March 3, 2006	Friday	Safar 2, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, March 2: Minister for Information Technology Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari on Thursday called for strengthening links between the industry and academia to pave way for the production of top quality human resource that formed the core of a knowledge-based economy.

“We no longer live in an industrial age. It is the information age and countries that do not build a knowledge-based economy will fail to make headway into the next information age,” the minister said while speaking at the launching of an IT Forum for Young Entrepreneurs/Innovators by the Institute of Information Technology of the Quaid-i-Azam University in collaboration with Unesco.

The minister said no developed country could afford to have undeveloped human resource. Everything now revolves around people and if their potential could be harnessed well, nobody could stop them from attaining a position of eminence in the comity of the nations, he said.

Mr Leghari said that Pakistan’s success in telecom sector had established the fact that with the right kind of policies and patronage at the highest political level any sector could produce miraculous turnarounds. “IT thrives on the quality human resource and if our universities can produce skilled professionals capable of meeting industry requirements, the days are not far when the IT sector will also be quoted as a success story,” he said.

Awais said he recently checked with six to seven leading universities asking them what help they needed to boost their IT disciplines and he was surprised when told that the universities combined were producing merely 600-700 IT professionals a year which was far below the number needed by the burgeoning IT industry.

He said his ministry had set up a well-structured R&D Fund that had extended scholarships worth millions of rupees to the deserving students to pursue MS and PhD studies abroad. He said the fund could also be used to support specific skill development courses as identified by the industry and academia.

Awais said the telecom sector had already provided an ideal platform for a revolution in the IT sector and with the mobile phone users touching 25 million mark and some 20 million more to be added within the next year, the production of interesting applications and development of local content for the mobile users was bound to go a long way towards boosting the IT industry.

He said mobile phone had emerged as the most vitally used tool and the future IT applications were bound to develop around it. Mobility and simplicity were going to be the hallmark of mobile phone technology and that is where the future IT market exists, he added.

He said the government had also launched a multi-million Venture Capital Fund to promote managerial and entrepreneurial skills, finance new businesses and start-up companies keen on producing service-based IT solutions.

“We would also focus on academic institutions as the ministry wanted to work them to develop interesting ideas and specific entrepreneurial skills,” he added.

Earlier, Prof Dr Qasim Jan, Vice-Chancellor Quaid-i-Azam University, said IT had become the engine of economic growth and it was good to see Pakistan notching up successes in this sector. He said the QAU was already in the process of bringing innovative changes in its academic programmes which would reflect a rich blend of both applied and theoretical aspects of information technology besides supporting research and development consistent with the market.

Director Institute of Information Technology Dr Farhana Shah said the institute was setting up the IT Forum for Young Entrepreneurs and Innovators to create a platform to inform and assist young entrepreneurs in their response to the challenge of rapidly changing business environment.

She said new information technologies were emerging everyday to enable the companies to speed up their work processes, lower costs and improve quality of products and services.

“The IT Forum will bring together young students, university researchers and dynamic innovators to enhance their skills to find solutions to the emerging problems. The initiative will also help develop quality human resource,” she added.