college can produce some 4500 engineers per year. Then just calculate how many engineers are coming out in each and every year in india. Even If you take 1% engineers are best brains then there is no doubt that India is the No 1 Talent provider in this world.
Interesting article but the 1.2 million number of graduates doesn't add up,(I know you quoted another source for this info) given Pakistan' low literacy rate. At 1.2 million/yr, 50% of our population would be university graduates by now, (don' t we wish) whereas it appears that less than that have completed primary school.
See:
www.prcdc.org/files/Pakistan.pdf
"Education
• Over 56 percent of the Pakistan’s adult population was illiterate in 2001. There was a significant gender gap with 55 percent of males and only 32 percent of females being literate. The literacy rate in urban areas is 63 percent, while in rural areas it is 34 percent.
• Only one-half of Pakistanis have ever attended school (66% of men and 34% of women); 37 percent have at least a primary education (49% of men and 25% of women)."
Javed,
The number of college and university graduates has steadily increased since 1947, particularly with 51 new universities and lots of new colleges established since 2003 when the HEC budget was increased more than five fold by Mush. University enrollment alone has increased sharply from 135,000 in 2003 to about 400,000 in 2008. Several hundred thousand students going for BA/Bcom/Bsc degrees in affiliated colleges are not included in this 400,000 figure. If you include Polytechnic education (3-yr), 150,000 students were admitted to various Polytechnic institutes in Punjab alone this year.
It's a tale of two Pakistans, where the primary education and schools have done badly in terms of their reach, but there has been a lot of focus and activity in this decade with lots of new colleges and universities in both public and private sectors.
Here is the latest teledensity data from ITU :
Both Pakistan (50/100) and Bhutan (37/100) are ahead of India (29/100) in mobile. India might soon be overtaken by Afghanistan (29/100) and even Bangladesh (28/100).
Of course, the fact that Afghanistan is ahead of Bangladesh in mobile penetration should cause all sorts of palpitations in government offices in Dhaka.
Bangladesh was one of the earliest in South Asia to adopt mobile and is the most densely populated country in the world. How they were overtaken by Afghanistan, a war-torn country with difficult terrain, should cause serious re-examination of policies such as the BDT 800 SIM tax. The fact that Afghanistan’s CAGR for 2003-08 is 109%, higher than Bangladesh’s 2003-08 CAGR of 101%, suggests that the gap between the two countries is more likely to increase than decrease.
A new study by the British Council says a "huge shortage" of teachers and quality institutions is hampering India despite a growing demand for English skills.
The study says China may now have more people who speak English than India.
India's emergence as a major software and IT hub has in part been possible due to its English-educated workers.
The study, English Next India, by British author David Gradoll says English is a "casualty of wider problems in Indian education".
It says: "The rate of improvement in the English language skills of the Indian population is at present too slow to prevent India from falling behind other countries which have implemented the teaching of English in primary schools sooner, and more successfully.
"China may already have more people who speak English than India."
The report says India will need many more people speaking English to sustain its economic growth.
Increasing demand for English language schools, a rising number of jobs which require English skills as well as growing social mobility are driving demand for English in India, the study says.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8365631.stm
Hello Riaz,
Have you also read that Indian economy will be the third largest in the world by 2050 in addition to above article about the number of english speaking people.
Here's a ranking of ease of doing business in South Asia that puts Pakistan well ahead of India:
Bangalore: The business environment in Pakistan and Bangladesh is far better than in India. According to the latest 'Doing Business Index', India's business environment has become tougher during the years compared to other nations.
Economies are ranked from one to 183 on the basis of their regulatory environment being conducive to business operations. All of India's neighbors except Afghanistan have been ranked better. While India is ranked 133, Pakistan is ranked 85th followed by Sri Lanka (105), Bangladesh (119) and Nepal (123).
"India is a consistent reformer for the past many years. A country's rank in the index is an average of 10 indicators, each with 10 percent weight in the index. India increased the number of judges in the specialized debt recovery tribunals, which led to a major removal of blockages. While India reformed in the area of insolvency, other countries reformed in more than one area," World Bank's Senior Strategy Advisor, Dahlia Khalifa told Economic Times explaining why India has been overtaken by other nations.
The 2010 Doing Business Report prepared by World Bank and the International Finance Corporation averages a country's percentile ranking on 10 topics, made up of a variety of indicators. This includes examining a country's business environment in terms of starting a business, dealing with construction permit, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and closing a business.
The first place is occupied by Singapore, which is followed by New Zealand, Hong Kong and the U.S.
To see complete rankings and report, click here: http://www.doingbusiness.org/EconomyRankings/"
For some of the posters here, let me share with you what Sean-Paul Kelly, a traveler-blogger, thinks of India, based on the recent NY Times story on "India's Innovation Envy":
Indians, it seems, aren’t lacking in the hyper-patriotic, and India certainly doesn’t lack its boosters in the West. Alas, some folks are beginning to see the light:
"BANGALORE, India — In the United States and Europe, people worry that their well-paying, high-skill jobs will be, in a word, “Bangalored” — shipped off to India.
People here are also worried about the future. They fret that Bangalore, and India more broadly, will remain a low-cost satellite office of the West for the foreseeable future — more Scranton, Pa., in the American television series “The Office,” than Silicon Valley."
Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley-Asia has called this wage arbitrage (Roach happens to be one of the few American economists that gets it right on India). And Americans are right to worry about this. It’s put downward pressure on services as varied as call-centers and tech support, to financial news reporting, X-ray and MRI interpretation and accounting. I would be especially worried if I were an accountant. But then again, many of the big firm accountants need not be worried, as their shilling game for Wall Street will protect them. For a time.
"Even as the rest of the world has come to admire, envy and fear India’s outsourcing business and its technological prowess, many Indians are disappointed that the country has not quickly moved up to more ambitious and lucrative work from answering phones or writing software. Why, they worry, hasn’t India produced a Google or an Apple?"
Wait a second. India does not have any technological prowess in the true sense of the word. After all, if they did, why would the Ambassador, a car model over fifty years old, made of the heaviest steel imaginable, and horribly inefficient be the best selling domestically produced car in India, still. The Nano notwithstanding.
"Innovation is hard to measure, but academics who study it say India has the potential to create trend-setting products but is not yet doing so. Indians are granted about half as many American patents for inventions as people and firms in Israel and China. The country’s corporate and government spending on research and development significantly lags behind that of other nations. And venture capitalists finance far fewer companies here than they do elsewhere."
Re-read that graph closely and you’ll begin to get an idea of the hurdles India faces. And hurdles it is doing nothing, absolutely nothing to overcome. Instead of using its domestic capital for something like infrastructure building, local elites continue to siphon it all off and live behind huge fenced in compounds paying dalits pitiful, barely life-sustaining wages.
How would Pakistan respond in the event of an Indian air strike? Here's a report on an interesting war game in Washington:
Early last year a group of Indian and Pakistan retired generals and strategic experts sat down for a war-gaming exercise in Washington. The question, predictably enough, was at what point during a conventional war, would the generals in Rawalpindi GDQ reach for the nuclear trigger.
In the event, the simulated war took on an unpredictable turn, which in some ways was more illuminating than the question of nuclear escalation, as columnist Ashok Malik writes in The Great Divide:India and Pakistan, a collection of essays by experts on both sides of the border.
The exercise begins with an Indian military strike on militant camps in Pakistani Kashmir, the most commonly envisaged scenario for the next India-Pakistan war. But the Pakistan response defies conventional logic . They don’t order a military push into Indian Punjab and Rajasthan, they don’t even attack Bombay High, the most valuable Indian oil asset in the Arabian Sea, and well within striking distance of the Pakistani Air Force.
Instead PAF planes fly all way to Bangalore, deep in the Indian south, to attack the campus of Infosys, the much celebrated Indian IT company.
Strange choice of target ? By all military logic it would seem so. It’s not like all of India would be crippled if Infosys were attacked, they don;’t run Indian IT infrastructure. Even the company itself might not suffer lasting damage. Its data would probably be stored in locations elsehwere too, and it wouldn’t take it long to rebuild the campus. Besides. the Pakistani planes would be almost certain to be shot down on their way back, if they managed to penetrate this far in on what seems like a suicide mission.
So why Bangalore, and Infosys? Malilk quotes a Pakistani participant as saying they chose the target because it is an “iconic symbol” of India’s IT prowess and economic surge. The idea was to strike at India’s economic growth and great power aspirations. A raid on the Infosys campus, visited by heads of states and corporate leaders, would underline the dangers of business in India and remind the world that for all its new-found success, it remained a nation of contradictions, and at heart, unstable.
Many people in the room were not convinced by the Pakistani choice. It still seemed more like an academic exercise than anything rooted in military reality. But in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks later that year, and in the light of renewed warnings this week by Israeli intelligence of another Mumbai-like attack coming in the next few weeks, it is clear that India’s vulnerability appears to be in economic, rather than purely military, targets.
Indeed last year when tensions rose following the Mumbai attack and there was talk of an Indian military response, it was Pakistan’s former chief of intelligence Hamid Gul who warned of Pakistan hitting back where it would hurt the most. India’s so-called Silicon Valley will go up in smoke, Gul is widely quoted to have told CNN, if the Indians sent troops to the border.
I have a feeling that this war game exercise in Washington by the former Indian and Pakistani generals was meant to confuse each other about the real war plans, which is what it did. With a significant ballistic missile arsenal that can be used to deliver conventional warheads over long distances accurately, why would the Pakistanis need to use aircraft and risk losing both the pilot and the aircraft deep inside enemy territory, and not hit the intended target?
Here is a NY Times story on how China is luring top Chinese-American scientists from US:
BEIJING — Scientists in the United States were not overly surprised in 2008 when the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland awarded a $10 million research grant to a Princeton University molecular biologist, Shi Yigong.
Dr. Shi’s cell studies had already opened a new line of research into cancer treatment. At Princeton, his laboratory occupied an entire floor and had a $2 million annual budget.
----------------------------“He was one of our stars,” Robert H. Austin, a Princeton physics professor, said by telephone. “I thought it was completely crazy.”
China’s leaders do not. Determined to reverse the drain of top talent that accompanied its opening to the outside world over the past three decades, they are using their now ample financial resources — and a dollop of national pride — to entice scientists and scholars home.
