An educational movement aims at I.T revolution in
Pakistan
By AMANULLAH BASHAR
Aug 06 - 12, 2001
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Brief introduction of Ziaullah Khan
Ziaullah Khan did his Matric from Habib Public
School Karachi. His early academic days do not portray him as a
serious student or a leader was in the making. He made various
unsuccessful attempts while in DJ Science College in ICMAP. He did his
Masters in economic as an external candidate. He got admission in the
Arizona State University from where he did his MBA in Finance, MS in
Computer Engineering and Manufacturing and Masters in Accountancy in
Information systems. He established his own company "Xeno
Systems. He however decided to come back to the homeland to serve his
own people. To make his dreams a reality, he has decided to train our
people with highest level of education in the I.T sector. When he
launched the "Operation Badar", he was alone but now he is
flanked by a strong group of his team-mates.
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What greater or better gift can we offer to the
nation than to teach and train our youth? We generally claim to have a
firm belief in this proverbial saying, but the ground reality
denounces these claims. Over the decades, the hopeless rate of
literacy prevailing in our country fully exposes the sincerity of
efforts made by our leadership in this respect. It is the harsh fact
that the quality education has been segmented to the affluent class
while the majority of the people have been left to suffer the
complexes of "Urdu-English Medium". The nature however never
leaves the vacuum unfilled and has sent a man in the form of Ziaullah
Khan, a non-resident Pakistani to bridge the gap. Ziaullah Khan, a
world class IT professional was living in the United States for the
last 15 years. Sacrificing the glamorous living, he decided to launch
an educational movement in the name of "Operation Badar" to
bring the cutting edge Information Technology to the grass root level
at an affordable cost in Pakistan.
Ziaullah Khan, founder of Operation Badar singles
out the quality education as the only solution for combating all
socio-economic ills and problems confronted to the nation.
He feels that in order to achieve the target of
economic revival, the country needs human resource development through
quality education. Zia says that the global proliferation of
Information Technology offers tremendous economic opportunities but
only to the people prone to the current trends in education.
Operation Badar, in fact is the right direction
towards the cherished goal through human resource development by
providing the opportunity to the people irrespective to the social
status for the quality education. Operation Badar launched hardly a
year ago received an overwhelming response, which reflects in the
registration of over 10,000 students in Karachi alone.
Zia says that his team, a group of the dedicated
people is going to introduce Operation Badar in Hyderabad and Lahore
in a couple of weeks.
In fact, Ziaullah Khan has an obsession to produce
over one lakh IT professionals by broadening the network of Operation
Badar in all smaller and major towns of Pakistan.
Currently, the area of education is facing acute
shortage of qualified teachers in I.T sector. Operation Badar will
produce quality professionals at a massive scale who would cater not
only to the need of the trade and industry but also bridge the gap in
education sector by providing highly skilled faculty staff for I.T
education.
Operation Badar has already been introduced at 9
different educational institutions. The premises of these Universities
and institutions are being utilized on off days. Operation Badar uses
the premises and Lab facilities of these institutions on Sundays by
conducting 4-5 classes of 3 hours each. Out of the total income 60 per
cent goes to the management of the institutions and remaining 40 per
cent is disbursed among the teachers. This is perhaps the first
educational movement which has been launched without having any
premises of its own.
Actually, it is the passion, which has been
translated into the shape of Operation Badar. It is an obsession to
spread the light of quality education to all segments of the society
and to bring economic prosperity both to the people as well as the
country. Interview of Ziaullah Khan is accompanied by shots of classes
and labs at Institute of Management & Information Technology (IMIT),
Technical Institute of Professional Development for Women (TPD) and
National Institute of Emerging Technologies (NIET) at Preston
University.
When his attention drawn towards the worldwide
crisis especially in the US IT sectors, he said that although he was
not an economist yet he believes that it's a temporary phase. As far
as the US economy was concerned it moves in waves ups and downs, steep
decline as experienced in the third world economies is not the
character in USA. However it should not be our concern, we have yet to
go a long way. The field is wide open and opportunities are always
there for the right man and right education. Large scope for IT
professionals exists even within Pakistan. Right now we are erecting
the infrastructure and a strong foundation for a prestigious fort
which has yet to come on the ground, he remarked.
Operation Mecca
The next step after achieving the targets of
Operation Badar, Zia says that he has plans to launch Operation Mecca.
