Pakistan makes remarkable progress in IT during 5 years | Pakistan Press Foundation (PPF)

Pakistan Press Foundation

Pakistan makes remarkable progress in IT during 5 years

LAHORE: Pakistan is placed 76th out of 102 countries in Information Technology(IT) rankings released by World Economic Forum behind Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania, and Ghana however its technology gap with India ranked 45 is less than five per cent.

Pakistan has made remarkable progress in IT during past five years. The country scored 3.06 points out of a maximum of 10 compared with 3.54 points scored by India. Even United States that tops IT ranking scored 5.5 points. This indicates that the advent of IT has narrowed down the technology gap between the developed and developing economies. The knowledge attained through IT is now accessible to every country with minimum communication infrastructure.

“It used to be the common view that information technology and poverty reduction were at the opposite ends of the spectrum of development policies. This year’s Global Information Technology Report shows that not only have some of the less developed economies started to take advantage of the ICT revolution, but also that networked readiness can be a very powerful tool to fight poverty.” said Bruno Lanvin, Program Manager, infoDev, World Bank.

However, the competitiveness increases with availability and use of IT by higher percentage of population, institutions, business houses etc. Pakistan has still to go a long way in improving its ranking as it has to improve its IT infrastructure and usage in shortest possible period. Access to Internet in Pakistan has been provided at a very rapid pace, however the speed and quality of this access still needs lot of improvement.

Malaysia is the highest ranked Muslim country in global IT ranking being placed at 26th position scoring 4.19 points followed by Tunisia at number 40 position with 3.67 point.
Source: Nation
Date:12/10/2003