The West, and the United States in particular, remain more attractive places for many Chinese scholars to study and do research. But the return of Dr. Shi and some other high-profile scientists is a sign that China is succeeding more quickly than many experts expected at narrowing the gap that separates it from technologically advanced nations.
China’s spending on research and development has steadily increased for a decade and now amounts to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product. The United States devotes 2.7 percent of its G.D.P. to research and development, but China’s share is far higher than that of most other developing countries.
-------------
Quantity is not quality, and despite its huge investment, China still struggles in many areas of science and technology. No Chinese-born scientist has ever been awarded a Nobel Prize for research conducted in mainland China, although several have received one for work done in the West. While climbing, China ranked only 10th in the number of patents granted in the United States in 2008.
Chinese students continue to leave in droves. Nearly 180,000 left in 2008, almost 25 percent more than in 2007, as more families were able to pay overseas tuition. For every four students who left in the past decade, only one returned, Chinese government statistics show. Those who obtained science or engineering doctorates from American universities were among the least likely to return.
Recently, though, China has begun to exert a reverse pull. In the past three years, renowned scientists like Dr. Shi have begun to trickle back. And they are returning with a mission: to shake up China’s scientific culture of cronyism and mediocrity, often cited as its biggest impediment to scientific achievement.
They are lured by their patriotism, their desire to serve as catalysts for change and their belief that the Chinese government will back them.
“I felt I owed China something,” said Dr. Shi, 42, who is described by Tsinghua students as caring and intensely driven. “In the United States, everything is more or less set up. Whatever I do here, the impact is probably tenfold, or a hundredfold.”
He and others like him left the United States with fewer regrets than some Americans might assume. While he was courted by a clutch of top American universities and rose swiftly through Princeton’s academic ranks, Dr. Shi said he believed many Asians confronted a glass ceiling in the United States.
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Here's a BBC report about downgrading of 44 universities in India:
Students in India are protesting against the government's decision to strip 44 places of learning of their official university status.
The move follows a review which found the institutions were unable to provide proper educational facilities.
Nearly 200,000 students are enrolled in such establishments across India.
The government has said it will take steps to ensure the decision does not jeopardise the future of students currently studying at the universities.
Worried
The move sparked angry protests.
Students at the Savita School of Engineering in the southern city of Madras (Chennai) smashed furniture after hearing of the government decision.
Students say they are worried the order will affect their future prospects, but the authorities sought to reassure them.
"We will take care of all students who are in those 44 universities. The government's intention is to make sure not a single child will be affected," said federal Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal.
His ministry, which looks after education, says the decision is based on recommendations made by a special task force.
"The review committee came across several aberrations in the functioning of some of the institutions deemed to be universities," the government said in a report to the Supreme Court on Monday.
Most of the 44 universities concerned offer post-graduate and undergraduate courses.
They include three government-sponsored institutes, including the Nava Nalanda in Bihar, the National Museum Institute of the History of Art, Conservation and Museology in Delhi, and the Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development in Sriperumbudur in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
Indian engineers are the best in the world and working in the best companies weather in india or in abroad weather in satyam, wipro, infosys TCS and enven in IBM, Microsoft and many other companies you will find indian engineers...
According to the World Economic Forum's Global IT Report 2010, Pakistan has jumped 11 places to 87 from 98 on a list of 133 economies.
Here's how Telecomnewspk.com reports it:
“It is evident that technology is playing a leading role in accelerating economic growth and promoting development,” said Competitiveness Support Fund (CSF) Chief Executive Officer Arthur Bayhan. CSF, a partner institute of WEF, is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Finance, government of Pakistan and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), established to reposition Pakistan’s economy on a more competitive global footing.
Bayhan pointed out that CSF has carried out a policy action plan in 2008-09 to mobilise a dialogue across the telecommunication value chain to define the challenges that confront Pakistan’s telecom and IT industry and to address these challenges. The exercise resulted in an action agenda to tackle constraints and better position the ICT sector in Pakistan to take advantage of opportunities for growth.
“Now within 18 months of the exercise, many of the suggested initiatives and recommendations have taken effect so as to reshape the telecom industry in the most efficient and effective manner. CSF believes that through this focused initiative it has helped transform the Pakistan telecom domain,” Bayhan said.
Published for the ninth consecutive year with an extensive coverage of 133 economies worldwide, the Global IT Report remains the world’s most comprehensive and authoritative international assessment of the impact of ICT on the development process and the competitiveness of nations.
Pakistan has fared particularly well in the sub-indexes of Individual Readiness – mobile cellular tariffs (8) and residential telephone connection charge (11) while under the sub-index of Business Readiness the country does good in business telephone connection charge (15) and business monthly telephone subscription (17).
A marked improvement has been seen in Pakistan’s capacity for innovation, which has gone up from 73 last year, to 56 this time but it still requires further improvement. There have been slight improvements in quality of educational systems, up from 104 last year to 99, internet access in schools improving by six places to 75 and company spending on R&D getting better by six places to stand at 80. One of the recommendations put forward by CSF in the action plan was that the telecom operators in Pakistan adopt strategies for creating a conducive and competitive infrastructure cost sharing environment. Accordingly, major cellular operators of the country have signed agreements to get involved in infrastructure cost sharing thereby reducing infrastructure duplication and costs, noted Bayhan. CSF also recommended amplifying the bundled offers like voice and SMS with value-added services like MMS, Mobile TV, Mobile Banking, GPRS etc.
Here's an excerpt from Pakistan's consumer electronics market report:
Pakistan’s consumer electronics market, defined as the addressable market for computing devices, mobile handsets and AV products, is projected to be worth around US$1.6bn in 2010. Underlying demand will grow at a CAGR of about 7%, but spending will be restrained by a sizable grey market of smuggled or illegally assembled products.
The market’s considerable potential is currently depressed by a large grey market, poor IP protection, an unstable economic and security situation and weak distribution channels. Growth will be driven, however, by improved ICT infrastructure, and more credit availability. Reform of often high national and provincial taxes and tariffs on products ranging from computers to prepaid mobile cards would also boost the market.
Computer Computers accounted for around 18% of Pakistan’s consumer electronics spending in 2009. BMI forecasts Pakistan’s domestic market computer sales (including notebooks and accessories) of US$283mn in 2010, up from US$264mn in 2009. Computer hardware CAGR for the 2010- 2014 period will be around 7%. The abolition in September 2009 of a minimum sales tax on imported computers should boost the market.
AV AV devices accounted for around 40% of Pakistan’s consumer electronics spending in 2008. Pakistan’s domestic AV device market is projected at US$632mn in 2010. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11% between 2010-2014, to a value of US$946mn in 2014. TV sets remain the core product in this category, but the growing availability of smuggled colour televisions is a market inhibitor.
Mobile Handsets Pakistan’s market handset sales are expected to grow at a CAGR of 1% to 18.8mn units in 2014, as mobile subscriber penetration reaches 91%. Revenue growth will be slower due to lower average selling prices (ASPs) of mobile handsets, with most handsets sold at a under US$40 price-point. Another issue is a declining growth rate of mobile subscriber penetration, which is now above 60%.
Here's a report estimating Pakistan's ICT industry at $12 billion in Pakistan:
KARACHI (APP) - The overall size of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry in Pakistan has crossed more than $ 12 billion, of which $ 1 billion is foreign direct investment (FDI).
This was stated by the Advisor to PM on Information Technology Sardar Latif Khan Khosa while speaking at the inauguration of 5th Information & Communications Technology Exhibition and Conference - CONNECT 2010 at Karachi Expo Centre here Saturday.
He said Pakistan has one of the fastest growing the tele-density in the world, accelerating at a rate of 63.5 percent, while the neighbouring India is just 37 percent.
Khosa said there are more than 95 million mobile connections in the country and are still growing in numbers. This is exponential growth as mobile telephone market has seen a 14-fold increase since the year 2000, he added.
He said this signifies the importance of ICT sector and the further potential it holds for country’s economy.
He said CONNECT brings to Pakistan a focused event in the dynamic fields of IT and telecom and provides a unique platform to the companies to showcase their products and services.
The Advisor called upon IT professional to reach out entire Pakistan and spread IT in every nook and corner so that the people can take benefit of this dynamic technology.
He also supported the idea for a greater cooperation and interaction between the government, industry and academia to get maximum benefits of information technology. The Advisor pointed out PPP provides a platform for the promotion of IT in the country under its manifesto which envisages support for right of information to the people. This is the vision of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto for IT and other sectors, he added. Later, taking to media, Sardar Khosa said the government has again invited foreign IT companies to restart their business in Khyber-Pukhtunkhawa and Balochistan.
I have asked these companies to identify the quantum of damage to their infrastructure in Khyber-Pukhtunkhawa area due to on-going war on terror. They are also seeking a price differential for broad band expansion, but we have asked them to first start rehabilitation of their infrastructure and we have assured them to look into their demands.
Good work Riaz, Pakistan needs some positive information and positive re branding to get out of the vicious cycle of insurgency and military coups. Though many of your claims are slightly pepped up and biased (selectively picking negative articles about India and positive ones about Pak) overall you are doing a good job providing information about Pakistani IT industry. I am an Indian and I am only happy if my troubled neighbour could develop a strong IT industry providing much needed jobs to young generation.
But I would like to correct some misleading information in your posts.
1) Number of engineering grads in India- You claimed it is close to 100 000 and out of which only 5000 or so IIT students can be called world class and rest rubbish.
Not at all correct, small sate of Kerala (population 3 crore) alone has 30000 engineering seats. Big states like Tamil Nadu, Andra pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra etc has more than 100 000 engineering seats in EACH states. So overall engineering seats in India must come close to a million (4 years engineering). Remember Pakistan with a population for 15 crore has only 10000 engineering seats. IITs (including newly established), NITs (several), BITS pilani, IIITs(several) all are FIRST Tier and world class. Please see the latest top 50 engg college list by Outlook Magazine http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?265887 , most of the new colleges are corporate backed and well funded and definitely are world class. So I would rather say
India produces anywhere between 100 000 to 200 000 WORLD class engineering graduates from these world class institutes. By comparison Pakistan has 10000 Engineering seats and let’s say 25% of these are world class students? So that number would be a mere 2500 students a year! The purpose of this post is not to put down Pakistani IT industry but to correct the misleading facts.
