ISLAMABAD, April 4: The Global Information Technology Report (GITR) of the World Economic Forum (WEF) has reflected the lack of seriousness on part of the Pakistan government in the IT sector.

The report ‘Living in a Hyper connected World 2012’, released by the WEF, on Wednesday indicates Pakistan’s challenges and opportunities on 10 different pillars.

The report highlights that Pakistan lost its competitive advantage on fixed broadband internet tariffs, dropping its ranking from 36 in 2011 to 79 in 2012, showing that residents were using less internet in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP).

For improving access to information and communication technologies (ICT) for all citizens to basic services health, education, financial services, etc., dropped by 30 points to 113 compared to last year. The government’s priority to ICT plunged to the rank of 103rd from 83 last year.

The Ministry of Telecom and Information Technology headed by Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, shows lack of efficiency and poor governance on the part of the government.

The report highlights that serious concern and bottleneck on Pakistan’s business and entrepreneurship initiatives have been identified on Pakistan’s policies on the tax regime introduced in 2011.

In the area of obtaining benefits through IT in various taxes collection regimes, Pakistan stood 58th this year from 39 last out of 142 economies in the world.

The report also identified that the extent of information and communication technologies creating new organisational models were also weakening in Pakistan, going to 81st from 63rd in 2011.

However, Pakistan improved its competitiveness in certain areas including efficiency of the legal system in challenging regulations, where Pakistan improved from 95th in 2011 to 79th in 2012 out of 142 countries.

Judicial independence was also highlighted as one of the advantages in Pakistan, where the improvements were made on 11 points, thus ranking Pakistan at 62nd in the world.

The effectiveness of the law-making body has also improved 9 points, with a ranking of 93rd this year. The quality of education system and capacity for innovation also showed improvement of 7 points each ranking at 79th and 51st respectively.

On the 10 pillars of the Global Information Technology Report (GITR) 2012 out of 142 countries, Pakistan on the Ist pillar scored ; Political and regulatory environment (110), 2nd pillar - business and innovation environment (96), infrastructure and digital content (108), 3rd pillar - doing well on the affordability pillar (26), 5th pillar - Skills (129), 6th pillar - individual usage (104), 7th pillar - business usage (96), 8th pillar - government usage (103), 9th pillar - economic impacts (94) and on the 10th pillar that is social impacts Pakistan scored 99 out of 142 countries.