Pak IT industry looks to India for partnership

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Pakistan's nascent information technology (IT) sector is taking a different route from the bigger Indian counterpart but is still looking for help in making a leap forward.

"The IT industry is small and very different. It has small and medium companies with say 30 employees, generating $30 million, unlike Indian companies with 70,000 employees and billions of dollars of turnover," president of Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT & ITES Jehan Ara told reporters here.

She said the Pakistani IT industry was not trying to "mimic" the Indian IT industry, as it was far bigger.

"Mostly, we are into knowledge processing.... Our BPOs are only doing KPOs," she said.

Jehan Ara has been coming to India for the last seven years and trying to work out projects with Indian companies.

"We have tried to work, sometimes it has worked out. There is already some work happening through some other third entity," she said.

According to the head of IBM Pakistan, Humayun Bashir, Indian IT companies could look at Pakistan as another place to ramp up their global growth.

"In line with India's plan vision 2020, which aims to increase the software growth from $50 billion to $200 billion, they (Indian IT companies) have been setting up centres in Egypt, Bangladesh. Maybe, they should look at Pakistan. We are certainly eager to work with them," he said.

Earlier, while speaking at an Indo-Pak business meet, Infosys Technologies chief mentor N. R. Narayana Murthy said Indian companies could help Pakistan in strengthening its IT-BPO industry by sharing expertise and best practices with their Pakistani counterparts.

Murthy said like India, Pakistan too has a talented pool of workers who speak English who could be hired at competitive cost.