Maurya: "The purpose of this post is not to put down Pakistani IT industry but to correct the misleading facts. "
All the data and the facts are based on credible sources, such as a Duke University study conducted to check inflated claims of number of engineering graduates in various countries, including India and China.
Some of the recent decisions of Indian govt to act against several Indian institutions bear out the concern about the quality of education and degrees awarded by them.
India's IT "miracle" is essentially driven by low level call center business, first-line tech support, simple repetitive code writing and run pre-defined testing. The best description of the typical Indian tech worker is "Cyber Coolie". It was coined by an astute Indian columnist Praful Bidwai back in 2003.
Another Indian Harish Trivedi of Delhi University has characterized India's call centers as "brutally exploitative" and its employees as "cyber coolies of our global age, working not on sugar plantations but on flickering screens, and lashed into submission through vigilant and punitive monitoring, each slip in accent or lapse in pretence meaning a cut in wages."
An Indian blogger Siddarth Singh says that "one cannot dispute the fact that our IT industry is at best a glorified labor provider, and our feted “IT Giants” have failed to provide even a single proprietary product which could create waves in the global IT industry (perhaps except Finacle, a banking and finance solution by Infosys, and which is used by a number of MNC banks around the globe).
Siddarth asks the question, "So, what does Indian industry actually excel at?" Then he offers the following answer: "Well, we are the leaders in the so called IT Enabled Services, or ITES. These are basically services such as BPOs, call centers, KPOs etc, which extensively use IT to provide backend and customer services to primarily overseas customers. That our ITES industry is hugely dependent on foreign clients is also not a secret anymore, with hardly any Indian company enlisting the services of such companies".
A recent letter from a Bangalore based Indian IT worker addressed to the editors "The Hindu" newspaper read as follows:
This is how people in the West have started referring to people in developing nations. In the old days, of course, we Indians were referred to as "coolies" because we provided cheap labour. Nowadays, we are being called "cyber coolies".
Why? Because most software companies find it cheaper to get their job done in countries like India and other developing nations. There are many people in the U. S. and Britain who raise a hue and cry when jobs get exported to countries like India — especially jobs related to call centres and the software industry.
The fact that they refer to us as coolies shows that they haven't lost their imperialist outlook....
People and the media are often fooled by "R&D" in the name of some of the western companies locations in Bangalore.
In reality, Bangalore is the code coolie capital of the world...it's not about tech, it's about cheap labor performing low-level tasks at rock-bottom wages. It's just cost arbitrage in the service sector.
I have no doubt there are some smart techies in India doing leading edge work, but these are exceptions. The overwhelming majority of the so-called IT work in India is call centers or low-level routine software tech support, maintenance, testing, etc. which is widely described as code coolie work. It's mostly about cost arbitrage, not advanced tech.
Related Links:
ICT: Hope or Hype?
Truth About India's IT Revolution
India's IT "miracle" is essentially driven by low level call center business, first-line tech support, simple repetitive code writing and run pre-defined testing. The best description of the typical Indian tech worker is "Cyber Coolie". It was coined by an astute Indian columnist Praful Bidwai back in 2003.
Harish Trivedi of Delhi University has characterized India's call centers as "brutally exploitative" and its employees as "cyber coolies of our global age, working not on sugar plantations but on flickering screens, and lashed into submission through vigilant and punitive monitoring, each slip in accent or lapse in pretence meaning a cut in wages."
An Indian blogger Siddarth Singh says that "one cannot dispute the fact that our IT industry is at best a glorified labor provider, and our feted “IT Giants” have failed to provide even a single proprietary product which could create waves in the global IT industry (perhaps except Finacle, a banking and finance solution by Infosys, and which is used by a number of MNC banks around the globe).
Siddarth asks the question, "So, what does Indian industry actually excel at?" Then he offers the following answer: "Well, we are the leaders in the so called IT Enabled Services, or ITES. These are basically services such as BPOs, call centers, KPOs etc, which extensively use IT to provide backend and customer services to primarily overseas customers. That our ITES industry is hugely dependent on foreign clients is also not a secret anymore, with hardly any Indian company enlisting the services of such companies".
A recent letter from a Bangalore based Indian IT worker addressed to the editors "The Hindu" newspaper read as follows:
This is how people in the West have started referring to people in developing nations. In the old days, of course, we Indians were referred to as "coolies" because we provided cheap labour. Nowadays, we are being called "cyber coolies".
Why? Because most software companies find it cheaper to get their job done in countries like India and other developing nations. There are many people in the U. S. and Britain who raise a hue and cry when jobs get exported to countries like India — especially jobs related to call centres and the software industry.
The fact that they refer to us as coolies shows that they haven't lost their imperialist outlook....
People and the media are often fooled by "R&D" in the name of some of the western companies locations in Bangalore.
In reality, Bangalore is the code coolie capital of the world...it's not about tech, it's about cheap labor performing low-level tasks at rock-bottom wages. It's just cost arbitrage in the service sector.
I have no doubt there are some smart techies in India doing leading edge work, but these are exceptions. The overwhelming majority of the so-called IT work in India is call centers or low-level routine software tech support, maintenance, testing, etc. which is widely described as code coolie work. It's mostly about cost arbitrage, not advanced tech.
In Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic rise of China and India, Mr Bardhan says it is not clear whether economic reforms are mainly responsible for the recent high growth in India.
Reforms have made the country's corporate sector more vibrant and competitive. But, he says, most of the Indian economy is not in the corporate sector, which absorbs only 6% of India's labour force. The fast growing info-tech sector - India's pride- employs less than 1% of India's workforce. Services - financial business services and telecommunications where reforms may have made a significant impact - constitute only about a quarter of the total service sector output. "It is yet to be empirically and convincingly demonstrated how the small corporate sector benefiting from reforms pulled up a vast informal sector," says Mr Bardhan.
Globalisation's impact on economies has been a divisive issue with economists. Some say it sharpened inequities and made the poor poorer; others believe it has pulled lots of people out of poverty.
Mr Bardhan isn't very sure about either.
He cites India's national household data, which suggests that poverty did not decline sharply in 1993-2005, when India experienced extensive opening up of its economy. Social indicators like child health remained - and remain - abysmally poor. At the same time, the growth rate in agriculture, where most of the poor work, has declined somewhat in the past decade. This is largely because of the decline of public investment in farm infrastructure and has nothing to do with globalisation, argues the economist.
Globalisation also does not appear to have helped in boosting India's social development indicators, Bardhan suggests. How else can one explain that Gujarat, the country's richest, high-growth, reform-friendly state, has a higher percentage of underweight children than sub-Saharan Africa?
Mr Bardhan suggests China's stunning growth rates (9% on an average) in the early years of liberalisation - 1978 to 1993 - happened because of domestic factors - farms reforms, distribution of land cultivation rights - which raised rural incomes.
Also, contrary to popular perception, China's growth has not been primarily export driven, the book argues. Bardhan shows how domestic investment and consumption have been the main drivers of China's growth. No doubt globalisation and economic reforms have trigged off economic growth but, as Bardhan argues, most of us may have overstated their importance.
Source: Biswas on BBC.com
UNDP publishes the Education Index which is measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment ratio (with one-third weighting). The adult literacy rate gives an indication of the ability to read and write, while the GER gives an indication of the level of education from kindergarten to postgraduate education.
On this UNDP education index, Pakistan scores 0.665 and ranks 137, ahead of India's score of 0.638 and ranking of 142nd.
It appears that Stuxnet worm was designed, developed and released by western and-or Israeli intelligence agencies to sabotage industrial systems at Iranian nuclear facilities. Here's a CNET report:
Iran's official news agency said today that a sophisticated computer worm purportedly designed to disrupt power grids and other such industrial facilities had infected computers at the country's first nuclear-power plant but had not caused any serious damage.
The Stuxnet worm, which some see as heralding a new era of cyberwarfare, appeared in July and was already known to be widespread in Iran. In fact, its high concentration there, along with a delay in the opening of the Bushehr plant, led one security researcher to hypothesize that Stuxnet was created to sabotage Iran's nuclear industry.
In addition to emphasizing the threat posed by the worm, which could be used to remotely seize control of industrial systems, today's news could well add to speculation about Stuxnet, the sophistication of which has caused some to suspect that a nation state, such as Israel or the U.S., might be behind its creation.
The worm exploits three holes in Windows, one of which has been patched, and targets computers running Siemens software used in industrial control systems.
Mahmoud Jafari, the project manager at the Bushehr plant, said the worm "has not caused any damage to major systems of the plant" and that a team was working to remove it from several computers, according to Iran's IRNA news agency, which was cited in a report by the Associated Press.
Jafari said the infection involved the personal computers of several staff members working at Bushehr and would not affect plans to open the nuclear plant in October, the AP reported.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20017651-83.html#ixzz11GhExJ8o
Here are a few excerpts from a piece by Prof William Easterly published in Foreign Policy Magazine:
"We found that there was a remarkably strong association between countries with the most advanced technology in 1500 and countries with the highest per capita income today. Europe already had steel, printed books, and oceangoing ships then, while large parts of Africa did not yet have writing or the wheel. Britain had all 24 of our sample technologies in 1500. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga had none of them. But technology also travels. North America, Australia, and New Zealand had among the world's most backward technology in 1500; today, they are among the wealthiest regions on Earth, reflecting the principle that it's the people who matter, not the places. As migration has transformed parts of the world that were nearly empty in the Middle Ages, technology has migrated with them. "
"OF COURSE, IN SOCIAL SCIENCE, no generalization is universal. The most important counterexample is China, which in 1500 had plow cultivation, printing, paper, books, firearms, the compass, iron, and steel, and yet failed to emulate Europe's Industrial Revolution in the centuries that followed. Scholars have argued that autocratic Chinese emperors killed off technological progress for domestic political reasons. For example, one Ming emperor banned long-distance oceanic exploration for fear of foreign influence threatening his power, after Chinese ships had already reached East Africa in 1422."
