Caretaker Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunication Dr. Umar Saif on Thursday said that IT industry of Pakistan had grown and the industry could fix Pakistan’s trade imbalance as this was a service based industry, thus no bill of import as no goods being sent to Pakistan.
He shared these views as chief guest at inauguration ceremony of “ITCN Asia 2023”, International IT & Telecom Show at Expo Centre here.
The minister said that the key difference between the IT industry and all the other traditional industries was that the IT was a service based industry.
Dr. Umar Saif said that we lived in a country where the Achilles heel of our economy is how much we can export. But the Achilles heel is that wherever we decide to export, whenever we increase our exports, we also have to import a lot of stuff and raw material.
He said that the textile industry and all the other traditional industries in Pakistan also depend on import of raw materials, which means that even if we begin to export, even if there is a lot of domestic consumption, our trade imbalance continues to go into a boom, he added.
He said that the solution to this, of course, is the growth of service-based industries, industries for which the raw material already exists in this country as our biggest raw material, our biggest strength is a very large, educated, tech-savvy, skilled, young population. The average Pakistani is only 22 years old, he noted.
The minister said that our close to half a million graduates from university every year as a lot of them do technical degrees and could be employed here or become part of the global workforce to what is now called the gig economy.
He pointed out that our IT companies were not able to employ a lot of the skilled, educated, tech-savvy youth, added, they became the second largest online worker marketplace in the world.
We talked so much about the negativity, the challenges of this country but the young people of this country did not wait for us to step up and do anything for them. They bought a laptop, they teamed up with a friend, and they became part of a global workforce, he said.—APP
