US-based global IT corporation Google has offered 15,000 annual scholarships to capable young people from Pakistan in an effort to transform that nation’s very promising IT sector.
“The American tech giant wants to invest $3.5 million in Pakistan,” said Senator Dr Afnanullah Khan, a member of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT).
He said similarly, that the sale of 5G licence would bring in billions of dollars in foreign exchange, while heavy venture capital investment would also be made in the private sector. “With modest planning, Pakistan’s IT exports can easily be increased to $10 billion in the next few years,” the senator said.
He also said that South Korea has provided Pakistan’s information technology sector with a $1 billion loan with a 0.1 percent interest rate.
“There are many areas in IT that Pakistan can focus on to emerge as an IT power in the region very soon.”
The senator further said he was trying to bring revolution in the IT sector in the country along with the government as well as individually. “I want to use my higher education in the field of information technology for the benefit of the country.”
Senator Khan has completed IT projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars and holds a PhD in information technology from Oxford University. He claimed that the PML-N leadership was aware of the struggles faced by Pakistanis and desired for the country to grow more in the IT industry since, in contrast to other industries, investments in the IT sector paid off extremely rapidly.
He claimed that an important initiative that was now in progress involved the export of IT personnel to a nation like Japan. Therefore, he continued, “every effort will be made to boost the government’s focus on this area in order to remove the barriers to foreign investment.”