"This gives us a hint as to how political formation affects development: Fragmented Europe did not have any one autocrat who could kill off technological innovation, and the constant threats of living in a hostile neighborhood spurred the advancement of military technology. And because borders were relatively open around 1500, the reality that citizens could leave for more advanced places -- the forerunner of today's "brain drain" -- kept alive the spirit of innovation. "
"Most importantly, what the history of technology tells us is that the blank-slate theory is a myth. Top-down development programs simply don't work. In fact, the principal beneficiaries of Western largesse today -- African autocrats and dysfunctional regimes -- are themselves the main obstacles to development. If there's anything that "must be done" to spur future development, it's to create the conditions necessary to empower the ordinary individuals who will create new and unforeseen technologies out of old ones. There's a Thomas Edison born every minute. We just have to help them turn the lights on."
After agriculture, textile sector is the second largest employer in India. Here are excerpts from a NY Times report on how the situation is changing in Coimbatore, a big textile center in Tamil Nadu:
The clear losers of India’s currency approach right now are garment makers. From April to August, exports were down 6.4 percent from a year earlier in the $10 billion Indian clothing industry. Although it represents only about 1 percent of the nation’s economy, the garment industry is India’s largest employer after agriculture.
“All the other countries are protecting their currencies, so why are we not?” said Premal Udani, chairman of India’s Apparel Export Promotion Council.
Indian policy makers are eager enough for foreign investment that, for now at least, they are willing to endure the damage a stronger rupee inflicts on exports, especially for lower-value goods like clothes. Exports of other Indian goods and services, like software and pharmaceuticals, have not been as hard hit because they are not as price-sensitive.
India also places a premium on the higher-value jobs that are fueled by foreign investment. Not far from where that old textile mill once stood, the German engineering company Bosch and the American software concern Perot Systems have opened offices in a new technology park.
The influx of capital has helped fuel a nearly 9 percent annual growth rate for India’s economy. It has also powered the Indian stock market to near record highs. A big beneficiary of the stock rally has been the government, which is selling shares in state-owned firms like Coal India, the world’s largest coal miner.
The government, which has a large budget deficit, plans to raise $9 billion in the current fiscal year from share sales and spend the money on jobs for the rural poor and other welfare programs. A stronger rupee also reduces India’s bill for commodities, like oil, that it needs to import.
“If India is to sustain 8 percent growth or 9 percent growth, the only constraint on that can be capital,” said Nikhil Chaturvedi, managing director of Prozone, the Indian real estate firm that is building the Alliance Mall development. “Free flow of capital should be allowed in all sectors” of the economy, he said.
Mr. Chaturvedi, whose joint venture partner in the Alliance Mall is the London-based Capital Shopping Centers, said an appreciating rupee must be tolerated as an unpleasant side effect of the flow of foreign capital.
After agriculture, textile sector is the second largest employer in India, according to fiber2fashion.com :
The Textile Sector in India ranks next to Agriculture. Textile is one of India’s oldest industries and has a formidable presence in the national economy in as much as it contributes to about 14 per cent of manufacturing value-addition, accounts for around one-third of our gross export earnings and provides gainful employment to millions of people. The textile industry occupies a unique place in our country. One of the earliest to come into existence in India, it accounts for 14% of the total Industrial production, contributes to nearly 30% of the total exports and is the second largest employment generator after agriculture.
About 27% of India's foreign exchange earnings are on account of export of textiles and clothing alone. The textiles and clothing sector contributes about 14% to the industrial production and 3% to the gross domestic product of the country. Around 8% of the total excise revenue collection is contributed by the textile industry. So much so, the textile industry accounts for as large as 21% of the total employment generated in the economy. Around 35 million people are directly employed in the textile manufacturing activities. Indirect employment including the manpower engaged in agricultural based raw-material production like cotton and related trade and handling could be stated to be around another 60 million.
Here are excerpts from a NY Times report on how the situation is changing in Coimbatore, a big textile center in Tamil Nadu:
The clear losers of India’s currency approach right now are garment makers. From April to August, exports were down 6.4 percent from a year earlier in the $10 billion Indian clothing industry. Although it represents only about 1 percent of the nation’s economy, the garment industry is India’s largest employer after agriculture.
“All the other countries are protecting their currencies, so why are we not?” said Premal Udani, chairman of India’s Apparel Export Promotion Council.
Indian policy makers are eager enough for foreign investment that, for now at least, they are willing to endure the damage a stronger rupee inflicts on exports, especially for lower-value goods like clothes. Exports of other Indian goods and services, like software and pharmaceuticals, have not been as hard hit because they are not as price-sensitive.
India also places a premium on the higher-value jobs that are fueled by foreign investment. Not far from where that old textile mill once stood, the German engineering company Bosch and the American software concern Perot Systems have opened offices in a new technology park.
The influx of capital has helped fuel a nearly 9 percent annual growth rate for India’s economy. It has also powered the Indian stock market to near record highs. A big beneficiary of the stock rally has been the government, which is selling shares in state-owned firms like Coal India, the world’s largest coal miner.
The government, which has a large budget deficit, plans to raise $9 billion in the current fiscal year from share sales and spend the money on jobs for the rural poor and other welfare programs. A stronger rupee also reduces India’s bill for commodities, like oil, that it needs to import.
“If India is to sustain 8 percent growth or 9 percent growth, the only constraint on that can be capital,” said Nikhil Chaturvedi, managing director of Prozone, the Indian real estate firm that is building the Alliance Mall development. “Free flow of capital should be allowed in all sectors” of the economy, he said.
After agriculture, textile sector is the second largest employer in India, according to fiber2fashion.com :
The Textile Sector in India ranks next to Agriculture. Textile is one of India’s oldest industries and has a formidable presence in the national economy in as much as it contributes to about 14 per cent of manufacturing value-addition, accounts for around one-third of our gross export earnings and provides gainful employment to millions of people. The textile industry occupies a unique place in our country. One of the earliest to come into existence in India, it accounts for 14% of the total Industrial production, contributes to nearly 30% of the total exports and is the second largest employment generator after agriculture.
About 27% of India's foreign exchange earnings are on account of export of textiles and clothing alone. The textiles and clothing sector contributes about 14% to the industrial production and 3% to the gross domestic product of the country. Around 8% of the total excise revenue collection is contributed by the textile industry. So much so, the textile industry accounts for as large as 21% of the total employment generated in the economy. Around 35 million people are directly employed in the textile manufacturing activities. Indirect employment including the manpower engaged in agricultural based raw-material production like cotton and related trade and handling could be stated to be around another 60 million.
Here are excerpts from a NY Times report on how the situation is changing in Coimbatore, a big textile center in Tamil Nadu:
The clear losers of India’s currency approach right now are garment makers. From April to August, exports were down 6.4 percent from a year earlier in the $10 billion Indian clothing industry. Although it represents only about 1 percent of the nation’s economy, the garment industry is India’s largest employer after agriculture.
“All the other countries are protecting their currencies, so why are we not?” said Premal Udani, chairman of India’s Apparel Export Promotion Council.
Indian policy makers are eager enough for foreign investment that, for now at least, they are willing to endure the damage a stronger rupee inflicts on exports, especially for lower-value goods like clothes. Exports of other Indian goods and services, like software and pharmaceuticals, have not been as hard hit because they are not as price-sensitive.
India also places a premium on the higher-value jobs that are fueled by foreign investment. Not far from where that old textile mill once stood, the German engineering company Bosch and the American software concern Perot Systems have opened offices in a new technology park.
The influx of capital has helped fuel a nearly 9 percent annual growth rate for India’s economy. It has also powered the Indian stock market to near record highs. A big beneficiary of the stock rally has been the government, which is selling shares in state-owned firms like Coal India, the world’s largest coal miner.
The government, which has a large budget deficit, plans to raise $9 billion in the current fiscal year from share sales and spend the money on jobs for the rural poor and other welfare programs. A stronger rupee also reduces India’s bill for commodities, like oil, that it needs to import.
“If India is to sustain 8 percent growth or 9 percent growth, the only constraint on that can be capital,” said Nikhil Chaturvedi, managing director of Prozone, the Indian real estate firm that is building the Alliance Mall development. “Free flow of capital should be allowed in all sectors” of the economy, he said.
About 60% of India's workforce is in agriculture. Textile industry is the second biggest employer, accounting for a fifth of India’s exports, and employs almost 10 percent of India’s workforce, or some 35 million people, and has the potential to add another 12 million new jobs --dwarfing the 1-2 million jobs created by the much-heralded IT and BPO sector, according to a World Bank report.
The largest number of people in other South Asian nations are also employed in the agriculture sector, followed by textile manufacturing as the second largest employer.
About 60% of India's workforce is engaged in agriculture, contributing about 16% of GDP, according to published data. Textile manufacturing claims the second largest employment and comprises 26% of manufacturing output. It accounts for a fifth of India’s exports, and employs almost 10 percent of India’s workforce, or some 35 million people, and has the potential to add another 12 million new jobs --dwarfing the 1-2 million jobs created by the much-heralded IT and BPO sector, according to a World Bank report. Even the most optimistic estimates by NASSCOM put the total direct and indirect employment in IT and ITES sectors at 10 million jobs.
The textile sector is crucial to India's economy. The textile industry contributed 4% of India's gross domestic product in the year that ended March 31, and accounted for 13.5% of Indian exports, bringing in $17.6 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Here is a quick comparison of different sectors of the economy in India and Pakistan in terms of employment and GDP contribution:
Country....Agri(emp/GDP)..Textiles..Other Mfg..Service(incl IT)
India........60%/16% ...........10%/4%.....7%/25%...........23%/55%
Pakistan......42%/20%...........12%/8%......8%/18%...........38%/54%
Assuming India's PPP GDP of $3.75 trillion (population 1.2 billion) and Pakistan's $450 billion (population 175 million), here is what I calculated in terms of per capita GDP in different sectors of the economy:
India vs. Pakistan:
Agriculture: ($833 vs. $1,225)
Textiles: ($1,242 vs. $1,714)
Non-Textile Mfg ($11,155 vs $5,785)
Services ($7,246 vs $3,654)
It shows that Indians in manufacturing and services sectors add more value and produce higher value goods and services than their Pakistani counterparts.
The income range in India is much wider from $883 to $11, 155 accounting for the much bigger rich-poor gap relative to Pakistan's range from $1225 to $5,785.
