Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication has completed consultation on the draft of National IT Policy 2016, envisaging software and telecom enabled service exports at $6 billion by 2020.
Earlier this month, the ministry made the draft of National IT Policy 2016 public for views, comments and feedback.
According to the officials concerned, consultation process is almost complete now and the draft policy will be given final shape soon.
It is expected that the draft policy will be submitted to the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) for approval next month, an official added.
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However, stakeholders have termed the exports target of $6 billion by 2020 as unrealistic while keeping the ground realities in view.
Syed Ahmad CEO of DPL Software Company said government claims that IT exports are about $2.5 billion, however, State Bank of Pakistan’s (SBP) data reflects only $500 million. There is no study to measure the exact exports figures or to find out why there is discrepancy in govt and SBP figures, he added.
Syed Ahmad further said that exports of formal IT industry range between $500-600 million and non-formal industry i.e. freelance is around one billion dollars. However, it is not easy to regulate the freelancers to report the actual figures. IT exporters said that government needs to give incentives to the sector, especially to the freelancers, to increase the exports.
About the IT Policy 2016
Some of the key features of the National IT Policy draft are sectoral digitization, big data, data analytics, entrepreneurship, Internet of Things (IoT), e-commerce, e-agriculture, software export.
According to the draft policy, there has been higher growth in recent years in the Pakistani IT industry as a whole with IT firms earning nearly $560 million, mainly in software development and service outsourcing. However, it has been estimated that around 75 percent of earnings are held overseas to finance the cost of foreign offices and international marketing making the real figure in excess of $2.2 billion. IT exports have witnessed a 41 percent increase during last one year.
The draft policy states that Pakistan has more than 2000 IT companies and calls centers and the number is increasing every year. Pakistan has more than 300,000 English-speaking IT professionals with expertise in latest IT products and technologies. More than 20,000 IT graduates and engineers are being produced every year.
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Pakistan has 14 Software Technology Parks at present with an area of one million square feet with more being planned for the future. Freelancing revenue is another $90-100 million per year, domestic revenue is roughly around Rs 30 billion or $300 million and the market of cellular mobile companies is huge with total imports of Rs 73.224 billion for the fiscal year 2014-15. All these of reflect a promising IT landscape in Pakistan.
The policy is targeting to enhance exports of software and IT/IT enabled services to create jobs and contribute towards the government’s efforts to increase overall exports and IT remittances.
The policy mainly concentrates on emerging areas of mobile applications, responsive web applications, and animation. It is also focused on moving up the global IT value chain while it is also exploring new areas where low end business process outsourcing jobs can be created.
The policy aims to attract multinational global companies to utilize Pakistani manpower for back-end services by providing appropriate incentives in a transparent manner, utilize the Pakistani diaspora in the US and European markets to plug young entrepreneurs into the global IT value chain. The policy is aimed at providing enabling environment for companies to set up venture capital and other financing mechanisms to start up companies.
The ministry spokesperson said that given the growing trends of information technology, it has become imperative to reformulate the National IT Policy to take into account the transformative fundamentals of technology and its ecosystem centered on digitization.