This project aims to establish world class Software houses in
Pakistan. The trade and business community has received the idea with
tremendous zeal and fervor. They are willing to invest any amount to
make Pakistan as an entity of I.T power on the world map. Zia has a
firm belief to successfully hit this target in the days to come. A
small office as the first step towards this direction has already been
established.
Ziaullah says "Muslims of the sub-continent
did not participate in the industrial revolution. The result has been
centuries of subjugation, economic deprivation and military defeats.
If we miss the digital and information revolution, the consequences
are hard to imagine. In the past only the western powers had the
technological edge over us, this time our neighbour has also made
tremendous strides in this area. If we are not careful our very
survival is at stake. However, the good news is that there is general
consensus in Pakistan both on the individual level as well as at the
national level that mastery of information technology is crucial for
our survival. The only thing we lack is direction, focus, and a
winning strategy.
The reality is that it will be very difficult for
us to compete with USA, as it is at least 50 years ahead and India has
about a 20-year lead. The only way we can leapfrog our competitors and
effectively participate in this revolution is by focusing and gaining
excellence in upcoming and cutting edge technologies. When Japan
wanted to get into the watch making business instead of competing with
Switzerland for the market share in mechanical watches, they
completely changed the rules of the game — they focused on Quartz
technology and the rest is history.
Ziaullah while talking about Internet phenomena and
the potential of commerce said that it provides the opportunity of a
lifetime to take a big leap forward. Instead of turning out MCSCs or
training people to create animations in Flash, we should focus on
Electronic-Commerce Web Services Development technologies. The
technologies we should develop expertise should be industrial
standards so that our future should not be dependent on the economic
interests of any one company.
The technologies that are emerging as industry
standards for web and e-commerce services development are Java, C#
(pronounced as C-Sharp), XML (extensible Markup Language) and UML,
(Unified Modeling Language).
But before we create companies, which utilize these
technologies to develop world-class products, we will need world class
raw material. The raw material for the digital age is the human
capital. Recently, universities and institutes that claim to provide
IT training have been popping up like wild mushrooms all over
Pakistan. However, most of them have outdated curriculum, face acute
shortage of teaching staff and suffer from unchecked commercialism.
The quality of education provided in these institutions is not upto
the standards. The students from these institutions cannot complete
with even the students of low level US institutions, let alone
complete with the likes of MIT, Stanford or even Indian Institutes of
Technology. Some might argue that the quality would improve with time.
However, a close analysis reveals that problems are structural in
nature and cannot be solved through conventional means. These
institutions are in commercial nature, which itself is not bad but
when combined with the ground reality that generally students who have
money do not want to study and the students who want to study cannot
afford the education. Because these institutions need the revenue to
be commercially viable they have adopted lax academic standards as a
policy both at the time of entrance examinations as well as making
promotions to the next level. Also due to high standard for IT
professionals the world over, there is an acute shortage of teachers
in these institutes. Most of the academic staff has no or very little
knowledge of the subjects they are teaching. This has resulted in the
complete erosion of academic integrity and quality. In addition, some
of these institutions in order to have strong marketing appeal have
affiliated themselves with low end and highly commercial institutions
from Singapore, Malaysia, England etc. These mentioned countries and
the affiliated institutions in particular are about five years behind
in cutting edge e-commerce and Web Services technologies — resulting
in the phenomena of "blind leading the blind", Ziaullah
remarked. In the next year or two when the students of these
institutions will start biting the street they will face mass
unemployment which will result in disillusionment from the field in
general.
Facing this grave situation "Operation Badar"
has been launched with an objective providing very high quality
e-commerce application development education at very low cost to the
students and professionals in Pakistan. The organizers of Operation
Badar have no financial interests in the program. The fee charged to
students will be used to cover the cost of utilities, facilities,
teaching etc. The target is to train 313 architects and 10,000
developers in the field listed above. The quality of education
provided will be at least at par with the world leading institutions
of higher learning. The cost of training will be less than Rs1000 per
month. The total cost of the 15/19 month program will be less then
Rs20,000. Scholarships will also be awarded on need/merit basis.
To put it mildly, the targets seem to be
unrealistic and impossible to achieve given the dire ground reality.
Indeed they are not realistically achievable if we apply the
conventional solutions and wisdom. Operation Badar will have to employ
new tactics and strategies.