Here is an Indian report about Pakistani hackers attacking India's FBI (called CBI) website:
New Delhi, Dec 6: Exposing India's weakness in information technology, the premier investigative agency, Central Bureau of Investigation has failed to restart its hacked official website even after 48 hours.
The CBI website (http://cbi.nic.in/), which was hacked by Pakistani hackers, remained offline on Monday, Dec 6. The failure indicates the credibility of Indian IT sector, which is considered as one of the leading exporter of 'brainees' to the Western countries.
The official website of CBI was hacked on Friday, Dec 3 night by unknown hackers, who claimed themselves as "Pakistan Cyber Army". The hackers infiltrated to the root level and left a note saying that the attack was a response to the hacking of Pakistan websites by Indian hackers.
The note left by Pakistan hackers read, "This attempt is in response to the Pakistani websites hacked by 'Indian Cyber Army'. We told u before too...we are sleeping but not dead". The note ended with "Pakistan Zindabad."
Later on Saturday, CBI officials released a statement describing that they were working hard to fix he issue and also registered a case under Information Technology Act against 'unknown' hackers.
"A case has been registered in this connection in the cyber crime cell of the CBI and efforts are underway to restore the website with the help of National Informatics Centre and the CBI cyber security experts," the statement said.
Another Indian report raises questions about the vulnerability of outsourced work in India to hacking, and it says: "Once, our national leaders cried for the 'brain drain' happened to India. Even now, US President Barack Obama urging Americans to compete with India 'brainees'. But the hacking of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)'s website exposed the 'real' credibility of Indian IT power."
Here's an excerpt from a Wired.com report on how Pakistani techies are helped in the flood-relief effort:
One of the biggest problems in flood relief is locating people displaced by the flood who need food, shelter or medicine. So Sohaib Khan, a computer-science professor at the Lahore University of Management Scientists, put together a widget to help. Floodmaps relies on Google Earth and Google Maps to track the path of the flood and monitor devastation like washed-out bridges that need to be rebuilt. His maps page provides detailed views of over 9000 villages affected by the downpour, broken down by region.
The primary customer for Khan’s maps are non-governmental organizations at work in Pakistan. “Our goal is to get as much data out there as possible,” he says. “We are now working with other NGOs to help them with their mapping needs, both for the current phase as well as planning for the upcoming rehabilitation phase.” But it’s not just independent aid groups that have made use of Floodmaps. The Punjab government’s detailed flood-relief website runs Floodmaps on its mapping page.
Khan’s website makes it easy to get one of his widgets: Just file a request through a provided form and receive a Floodmap. But that’s about as far as his efforts go in terms of social media. The maps themselves track data provided by affiliated aid groups about broken dams, damaged roads and other affected infrastructure. But those groups — or citizens themselves — can’t adjust the maps themselves. “We have not yet really exploited crowdsourcing,” Khan says.
That falls to a group called PakReport, an impromptu collection of Pakistani technologists and their mostly-American academic friends. PakReport is a donor-supported SMS effort that allows people affected by the flood to send in their location and a message about their need. Using a mapping tool called Ushahidi, flood-stricken Pakistanis can find their emergency information tracked by type and location, giving official and independent aid agencies a view into the evolving landscape of people’s needs. Text to 3441 and help create a distributed database of crisis information.
Here's an interesting CGAP report on the use of technology to aid Pakistan's flood victims in 2010:
CGAP’s partner in Pakistan, Tameer Microfinance Bank, and their parent company, Telenor Pakistan, have made it possible for people in Pakistan who may not have internet access to make donations to relief organizations using their EasyPaisa mobile banking platform and have removed the usual transfer fees. EasyPaisa account holders can make donations direct from their mobile wallets and anyone can walk into one of 6,000 agents to contribute to the work of organizations including the Pakistan Red Crescent Society and SOS Children’s villages. They are also in discussion with a number of NGOs about using EasyPaisa to help them to distribute payments to people who have lost their homes or their livelihoods and Telenor themselves have pledged over Rs 213 million (USD 2.5 million) to flood relief efforts.
UBL Bank has won a contract from the Government of Pakistan to make electronic payments of Rs 100,000 (USD 1,170) each to 2 million households – the vast majority of whom will never have set foot in a bank. UBL plan to use their Omni Branchless Banking platform to deliver payments to recipients via Visa debit cards. They will open accounts and distribute cards so that recipients can spend their money at stores or withdraw their cash at ATMs or agents that have been specially set up to deal with the post-flood situation. In post-disaster situations, being able to access cash becomes a life or death issue and from the provider perspective it’s also a major challenge. UBL has 1,800 agents at present and they plan to set up 3,000-4,000 more over the next 3-4 months to cope with the increased demand, according to Abrar Mir, Executive Vice-President of Branchless Banking, who hopes that the people that they reach will continue to use their accounts long after the floods have subsided.
Other organizations are using mobile phones in innovative ways that are not related to branchless banking. Ushahidi, an open source project that allows users to crowdsource crisis information via mobile, have set up pakreport.org a mapping service that allows anyone in the country to text information about the flood. Information is collated and made available to the emergency services and disaster response organizations and NGOs via a web-based interface.
The presence of two branchless banking services in Pakistan (EasyPaisa and UBL Omni) may play an important part in the response to the flood in Pakistan. In Haiti, where no branchless banking solutions exist, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID set up a prize for the first organization to launch a branchless banking solution earlier this year that could be used to make payments to those affected by the earthquake. Although there are some encouraging signs, the prize has yet to be claimed. The response in Pakistan has been much faster due to the presence of existing systems.
Disasters are a fact of life in many countries, and disproportionately affect the poor. Branchless banking will never be able to prevent disasters, but it has the potential to dramatically improve the way in which we can respond to them.
Here's a Wall Street Journal story titled "India Graduates Millions, But Too Few Are Fit to Hire":
BANGALORE, India—Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.
So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.
India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.
Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India.
In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore.
"With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees," says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. "Instead, we're scouring every nook and cranny."
India's economic expansion was supposed to create opportunities for millions to rise out of poverty, get an education and land good jobs. But as India liberalized its economy starting in 1991 after decades of socialism, it failed to reform its heavily regulated education system.
Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What's more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world.
"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," says Vijay Thadani, chief executive of New Delhi-based NIIT Ltd. India, a recruitment firm that also runs job-training programs for college graduates lacking the skills to land good jobs.
Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.
But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.
Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.
The Times Higher Education Supplement for 2011 ranks 6 Pakistani universities among the top 100 Asia for Life sciences and Bio medicine.
NUST ranks 60, UET-Lahore 65, Karachi University 68, University of Lahore 73, Punjab University 91 and Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad at 94.
On THES IT and Engg rankings, there are 4 Pakistani universities: NUST is 47, Univ of Karachi 91, University of Lahore 89, UET Lahore 90.
Here's an Express Tribune report about Pakistan's IT export potential:
KARACHI: Pakistan could play host to an extreme growth spurt in the information technology industry in the next 10 years, according to a study quoted by IBM’s Country General Manager Hamayun Bashir.
Speaking at a ceremony held to celebrate a century of IBM’s existence on Thursday, Bashir informed Pakistan may have up to one million jobs in the information technology industry by 2020.
“IBA students are working on a study with assistance from the Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s IT committee. The report, to be published in a few months, underlines that by 2020, Pakistan can easily have a million jobs and exports of $10 billion in the IT industry,” he asserted.
He expressed hope that the current figure of 0.15 million jobs in the industry could easily be increased. “I see a bright future for our industry, which is producing top-quality software,” said Bashir.
“We are meeting the IT ministry on behalf of Pasha – the chamber for IT in the country – to get officials to refocus on the sector,” said Bashir.
Commenting on the resignation of former IT minister Babar Awan, he said, “The minister was an important, focal point of the industry.”
“I have heard that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is providing funds and a data centre will be created in Islamabad,” he said while talking about the e-government programme.
Replying to a complaint that large organisations in the country, such as banks, did not give projects to local firms, he said that there were up to 60 large companies in Pakistan which needed tried and tested software.
He, however, explained that there were at least 10,000 small companies that would not be able to afford services of large international firms and would have to adopt local software solutions, which would help the economy grow.
Here's a report in The Nation on PTCL data centers in Pakistan:
ISLAMABAD - PTCL, understanding the rapidly changing business environment and its growing reliance upon automation, has introduced region’s largest Data Centres in Karachi and Lahore. These centers are certified by the internationally recognized certification body, EPI.
This certification by an international body is the first data centre certification in Pakistan’s history and proves PTCL’s commitment to providing state of the art products and services backed by engineering and support for the Government and Enterprise markets of Pakistan, says a press release issued here on Wednesday.
PTCL Data Center services is an ideal choice for companies who want the flexibility to house their Primary, Disaster Recovery and/or Business Continuity sites and choose from a variety of cost reducing services as their business demands.
PTCL Data Centre solution provides customers managed and hosted cloud based services that comprise of computing as a service, processing as a service, storage as a service, software as a service, application hosting, infrastructure hosting, caging, co-location, disaster recovery as a service, backup solutions, hosted business solutions, unified communications and telepresence switching.
President PTCL Walid Irshaid said “PTCL is heavily investing in these ICT assets on behalf of our customers so that they can focus on their core competencies. Getting our Data Centers certified is further evidence that PTCL is committed to provide technology to the Govt and Enterprise markets of Pakistan of international standards.
This certification by an internationally recognized organization ensures that PTCL Data centers provide a reliable, responsive and resilient infrastructure, is designed and built using international standards and provides a secure, managed, climatically controlled environment for the housing and hosting of sensitive, mission-critical data and applications.
All the hype about Indian IT sector makes it hard to believe that it is Pakistan, not India, which has widely deployed biometric identification technology to issue multi-purpose national ID cards and e-passports to its citizens.
In fact, Pakistan is among the first few countries of the world to issue biometric national ID cards to 83 million citizens. Pakistan has also issued over 7 million e-passports to its citizens since October, 2004. These Multi-Biometric Electronic Passports, containing an RFID chip, facial and fingerprint images of the passport holder, PKI and other security features are compliant with ICAO standards.
NADRA's corporate clients are Mobilink, Ufone, Telenor, Barclays Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Standard Charter Bank, PTCL, IESCO, SNGPL and SSGPL.
