Profile Khurram H. Kalia

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By AMANULLAH BASHAR
Nov 13 - 19, 2000

Khurram H. Kalia, an emerging young entrepreneur has the ambitions to carve a respectable place for Pakistan especially in the world Information Technology. Khurram son of Hanif S. Kalia, an outstanding personality from business community of Pakistan, prominent businessman has his dreams to bring an IT revolution in Pakistan. He has already proved his guts and grip over the subject by demonstrating his natural talents and knack in the field of IT. Beside his contributions in development of "virtual university software" Khurram carries various distinctions to his credit. He developed a full-fledged proxy server with support for screening material by name and content type and caching of frequently visited sites. This project was developed in Java. A hybrid C/Pascal compiler. Fully object oriented design developed in C++, with support for all major functionality and constructs. Online Banking based on Citibank. A distributive database with the backend in Oracle and front-end in Active Server Pages and Developer 2000. It had online component and the head office component and the branch components. A full-fledged simulation of the pipelined DLX processor developed as a multi-threaded application in JAVA. Projects report on Windows 95 in Urdu. This was a complete exhaustive report starting from the feasibility study to the project schedule including the team structures and resource utilization and even a quality assurance manual. He also developed a complete Accounting package for Khanani and Kalia foreign Exchange in FoxPro.

He broke all previous records when he graduated with the highest CGPA in the entire history of the Foundation for Advancement of Science and Technology (FAST), the oldest and the best computer science institute of Pakistan. His CGPA was 4.00, which means that this record is unbreakable and thus he proves himself as the best computer science graduate from Pakistan. He qualified for 5 gold medals by securing maximum result in all the 31 subjects that make up the six semester's curriculum of FAST.

PAGE: Did you receive job offers from abroad in view of your outstanding achievements in the field of IT?

Khurram: "Having an unshakable faith in Almighty Allah, I turned down all good offers received from foreign companies and preferred to run my own company Kalsoft. I have all faith and confidence that despite all economic odds currently faced by the country I decided to serve my motherland and Inshallah will achieve my targets.

PAGE: Keeping in view the ground realities what are the factors which inspire you to beat the giants in competition especially when our neighbouring India has already gone far ahead in IT field?

Khurram: "We have many things better than India. Our graduates are in general, more intelligent than those of India are. So far computer science is concerned their intelligence is well accepted throughout the world. What we have to do is simply to inspire our graduates by providing them the means, which they are lacking in general. Our graduates have the potential to gain the rest by themselves. Qualitywise, our intelligent asset is already better, moreover, recently, the interest in IT is rising sharply and a lot more students are taking it up as a career choice and a lot of small and medium sized institutions are cropping up all over the country.

PAGE: Would you identify the areas which improvement is required for development of a strong IT base in Pakistan.

Khurram: The government must be more serious towards giving up infrastructure. In India even a few private sector companies have their own IT Parks. We don't have a single one and this is possible to achieve only with full government support. Another problem area is the brain drain from Pakistan. Our youth get out of the country as soon as they get any qualification of even meager nature in this field. Though they start earning good income abroad but their progress is suffocated. In developed countries they usually remain confined to the posts of programmers or so. The natives whom they would never like to give to people belong to other nations naturally hold top positions.

PAGE: Do you think that our private sector has the potential to go far ahead in IT field in near future.

Khurram: No reason to be pessimistic. We have good quality of intelligent asset. A number of institutions are working for their training. FAST, IBA, LUMS, UIT, Sir Sayyed, GIK etc. are already in the field. Further processing of this human raw material is on. One more point is that we have now been left with no other alternative. India's only software exports are to the tune of $5 billion while our total exports come to hardly a bit more than $8 billion. By exploring potentials and carrying a serious programme for human resource development the Information Technology is the field which has capability to enable Pakistan to survive and grow economically at a much faster rate. The difference between India and Pakistan is however very vast. They have already developed huge software export houses. Even a smaller house has strength of 3000-4000 programmers. We have started from the scratch, however a steady pace and approach would certainly lead us to the destination, he expressed the hope.