ISLAMABAD, April 19: Three new campuses of Comsats will be established in different cities in the next six months, Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunication Awais Ahmad Leghari said.
He was inaugurating the electronics exhibition at Comsats Institute of Information Technology on Saturday.
“These institutes, to be set up in Attock, Gujrat and Dera Ghazi Khan, will become operational by September this year,” Mr Leghari said.
He said the government wanted to expand the scope of Comsats Institute of Information Technology by taking it to the far-flung and backward areas of the country to enable the youth to acquire IT skills.
He said the government was working to create demand for IT professionals and would launch its e-government programme in the next financial year to give out projects to the local IT industry.
He expressed the hope that the move would help absorb a large number of IT students and professionals, besides creating employment opportunities.
Mr Leghari said his ministry had provided research and development fund of the PTCL to individuals and groups that would come up to the committee, headed by him, with projects aimed at developing and promoting IT products and skills.
He said international events of the last few weeks had showed that “it is knowledge and application of the same where true strength, both military and economic, lay”.
He said oil or natural wealth could not come to the rescue of a nation once it became complacent, thinking that money could buy everything.
“Unless we have the desire for knowledge and the ability to apply it, we will, like many other unfortunate countries, be relegated to the dregs of the world community waiting for handouts and second-hand knowledge,” he added.
The minister said Pakistan’s youth had the capacity to turn the tide of time if they put their minds and backs to it.
“Nations that have promoted and applied the fields of sciences like information technology, biotechnology, genetics, robotics, space, bionics and advanced communication systems have made sure that using the path of vertical integration from designing, manufacturing, implementing and marketing are the nations which have successfully steered their economies and people to secure shores,” he said.
The minister said people seemed to have forgotten the fundamentals in the hype of IT that “unless you have the hardware platforms on which all this software will ride on, we are working in a vapour-ware environment”.