International clients of NADRA include governments of Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria and Sudan. NADRA Technologies has recently entered into a agreement with Global Defense, a Turkish company, to pursue biometric IT services opportunities in Turkey and other European and Middle Eastern nations.
PTCL, another state-owned company, is rolling out fast broadband access at low cost, and building data centers in Pakistan to enable cloud computing on a large scale. PTCL has recently started rolling out 50 Mbits/sec broadband service in several cities and towns, and built large data centers in Karachi and Lahore.
http://www.riazhaq.com/2011/05/pakistan-leads-asia-in-biometric-it.html
Pakistani IT companies win recognition in Malaysia, according to The Express Tribune:
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani information technology (IT) companies won seven awards at the 10th International Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Pakistani companies secured the highest number of total awards.
The Silver Awards were secured in the Security Applications, E-Inclusion and E-Community, Financial Applications, Communications, E-Government and E-Health categories.
Pakistani companies won in the face of stiff competition from companies from 16 countries including Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia. The Center for Advanced Research in Engineering (CARE) won the Silver Award in E-Government, Security and Communications while Avanza won the Silver Award in the highly competitive Financial Category and Cure MD won the Silver Award in the E-Health category. Aerocar and Solotech showed won the Silver Award in the E-nclusion & E-Community category.
Secretary Information Technology Nagib Ullah Malik invited the winners to discuss ways and means to bolster the IT industry in Pakistan and increase the adoption of locally developed IT products. He also praised the winning companies for earning a good name for the country while acknowledging the depth and creativity of the companies.
The chairman of Pakistan Association of Software Houses (PASHA) Ashraf Kapadia, Member IT Tariq Badshah and Managing Director Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) Zia Imran were also present at the occasion.
Malik also said that the wins at APICTA are a solid evidence of the support that the Ministry of Information Technology (MoIT) has provided to spur innovation in Pakistan. He recommended the PSEB to look into additional IT industry support programs including greater adoption of locally developed products in government and private sectors.
Malik added that minimal regulation and maximum incentives are needed to compete with countries such as Vietnam and Brazil.
*You made some decent points there. I looked on the internet for the issue and found most individuals will go along with with your website.
software house in pakistan
Pakistan is ranked in 4th place on CII-Insead's Global innovation efficiency sub-index, 5 places ahead of India in 9th place, according to Economic Times of India:
India has improved its ranking in the global Innovation Efficiency Index to 9th position in 2011 from 101th last year on factors like political stability, R&D, market and business sophistication, according to a study.
Surprisingly, Pakistan was placed ahead of India at 4th position, the CII-INSEAD study said.
However, India has slipped on its ranking in the Global Innovation Index to 62nd position out of 125 countries in 2011 from 56th last year while Switzerland was at the top,
It said that a lot of Indian talent is returning home to the country and the youth in urban India are now more global than ever, "and they are quite in tune with new technologies, even ahead of the curve in many cases, as early adapters".
"Multinational corporations are making large investments in R&D outside of their headquarter countries, setting up R&D sites in low-cost emerging countries such as China and India to access global talent and take advantage of their proximity to target markets," the report said.
Indian major players such as Tata, Godrej, and Mahindras are shifting their focus towards the rapidly expanding middle-income group of customers by coming up with frugal innovations, keeping in mind the price sensitivity of Indian consumers, it said.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/india-moves-up-to-no9-on-global-innovation-efficiency-index/articleshow/9085252.cms
http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/gii/GII%20COMPLETE_PRINTWEB.pdf
While Pakistan fares badly, ranking 103 on a list of 125 nations, on CII-INSEAD Global Index of Innovation for 2011, it is included among the top 10 countries for the Innovation Efficiency sub-Index. These countries are Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, China, Pakistan, Moldova, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, India, and Bangladesh.
This places Pakistan in 4th place on CII-Insead's Global innovation efficiency sub-index, 5 places ahead of India in 9th place, according to Economic Times of India:
India has improved its ranking in the global Innovation Efficiency Index to 9th position in 2011 from 101th last year on factors like political stability, R&D, market and business sophistication, according to a study.
Surprisingly, Pakistan was placed ahead of India at 4th position, the CII-INSEAD study said.
However, India has slipped on its ranking in the Global Innovation Index to 62nd position out of 125 countries in 2011 from 56th last year while Switzerland was at the top,
It said that a lot of Indian talent is returning home to the country and the youth in urban India are now more global than ever, "and they are quite in tune with new technologies, even ahead of the curve in many cases, as early adapters".
"Multinational corporations are making large investments in R&D outside of their headquarter countries, setting up R&D sites in low-cost emerging countries such as China and India to access global talent and take advantage of their proximity to target markets," the report said.
Indian major players such as Tata, Godrej, and Mahindras are shifting their focus towards the rapidly expanding middle-income group of customers by coming up with frugal innovations, keeping in mind the price sensitivity of Indian consumers, it said.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/india-moves-up-to-no9-on-global-innovation-efficiency-index/articleshow/9085252.cms
http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/gii/GII%20COMPLETE_PRINTWEB.pdf
http://www.riazhaq.com/2009/12/intellectual-wealth-of-nations.html
http://www.riazhaq.com/2009/10/pakistans-28-billion-it-industry.html
The Lahore-based Pepper.pk and Five Rivers Technologies made it to the number one spot across all categories on BlackBerry’s AppWorld on August 3 with their game Ninja Fruit Bash, developed for BlackBerry smartphones, according to a report in Express Tribune:
This was the third BlackBerry app developed by the local company to make it to number one on BlackBerry AppWorld.
Their other apps to reach number one include Photo Editor, an app that allows users to edit photographs from their hand-held devices, and LED Notifier, an app that blinks different colored LED for different contacts.
Mahe Zehra Husain, the Head of Operations and Product Management said “We are thrilled at this achievement. We already have two world number one utilities on BlackBerry AppWorld and adding a game to our family shows that not only can good code be developed for software utilities in Pakistan we can actually make amazing games as well!”
Ninja Fruit Bash Storyline
Ninja Fruit Bash follows the quest of a Ninja as he travels across China slicing tainted and poisoned fruit in order to save humanity.
The fruit is poisoned by the evil spirit of Orochi and is fatal if eaten. Orochi has turned fertile fruit gardens all over China into poisonous wasteland and our Ninja is on a mission – to return all the fruit gardens to their former glory.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/224923/pakistan-it-firm-tops-world-ranking-with-blackberry-game/
Here's more from Blackberrycool.com:
There’s a growing trend of taking iOS successes and porting them over to BlackBerry. We believe the trend was started by Smarter-Apps and from a strictly business perspective it makes a lot of sense. Sure, you could spend a long time working on a risky app that may or may not be a success, or you could take something that obviously makes money on another platform and bring it to the 40 million or so BlackBerry users. Considering the huge success of this strategy, as proved by Angry Farm, it makes you realize that a lot of these iOS developers are listening to the analysts more than the users.
Ninja Fruit Bash is the latest in this strategy and they’ve taken the success of Fruit Ninja to BlackBerry users. The app isn’t 100% of the fun you get on the iOS version and there are some limitations on the BlackBerry side such as the fact that not all devices have OpenGL support for 3D graphics. Ninja Fruit Bash on the Torch was a pretty smooth experience and it’s definitely a good start. The company will have to work a little harder to bring more of the user experience and graphics to the game but as a start it’s awesome.
http://www.blackberrycool.com/2011/07/21/ninja-fruit-bash-is-the-latest-ios-success-to-blackberry-clone/
Pakistan has exported $750 million software solutions last year, according to Pakistan Software Exports Board. This is a huge increase over $169 million reported in 2007-2008.
It should be noted that Pakistan uses BPM5 balance of payments method for reporting software and IT exports, and BPM5 significantly understates the value relative to BPM6 (MSITS) method used by RBI India.
BPM 6 (MSITS) includes sales to multinationals operating within the country, earning of overseas offices & salaries of non-immigrant overseas workers to export revenue.
Here's a Dawn story on rapid broadband growth in Pakistan:
WASHINGTON: Pakistan is ranked as one of top countries that registered high growth rates in broadband Internet penetration among their populace, the latest worldwide data report for Q1 2010 to Q1 2011 says.
Serbia leads all countries surveyed with a 68% annual growth rate from Q1 2010 to Q1 2011, according to July 2011 Bandwidth Report with data on worldwide bandwidth penetration.
The figures were cited by Website Optimization, LLC, a leading website optimizing firm, sourced from Point Topic, a global broadband tracker, and reported by PRWeb.
Pakistan, which has seen a boom in its promising telecom sector and information technology services in recent years, recorded around 46.2 percent growth of subscribers and is placed fourth on the ranking list.
The closest South Asian country to Pakistan on the list of top countries is Sri Lanka at the 11th spot with its broadband penetration growing in 30s while India lags at the 14th place in terms of broadband growth.
Globally, only Thailand and Belarus had greater percentage expansion than Pakistan, apart from top-rated Serbia during the period.
Pakistan’s digital growth prospects have begun to look brighter lately.
Besides having a large bilingual (English and Urdu) Internet conversant population, Pakistan’s software companies have carved a niche internationally in recent years.
According to government figures, the country’s information technology exports totaled $1.4 billion in the last financial year.
Experts say the IT industry, which adds thousands of skilled workers every year, has the potential to hit multimillion export target within next five to ten years. Additionally, mobile phone and wireless Internet usage are also expanding rapidly.
The survey data shows that China continues to lead the world in total broadband subscribers. As of the first quarter of 2011, China had over 135 million broadband subscribers, with the US at over 88 million subscribers in second place. Japan, German, and France followed China and the US in total subscribers.
http://www.dawn.com/2011/08/30/pakistan-among-top-countries-registering-high-broadband-growth.html
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/1107/
http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Business/31-May-2011/Pakistan-earning-US-14-bln-through-IT-exports-PM
Here's a UKPA story of a Pakistani innovators harnessing the Internet for the poor:
One of the world's top young technology innovators is working to bring internet-style networking to millions of Pakistanis who don't have access to the web.
Umar Saif's efforts, which centre around giving ordinary citizens new ways to use a basic mobile phone, recently earned him recognition by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The trigger for his research was a 2005 earthquake in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir that killed 80,000 people and caused widespread destruction. The disaster coincided with his return to Pakistan after getting a PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge.
