Daily Times

Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives Ahsan Iqbal Tuesday said that promotion of Information Technology (IT) sector of the country was the top priority of current coalition government.

Addressing an event here, the minister said digital revolution was providing equal opportunities to all, therefore the government was giving special focus to this sector to reap maximum benefits out of it. Ahsan Iqbal said Pakistan had already made a big progress in the IT sector due to better policy intervention by the PML-N government.

“It was our government that decided to privatize the telecom sector, which brought revolution in the sector and created thousands of jobs”, he added. Similarly, he said “we also issued licenses of 3G and 4G spectrum which were stuck up for over eight years.

Ahsan Iqbal said the PML-N government also provided 1m laptops to the youth of the country due to which Pakistan had now become the third largest e-lancing country of the world. Likewise, he said fibre optic cable was laid across the country under the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and in 2017-18, then government also launched a Digital Pakistan Policy. However, he said due to the political disruption, the policy was interrupted.

He said when he left the ministry in 2018, total allocation of the federal budget was Rs1000b, however when he took over the charge of the ministry again in 2022, the federal budget shrank to as low as Rs550b.

He said the previous government had no money to release for whole of the last quarter of fiscal year 2021-22 which meant that the national exchequer was empty. So, he said due to the political instability, instead of moving forward, we were lagging backward so far as the national economy was concerned.

Due to fiscal constraints, the minister said the allocation for the current fiscal year was set at Rs700b despite the fact that the demands for the ongoing projects during the current fiscal year was over Rs2000b.

He said the country where there was no political stability and where the Prime Ministers and other ministers had to face court cases every other day, could not progress and move forward.

He said that corruption in both India and Bangladesh was more than that in Pakistan but still they were progressing with far higher pace. He said it was because there was political stability and policy continuity in such countries.