Home Minister helped Pakistani delegates get visas
By Bala Shah

Pakistan has a population of 200 million and its scientists and techies have the same high quality skills as India.  Pakistan has cutting edge nuclear technology and is highly wired with about half its citizens (approx 95 million) owning mobile phones.  Despite the recession, it had a growing IT/BPO industry. 

Pakistanis, like Indians, have settled in large numbers in US and Europe and in that sense it is a connected country. And whatever happens there affects India.  And vice versa.

NASSCOM held its Leadership Forum in Mumbai between Feb 9 – 11, 2010. This 3 day NASSCOM leadership forum, which cost about Rs. 30K per person, had the theme of ‘New Times, New Ideas, New Directions’. It had about 300 foreign guests including 4 from Pakistan.

Techgoss had always felt that the vast majority of Indians and Pakistanis want to live in peace and harmony.  Sadly, some extremist forces are hell bent on shattering good neighborly relations.  There are many in the Pakistani IT-ITES sectors who are equally interested in the positives of both countries. Jehan Ara was born in Karachi but moved to Hong Kong as a child.  Jehan is the current President of P@SHA (Association of Software Houses Association, Pakistan) and hopes for good long term relationships between the peoples of both countries. She is one of the key figures in Pakistan’s booming tech industry.

Jehan Ara and 3 others from Pakistan were also invited to the NASSCOM conference in Mumbai. Apparently, the NASSCOM leadership had to personally ring Home Minister Chidambaram to ensure that Visas were given on time to our guests from Pakistan. She has blogged about the challenges in getting Visas to India and the warm reception by their Indian hosts.

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The flight itself was a very short one – one hour and 25 minutes and although take-off was 10 minutes late due to air-traffic control, we landed in Mumbai at 12 noon. We were excited about the upcoming conference and happy that the visa had been granted. It had been a real hassle this time with Home Ministry clearance, NoCs from the Ministry of External Affairs and the Maharashtra State Government all being part of the requirements. The President and Vice President of Nasscom, and several friends within the Association, had put in a lot of effort to ensure that we got our visas at the 11th hour. Unfortunately our visas were single entry, Mumbai-only conference visas for a 10 day period, instead of the multiple-entry business visas that we had requested, which would have included cities like Bangalore, Delhi and Hyderabad.

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Anyway, at our level, we continue to try and meet, to exchange views and to learn from each other. Som Mittal, President of Nasscom, warmed our hearts when during his inaugural address at Nasscom 2010, he said that he specially wanted to extend a warm welcome to the delegates from Pakistan. There were 1700 delegates at the Nasscom event this year. This included around 300 foreign delegates. Som was one of the key people who was responsible for processing our visas as quickly as he could. He called the Home Minister himself to ensure that it was done. Thanks Som.
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