Realising that rescue workers were having trouble co-ordinating, Saif, 32, devised a computer program that allowed people to send a text message - or SMS - to thousands of people at once. Users send a text to a specific phone number to sign up for the program, and then can message all the subscribers, allowing users to engage in the kind of social networking possible on the internet.
It has since blossomed into a commercial enterprise called SMS-all that is used by at least 2.5 million people who have sent nearly four billion text messages.
"You can do the sorts of things that we do on Facebook and Twitter," said Saif, now an associate professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.
The company generates revenue by charging a small amount for each message. Saif has expanded the service to Iraq and Nigeria by working with telecommunication companies there.
Roughly 20 million Pakistanis use the internet, about 11% of the country's total population of 187 million. But there are more than 108 million Pakistani mobile phone subscribers.
"The thing to do is to bring whatever you have on the internet on the phone lines, because that is what gets used the most," said Saif.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5gGB71MuxyPPnNQBdZ4xMfvksHuxA?docId=N0201411315222132958A
Here's some info on Pakistan's C4I efforts at Air Weapons Complex (AWC) according to a post on defence.pk
The Air Defense Automation System has been indigenously developed by Air Weapons Complex (AWC). The designed system collects information from all Air Defense sensors and radars, processes it, converts it into a standard format and displays it in real time at any desired location. The system architecture is independent of space, time and communication medium. The Command and Control System provides an environment for multiple functions to operate on the same hardware platform and share data via a Local Area Network (LAN) or a Wide Area Network (WAN).
The System allows the Commander to a view a fused picture of his complete Area Of Responsibility (AOR). It is a compilation of data from all Air Defense sensors, combined with battle plan, projection overlays, and any other data that is available, including:
current locations and planned movement operations of ground, maritime and air units of friendly, neutral, and enemy forces
generated features and projections (e.g. battle plans, operating zones)
Our engineers work closely with the customers to provide them customized, open, flexible and cost-effective solutions to their Air Defense Automation System requirements. AWC provides comprehensive Integrated Logistic Support (ILS) throughout the life cycle of the System.
SALIENT FEATURES
Seamless integration with C4I systems.
Network centric design allowing self-forming and self-healing network (user can enter or leave the network dynamically).
Complete Air Situation Display (ASD).
User friendly and compact Graphical User Interface.
The System can be operated in different modes (Operator, Commander etc.)
Personnel training under simulation mode.
Scenario recording and replay facility.
Communication with lower and higher command centers.
Advanced GIS support.
Multiple layer architecture (Display of multiple maps).
Map features e.g. map loading, map editing, map color changing etc.
Preset and programmable zoom buttons.
Display of Latitude/Longitude, Georef and Grid System.
True battlefield scenario support.
Display of track history during interception operation. User can switch on/off history of track.
Track symbol indicating its category.
Track type indicates the threat status of the track.
Tactical interception aids available.
Radar on/off option.
Aircraft Plot Suppression Area (PSA).
Non-automatic track initiation area.
Weapons (SAM/AAA) status monitoring.
Use of commercial technologies.
Ergonomically designed Command and Control Console.
Easy maintenance.
MULTIPLE RADAR TRACKER
AWC's Multi Radar Tracker (MRT) uses state-of-the-art tracking algorithms to detect and track all modern, fast and highly maneuverable targets, hence forming an integral part of C4I and Air Defense Automation System. It works effectively in high clutter environments and displays real time information for any command & control function. It can handle 2000 plots and 1000 tracks. This capability can be further enhanced due to scalable design of the Tracker. It can be integrated simultaneously with homogenous and heterogeneous radars.
The Tracker automatically initiates and reliably tracks maneuvering targets. The tracks initiation and maneuvering detection is enhanced with multiple sensors. The trackers update the display information at a high rate to form a true, accurate and complete Air Situation Display (ASD) for all air-defense and air-traffic control operations....
Here's a report on business deals signed during Karachi Trade Expo in Pakistan:
Various agreements and Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs) have been signed between Pakistani companies and foreign firms on the second day of 6th Expo Pakistan, which are aimed to create new trade opportunities for Pakistani industries.
Chromium and other industries from Information Technology sector signed over $300 million worth of trade deals with different international organisations during the 2nd day of this international event.
For the first time a Hong Kong based company Ormita Commerce Network, which operates as an international barter exchange platform and currently facilitating approximately $2.66 billion transaction per annum, has struck a strategic investment deal with Pakistani firm Alpha Dairies to launch Operation in Pakistan.
Under the agreement signed, the foreign firm plans to conduct more than $120 million of bilateral trade within 12 months of the finalisation of the deal, said Daniel Evans Chief Executive Officer of Ormita.
Talking to Profit, he said that for the first time the ‘barter business’ is being launched in Pakistan under which his company would play a third party role for imports, as government itself can acquire high-tech machineries and commodities from Ormita network participants across the globe and it can pay the dues by using its own under utilised resources or raw materials.
According to Daniel, all kinds of machineries, equipments and other goods could be imported through the barter business with the exchange of raw materials or other available products in Pakistan. Since Pakistan is currently facing several risks, including financial deficit, energy crisis and political instability, for any investment in Pakistan, the barter system is the only solution for any foreign investment in Pakistan. Currently barter system accounts for nearly 30 per cent of the world’s total business, and this is the best solution for a country to build trade relations with other countries in the absence of interest from foreign investments.
“Ormita is currently representing non-cash trading for more than 0.21 million traders across 54 different countries, and it is operating this huge amount of trade through 21 offices in different counties. Pakistan, rather than a cash payment, can exchange it’s under utilised resources or raw materials as a payment for the services or high-tech machineries imported from Ormita” he added.
The Trade Development Authority of Pakistan CEO met with CCPIT China Vice Chairman Huang Shan, Malaysia State Minister Haji Abdul Malik, and other importers. He said that fruitful discussions were made with the dignitaries from China, Japan, UK, USA, France, Brazil, Greece, Argentina, Madagascar, Belgium, South Africa, South Korea, Poland, Malaysia, Nigeria, New Zeeland, India, Panama and Colombia.
The foreign buyers, who met the concerned Pakistani companies’ representatives during the exhibitions have informed him that majority of them had good deals with the country’s exporters and also have placed orders worth millions of dollars.
Earlier, Tariq Rafi, Chief Executive of Siddiquesons Limited, claimed that his company has received import orders worth millions of dollars from buyers from Argentina, Brazil, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Japan and USA as they were interested in denim imports. Almost half of the visiting countries were new customers for this sector.
He said the exporters of denim and other textile items were satisfied with the developments and trade deals made during the 6th Expo as they had received a good response from the foreigners.
http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2011/10/pakistani-it-companies-sign-300m-worth-trade-deals/?thick=off&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=540&width=962
NADRA has issued over half a million cards for Rs. 20,000 cash to each flood affected family in Sindh so far, according to The News:
The National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) has said 47 centres of its total 62 centres are operational in six districts, while the other centres have completed their task and are entertaining complaints from genuine applicants who
were unable to get themselves registered for the Pakistan Card.
Nadra Deputy Chairman Tariq Malik pointed out on Friday that Nadra’s centres were working in Badin, Tando Mohammad Khan, Shaheed Benazirabad Mirpurkhas, Tando Allahyar and Sanghar, while 15 other centres were addressing complaints from those people who did not get themselves registered for Pakistan Cards.
He stated that throughout the process, Nadra ensured strong checks so that only deserving families belonging to the provincially notified calamity-hit areas could obtain the Pakistan Card.
Malik informed that Nadra had so far issued 592,651 Pakistan Cards to heads of rain-affected families in Sindh, 105,455 in Mirpurkhas, 240,227 in Badin, 79,946 in Tando Mohammad Khan and 156,324 in Shaheed Benazirabad (Nawabshah), 8,011 in Tando Allahyar and 2,684 in Sanghar.
He said that Nadra had launched a mobile SMS service in collaboration with the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) and all operating telecom companies to determine a person’s existence in the beneficiary list for the Pakistan Card project to facilitate the rain-affected people in checking the status of their requests.
The eligibility of the applicant for the Pakistan Card can be checked by simply sending his/her CNIC number to the designated short code (i.e. 9777). In response, a text message will be sent from Nadra’s central server confirming CNIC existence in the beneficiary list. The intent to use this service is to assist the provincial and local governments in curtailing the rush at the centres and helping the flood victims by using the technology while this service was for free, he added.
Nadra, in addition to setting up centres, has also mobilised its mobile resources MRVs (Mobile Registration Vans) to process the CNIC for free in all the affected areas in coordination with the public representatives and district administrators, he added. He said that Nadra had also issued 77,833 CNICs for free to flood/rain-hit victims so far.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=77118&Cat=4
NADRA offers SMS verification service to check flood affectees, according to APP:
Islamabad—National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) has initiated a mobile SMS service determine and check existence of flood-affected persons in the beneficiary list for Pakistan Card.
This service has been launched in collaboration with Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and all mobile phone operators with the objective to assist provincial and local governments to curtail down rush at the centers and help the flood victims by using technology.
A senior official at NADRA on Monday told APP that the eligibility of the applicant for Pakistan Card can be checked by simply sending his/her Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC) number to the designated short code i.e. 9777.
In response, a text message will be sent from NADRA central server confirming CNIC existence in the beneficiary list, the official said and added the Authority ensures strong checks in the software so that only deserving families belonging to provincially notified calamity hit areas could obtain Pakistan Cards. He said the process of issuing Pakistan Cards is in progress as around 598,600 such Cards have been issued to flood affected families in Sindh.
Giving further details, he said around 105,455 Pakistan Cards in Mirpurkhas, 240,227 in Badin, 79,946 in Tando Muhammad Khan and 156,324 in Shaheed Benazirabad (Nawabshah), 8011 in Tando Allahyar and 2684 in Sanghar have been issued.
http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=125035
The State Bank said on Wednesday that the value of e-banking transactions aggregated to Rs12 trillion during the second half of 2010-11, showing an increase of 19 per cent as compared to the first half of the year, according to a Dawn report:
The Payment Systems Half Yearly Review released by the State Bank here noted speedy rise in e-banking transactions in the country.
