Techno Park: A billion dollar enterprise

Address by Dr. Sarath Amunugama, Minister of Enterprise Development and Invstment Promotion at the forum to discuss expansion of the IT/BPO sector in Sri Lanka, held at the Ministry Auditorium at WTC recently.

TOURISM: The Sri Lanka Government considers IT a major thrust area and it is my job to coordinate all our efforts to see that we become a very significant IT centre and also to position IT as a major development area in our country.

Some of you may remember that as Secretary - Ministry of Tourism, in 1977, we were able to launch a similar thrust area.

At that time we had about 200,000 tourists and tourism was not a major economic growth factor. But we were able to launch the Tourist drive and within four years we had 500,000 tourists. It was a record.

I get the same feeling today. Because when I see you, I get a lot of confidence as we are seeing the beginning of a new, potentially very significant thrust area in our economy.

Recognizing this, the government has set up a new NCED cluster for ICT and IT. I want to bring all those efforts together and get the BOI as the cutting edge.

As soon as I came here I approved 17 projects that were pending.

I can tell you, to the best of my knowledge, all IT proposals that have come in to BOI have now been approved. We are basically a facilitating agency and not an obstructing agency. It is not our job to obstruct the growth of an industry.

With that in mind there are a few matters that we should attend to. First is to clear your approvals within the shortest possible time. I have asked this office to submit to me within 48 hours any project that comes in, and I will try my best to process them as early as possible. If there is any delay please contact me or my office and have a dialog so that we could get these projects off the ground as soon as possible.

Second is that we want to have a Techno Park. We have already found the land in Katunayake. While I was Minister of Finance, I have had discussions in Hyderabad and Bangalore with some of the top IT people there, who were willing to transfer some of their operations here, provided we give them adequate infrastructure.

To the best of my knowledge, you don’t need huge buildings to start off. What happened in India and what happened originally in the USA too, is that people started small. Go to Hyderabad and visit the Techno Park. What they did was to set up buildings and the world’s top companies just hired a floor.

They did not look initially for a huge campus or a huge institute. But what really happened was after they went there, in an year or two they decided whether expanding was feasible or not. We have been working on the basis that we go on to stage two or three with these silicon valley type of operations later.

So, we will start this Techno Park. People can rent out floors and start their operations. I was advised that we should have it close to the airport. Because we have CEOs from India coming here in the morning, doing their work, and going back in the evening.

It is perfectly feasible now because we have about 120 flights weekly to various points in India. So two of the major problems we had earlier, the frequency of flights and Visa on arrival, have now been sorted out. Without those steps it is futile to talk of Sri Lanka and India collaborations in this field.

I was in China last week and was horrified to find out that a tourist to Sri Lanka has to visit or correspond with Beijing for a visa, because they cannot get a Visa on arrival. We are trying to set that right because China being such a large country, it is not possible to travel to Beijing to our embassy all the way to get a visa to enter Sri Lanka.

It is not surprising that we have such a small number of visitors from China.

We must set straight all frontier formalities as visitors from India are fast arriving. India is becoming the major source of tourists in the country. There will be more flights to and from India for the Techno Park. We also need to talk to Telecom to have the intermediate costs brought down.

If we jack up rates we will not be so attractive as we think. I am glad BOI is already negotiating with TRC to have those rates revised or to give some type of incentive so that we could reduce the cost of broadband telecom connection for BPO/IT companies in Sri Lanka.

The next focal area is to start a Job Bank. We have no assessment as to how many employees are capable of entering this field. I have instructed the BOI to contact some of the top BPOs, and run advertisements, and look at the basic qualifications for staff for your convenience.

It is not compulsory that you take from this job bank, but as a service to you we will have a list of people that you might find suitable, with the basic qualifications needed for employment.

At the IT institute at Kaduwela, for those who graduated last week with a BA in IT, some are already offered Rs.30,000 per month, as salary. That is a very attractive salary for a young person who has just come out with an IT degree. The incentive we have in mind will attract most of you to the training aspect.

We will be signing agreements that are due today and I would like you to give your own views as to how we could improve this rapidly. If you feel we could all go to Andra Pradesh or Bangalore as a delegation, we can discuss that. It is already a 100 million US Dollar growth area at present.

However, I am looking at it to be a billion dollar enterprise. The opportunity is now there for the private sector to do what they want. There is no point going on criticizing the public sector without making sure that the private sector expands.

As far as IT is concerned, BOI would be tailored in such a way that it be a friendly place where you can get the services you may require, with speed and efficiency.