The following strategies will be employed:
To reduce costs Operation Badar will not make any
capital investment, utilizing already existing facilities. Existing
computing and classroom facilities of Universities and Institutions
will be used on weekends and during the nights. To accommodate a large
number of candidates, auditoriums, cinema houses, marriage halls etc
will be rented during the time when they are not being used for
ordinary business.
Information and communication technology will be
employed in all aspects of education to communicate with large number
of students at low cost.
To overcome the shortage of teachers, the class
sizes will be as large as the premises permit. However to maintain
quality audio systems, projectors and other audiovisual equipment will
be used. Email, news groups and other Internet technologies will be
promoted. Emphasis will also be placed on identifying and training new
teaching talent.
To maintain the highest quality standards, a
process of continued filtering of students will be undertaken. The
unwilling students will be immediately removed from the program. To
maintain quality, mass level testing will be conducted on Internet.
The programmers of Operation Badar have already developed the
technology for such applications.
Students will only be admitted in the program after
an extensive screening process conducted mainly through mass level
intelligence and aptitude testing using Internet based applications.
At major milestones during the program, students will be asked to take
the Java Certification Examinations, which are jointly sponsored by
most of the major technology companies of the world. The certification
is recognized and supported by IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems. BEA
systems, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Oracle, the Sun/Netscape Alliance
and Sybase. This will provide international recognition to our
students, validate their knowledge base and make them highly sought
after developers. It will also serve as a benchmark to check the
quality and effectiveness of Operation Badar. By the end of the
program students would have received three world-recognized
certifications: Sun Certified Java Programmer, Certified Solution
Developer and Certified Enterprise Developer and IBM Certified XML
Developer.
Only students having exceptional aptitude for
programming background will be admitted to the program. Once the
operation are up and running taped classes will be shown in cinema
halls in off-hours. For question and answers sessions newly trained
teachers will be present. The view tapes of the classes will also be
wildly distributed.
The operations of the program are already under way
for a year. More than 10,000 students have already been enrolled in
Karachi alone. These students are attending classes at Sir Syed
University, Dadabhoy Institute for Management Sciences, APIIT, IMIT,
Niet, Fahimunnisa Memorial Aligarh Institute of Technology for Girls
and technical institute of Professional Development for Women have
already joined the program in Karachi.
The extreme shortage of manpower trained in cutting
edge Web Services based E-commerce technologies will assure that
students training by Operation Badar will be in high demand both
domestically and internationally. Given the economic realities of the
global village they are likely to be immediately recruited by the US
and European based high tech companies. Once overseas, there is no
doubt that these developers will establish Pakistan as a software
powerhouse and send back valuable foreign exchange. However this is
not enough to change the fortunes of this land. What is needed is a
parallel effort to establish world class Pakistan based software
development companies. New companies will have to be established and
old companies will have to be refocused towards e-commerce and
Web-Services.
The results achieved so far by Operation Badar are
very encouraging and have kindled the hopes for a prosperous future
for our younger generation. No doubt, it is the quality education,
which answers to all our problems. To be conscious that you are
ignorant is a great step towards knowledge.
RECORDS
Records are generally made to be broken, but Taqi
Hasan, an outstanding student of Operation Badar has set an
unbreakable world record in the field of Information Technology. He
has been declared as the highest scorer (100 per cent) of Sun
Certified (US) Java Professional (SCJE) exams. A challenger may repeat
this performance but will not be first. Afsah Shafqat, a 12-year old
girl, yet another brilliant student of Operation Badar also achieved
the world class performance. At her young age she achieved the touch
of class being the youngest Sun Certified Java programmer of the
world. Credit certainly goes to Operation Badar for the talent hunt
and also for breaking all taboos such as certain level of education,
grades and age etc. in vogue in our system as pre-requisites for
entering the higher studies. It is unfortunate that uncalled for
barriers in our education system are killing the wisdom at the cost of
so called educational degrees and certificates. Operation Badar
however has provided a platform to the people irrespective of their
age and educational degrees to prove their worth and wisdom. The
spirit reflects in the fact that over 500 students between the age of
12 and 19 are now studying in Operation Badar for juniors at Institute
of Management and Information Technology under this talent hunt
program. Students who will qualify in this 3 months course will be
given direct admission in the regular Operation Badar program. It is
worth mentioning that Afsah, the world record holder of Java
programmer and her two sisters are also in the regular program.
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