The volume of such transactions during the period under review reached 125.9 million depicting an increase of 15.5 per cent as compared to the first half of FY11, the review said, adding that the payment system infrastructure has maintained an overall growth trend for the second half of FY11.
However, the review also said that the volume and value of paper-based retail payments during the second half of FY11 were recorded as 177.3 million and Rs84.6 trillion respectively, indicating an increase of 3.5 per cent in the volume of transactions.
“The value of transactions has increased by 13.3 per cent as compared to the first half of FY11. The contribution of paper-based payments in total retail payment transactions was 58.5 per cent in terms of volume and 87.5 per cent in terms of value,” it added.
The review said the Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), which are the largest channel of e-banking transactions, showed 16.5 per cent increase in number of transactions and 19 per cent increase in value raising the share of ATM transactions in total e-banking transactions to 58.8 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, the review said.
It said the number of Real-Time Online Branches (RTOB) transactions grew by 14.7 per cent and the value of transactions increased by 18.8 per cent as compared to first half of FY11. “These transactions contributed 31.6 per cent in total volume of e-banking and 93.2 per cent in the value of such transactions respectively,” the review observed.
According to the review, as many as 466 more Automated Teller Machines were added bringing the total number of ATMs to 5,200 while 380 more bank branches were converted into Real Time Online Branches (RTOBs).
“A total of 7,416 bank branches (78 per cent) are now offering real time online banking out of a total of 9,541 branches in the country. The number of plastic cards at 14 million also registered an increase of 6.2 per cent during the period under review as compared to the numbers during the preceding half year,” the Review added.
The overall increasing trend in payment system infrastructure was also witnessed in the large value payments settled through Pakistan Real-time Inter-bank Settlement Mechanism (PRISM), which increased by 14.8 per cent in volume and 21.9 per cent in terms of value as compared to the first half of FY11.
http://www.dawn.com/2011/12/29/electronic-payments-reach-rs12tr.html
Here's an overview Pakistan IT industry in 2011, as published in Express Tribune:
The year 2011 saw a number of positive developments in Pakistan’s Information and Technology (IT) industry, from app development to global recognition and a series of awards.
HIGHLIGHTS
Pakistan Fast Growth 25
In a first for the IT industry, the Pakistan Fast Growth 25, a ranking of fast growth companies, listed 10 IT companies on its index. The Pakistan Fast Growth 25 is a program of the AllWorld Network in partnership with Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, launched in collaboration with JS Bank Limited.
Official Game for ICC 2011 Cricket World Cup
Local development company, Mindstorm Studios developed the official game for the ICC 2011 Cricket World Cup.The browser-based 3D game, “Cricket Power” features all 14 official teams along with players, stadiums and kits.
Pak-India ICT Firms to enhance trade up to $5b
Pakistani and Indian IT committees held bilateral talks separately on both sides of borders in March – aimed at enhancing trade ties in the field of IT. In the talks, both countries agreed to boost mutual trade in the IT sector by $5 billion through joint-ventures, investment and exchange of expertise.
Netsol deal in India
Local ICT company Netsol engaged with Indian companies to provide applications for financial services. It signed an agreement to sell its product “Netsol Financial Suite” to a global auto leasing company operating in India.
Google grants to social innovators
In another first for Pakistan, Google has granted seed money to a local association for social causes.
Google granted $250,000 to Pakistan Software Houses Association that launched Pasha Fund for distributing the amount to talented innovators. So far four individuals were selected to receive funds.
Pepper.pk mobile apps triumph
Local app developers, Pepper.pk hit the number one spot in Blackberry App World. Their application, LED Notifier Pro, has been immensely popular since its launch and ranked among the best selling Blackberry applications in the world. Additionally, their app, Photo Editor for BlackBerry has occupied the number one rank on App World twice in the past three months.
TenPearls wins Nokia contest twice
Pakistani IT firm TenPearls marked another record, beating out 800 entrants to bag second position and received a $50,000 cash prize at ‘Nokia & AT&T Innovators 2011 Contest’.
This is the second award TenPearls has received for its mobile app named “Animal 101” within a year. Their first award was first prize for their app uTrack mobile earlier in 2011 for the same platform in Pakistan.
Pakistan Shines at APICTA
Pakistan was declared the winner of two gold and five silver awards at the 11th annual Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) 2011 in Pattaya, Thailand. Pakistani firms secured two gold awards in the e-health and e-logistics and SCM categories and five silvers in the communication, financial, security, e-inclusion and e-community and e-government categories.
Pakistan’s team comprised of 18 products which competed against 162 different products from the Asia Pacific region.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/317436/2011-pakistan-it-industrys-golden-year/
Here are excerpts of a BBC report on Arfa's death:
Arfa's short life mirrors Pakistan's burgeoning engagement with information technology, an industry which holds out hope for youth embittered by unemployment and a lack of opportunities.
Her father, Col Amjad Karim, says she was particularly concerned to use her skills to help the young, those under-served by IT and those from villages.
"It is generally understood that computers are for very hi-fi people or rich schools but nowadays one can be purchased for a few thousand rupees by the poorest of poorest," he told the BBC.
"Arfa's centre of gravity was wanting to improve human resource development by focusing on education."
Col Karim retired from the army to be his daughter's manager. He says her mother and two younger brothers are in shock after her death.
Arfa had been in intensive care in a Lahore hospital since late December.
Senior politicians joined relatives at her funeral in the city on Sunday - she has already had a technology park named after her in Lahore.
Her loss is also being felt by Pakistan's IT world.
Shoaib Malik, country manager for games company Mindstorm, said: "It's really sad. What was amazing about her was that she had a clear vision, she literally wanted to set up the industry.
"One thinks only kids who have studied from abroad would have a vision but it was remarkable. I think whatever God does, does for the better but had she been alive she could have played an important role in the IT industry."
Mindstorm is one of a number of small Pakistani start-ups tapping into the global IT boom - a side to the country often overlooked amid bombings, natural disasters and never-ending political crisis.
The company, set up by self-taught techies, developed a game which ended being selected as the ICC World Cup 2011 official game, Cricket Power.
Internet effect
According to Pakistan Software Houses Association president Jehan Ara, Arfa was "intelligent beyond her years".
"In addition to achieving a professional certification at the tender age of nine, it is also notable that she set up and ran a computer training institute for a poor community.
"Her passion for technology, coupled with her vision to use her talent to do something significant for Pakistan and its people, was truly amazing for someone so young."
Ms Ara feels the IT industry offers a way out of unemployment for young Pakistanis, many of whom she says are starting their own companies. One Karachi firm is even developing software for the stock exchange in the UK.
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Around 1996 - the year when Arfa was born - the IT industry really took off in Pakistan, according to Shakir Hussain, CEO of software company Creative Chaos.
As the millennium approached, the fear of a mass technical apocalypse also motivated people to pay more attention to IT ventures.
"Suddenly there were hiring and migration opportunities for software engineers," he recalls.
But techies in Pakistan had been putting their creative minds to work even earlier than that, with far-reaching and destructive results.
In 1986, two brothers from Lahore created the world's first computer virus, "Brain".
They insist the virus was friendly and not intended to damage information, but it still ricocheted through the tech world and was developed by others, spawning viruses used to exploit operating systems.
That, however, is not what Pakistan's IT industry wants to be known for.
Shakir Hussain thinks it offers bright young people a good chance to earn a few thousand dollars working from home through various websites.
"The internet has been a great leveller," he says.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16599781
Here's an Express Tribune story about Pakistan's first tablet computer offered by Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC):
The newest entrant in the market for tablets and eBook readers – dominated by the likes of Apple, Amazon and Samsung – is none other than the Pakistani military.
The Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC) Kamra, whose self-described mission is “to produce and support weapon systems for a high state of operational readiness of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF)”, has started up a new commercial venture with a Chinese company, which an official told The Express Tribune was to “strengthen the national economy”.
The first three products produced by PAC are a computing tablet, a notebook and an eBook reader.
A press release issued at the launch of the project on December 29 notes that “for the joint production of JF-17, PAF had established sufficient facilities which are appropriate for the production of both defence and commercial products.”
The PAC official, who asked not to be named, told The Express Tribune that the joint venture with the Chinese company Innavtek had taken off with the initial offering of three products. “We plan to expand this in the future.”
The venture website, cpmc.pk, states that “Innavtek jointly developed two products with Avionics Production Factory which are successfully flying on fleet of our JF-17 aircraft and three more products are under co development phase.”
The official said that while PAC would manufacture the products, marketing was Innavtek’s responsibility.
He said the products were initially being marketed in Rawalpindi, but modalities needed to be finalised so it could expand to other cities including Lahore and Karachi. “We will get in touch with courier companies to see if we can reach a deal to transport them,” he said.
The competitively priced products, he said, have several benefits because they are being manufactured in Kamra. “It comes with a joint one-year warranty of PAC and Innavtek. Because PAC is producing it, it will ensure quality. We will also provide backup support,” the official said. In the first stage of this venture, PAC will manufacture the products locally but there are plans for an exchange of personnel to be trained in China and Pakistan respectively.
PAC’s plan to “strengthen the national economy” via its new commercial venture means it has to capitalise on “current trends”.
Jehan Ara, the president of the Pakistan Software Houses Association (PASHA), said she was unaware of the venture. She was skeptical that customers would buy PAC’s products just because they were manufactured by the Pakistani military. “People with a fixed budget will test products, read reviews and get recommendations from friends and then buy something. They don’t buy just because of a name. They will test it out of curiosity and put up reviews etc.” She also said governments around the world and in Pakistan buy computers from vendors based on pricing and reliability, and should not be forced to buy from a specific vendor.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/331525/from-kamra-to-karachi-via-the-chinese-military-debuts-in-the-handheld-market/
http://www.cpmc.pk/
The prices for Pakistan's PAC (Pakistan Aeronautical Complex) computers range from Rs. 8,000 for PAC eBook reader tablet, to Rs. 15,000 for PAC PAD 1 tablet and Rs. 23,500 for PAC nBook.
Check out PakAccounts.com for specs more details.
http://pakaccountants.com/pakistan-introduced-ebook-reader-notebook-tablet-pc/
Here's a link to a video about Pakistan Aeronautical Complex products.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oMbzyTun7Q&feature=related
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