In Pakistan, information technology is a rising industry with the potential to grow even more in the future. The Ministry of Information Technology of the Government of Pakistan is in charge of IT-related issues. During the recent decade, Pakistan’s government has provided incentives to IT investors, resulting in the expansion of the IT sector. Between 2003 and 2005, the country’s IT exports increased by roughly 50% to around 48.5 million USD.
In its 2014 Global Information Technology Report, the World Economic Forum ranked Pakistan 111th out of 144 nations in information and communication technology development.
As part of its efforts to build an “information age” in Pakistan, the government has highly valued information technology. Pakistan’s Prime Minister formed and chaired a National Task Force on “Technology-Driven Knowledge Economy.” The Task Force’s Vice Chairman is Atta-ur-Rahman, and the Task Force has initiated various national programmes connected to information technology. Artificial Intelligence is one significant area of attention, and the Task Force is establishing several Centers of Excellence in colleges across the country. The debut of 3G/4G technologies from 2013 to 2018 ushered in a historic upheaval in the sector, and the IT business is booming. According to Bloomberg, Pakistan’s technology sector had a record year in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 China tech crackdown.
The government wants to raise productivity in the public sector, improve the country’s IT infrastructure standards, and use IT as a management tool to promote good governance by focusing on information technology’s technological growth. In Pakistan, significant progress has been made in developing effective computerised e-government systems for major departments such as the police, law enforcement agencies, and district administration.
In Pakistan, software development is a rapidly growing field, and the government has launched several initiatives to promote software development and exports. Pakistani IT firms have started building software for various industries and services. Lowcost software solutions created locally are accessible in schools, hospitals, supermarkets, and other companies. Major control systems, such as ERPs, are also designed for large businesses that produce textiles, medicines, food and drinks, and other products.
The government of Pakistan has a different definition of broadband than the rest of the industrialised world. Pakistan, for example, defines broadband as always being 128 kbit/s, whereas the FCC in the United States defines it as 20 Mbit/s. Or a 159-fold difference in speed (15900 percent). The Government of Pakistan (GoP) recognised in 2015 that telecommunications had become one of the most important sectors in the economy, contributing to society’s well-being and contributing significantly to GDP, and thus issued a Telecommunication Policy 2015.
The e-commerce business in Pakistan is estimated to be worth $4 billion. According to the Oxford Dictionary, E-commerce is defined as business transactions carried out electronically over the Internet. With the launch of Beliscity.pk in 2001, Abid Beli established Pakistan’s first e-commerce enterprise. Since then, the market had gradually increased until 2012, when the sector reached a turning point.
In 2018, the Pakistani government reformulated its Digital Pakistan Policy to reflect its increasingly transformed role across all sectors of socio-economic development and their accelerated digitisation and transformational modernisation into integrated components of a holistic knowledge-based economy. One of the fastest-growing industries in the country is information and communications technology. Only 1.3 percent of the population accessed the Internet in 2001. By 2006, it had risen to 6.5 percent, and by 2012, it had been increased to 10.0 percent. Pakistan has a 54 percent internet user rate as of July 2021, which corresponds to around 118 million persons with internet access.