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IT’s politically correct: Indian, Pak firms eye tech tie-ups
Sibabrata Das / Mumbai
The improvement in India-Pakistan relations may kickstart a collaboration between
the two countries in the information technology sector. A 15-member Pakistani
delegation, which has come to attend ‘Nasscom 2004: India Leadership Forum’,
has made visits to the offices of Mastek and Datamatics in Mumbai.
The next stop will be Bangalore where the team would visit offices of various
Indian IT companies for exploring of a commercial relationships. “We are
looking at meeting people in Wipro and Infosys in Bangalore. We hope to find
out areas where we can cooperate in the IT sector,” Pakistan Software Houses
Association (PASHA) president Jehan Ara said.
This is the first time that a Pakistani delegation has come to participate in
an IT event in India, expressing a desire to break from the practice of growing
independently. “We are a young industry. There is much to learn from the
Indian IT industry which is older and much more mature. We could collaborate
on areas like research and business intelligence,” Ara said.
NetSol Technologies, a Nasdaq-listed software company promoted by Pakistanis,
is in fact planning to acquire a software development company in India. The
IT industry in Pakistan, Ara said, is in the process of changing its character
and looking at diversifying from its earlier focus on customer application to
businesses like product development.
The Indian IT industry plans to respond to the initial interest shown by a representative
group of Pakistanis. “The next natural step is for Nasscom to take a delegation
to Pakistan. This will provide us a base to understand each other’s capabilities,”
Nasscom president Kiran Karnik said.
Pakistan’s software services industry is small with annual revenues of
$50-100 million. There are only 350 companies. But it is a growing sector, Ara
said. “The government has provided several incentives like tax and duty
concessions. Telecom infrastructure is improving and bandwidth costs are low,”
she said. “We have a price structure that is competitive. We have an English-speaking
young IT population and some of them have returned from the US to set up shop
in Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore. We are creating a talent pool of around 20,000
IT graduates a year,” she added.
India may not even take notice of those figures. But Pakistan, as Ara said,
has started getting outsourcing work from a number of multinational companies
including Time Warner, Citibank and Yamaha.
India can offer expertise to Pakistan in e-governance and a whole area of citizen
services, Karnik said. Indian companies also can set up a base in Pakistan for
delivery. There is even possibility of a three-way base with US-India-Pakistan
as the axis. “We are still in an infant state of exploration. But it is
definitely an improvement from the stage when Indian companies assumed Pakistan
as a closed market,”Karnik said.
—The Financial Express
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