In the past year, the MSC had completely overshadowed the National IT Agenda and the National IT Plan. While it is exciting that the MSC would have a high-capacity, fully digital telecommunications infrastructure, such as a fibre-optic backbone with 2.5-10 gigabits per second capacity, would this development be at the expense of the development of the National Information Infrastructure which could provide high-speed, universal and affordable access to all Malaysians throughout the country, and not just in the 15 km by 50 km MSC.
This fundamental question concerns the issue as to whether the MSC is compatible with the principle of “universal, affordable and equitable access” of the Information Superhighway to ensure that there is no new division of Malaysians into the “information-rich” and the “information-poor”, or in this case, an oasis of information-prosperity in the MSC against a national backdrop of comparative information backwardness or even poverty.
The Information Superhighway is supposed to mean the death of geography and the end of the tyranny of distance. Isn’t the establishment of the MSC a reversal of this process, where geography is again important?
There are also many other questions about the MSC which cries out for answer.
One important question is whether Malaysia has the pool of IT skills and expertise to make the MSC a success? India, by per capita figures, is an information-technology poor country, with an installed base of personal computers at about 1.2 million in 1996 - which is one of the lowest in the world. However, despite this hardware-impoverished environment, India’s software industry has a global reach and competitiveness.
The answer lies in the large absolute amount of relevant talent available in the country and in the way in which it has been focussed. India has an English-speaking scientific workforce, second in size only to that of the United States. Around 40,000 technical graduates come out of the nation’s 1,700 higher education institutions and some 475 computer institutes produce 15,000 graduates every year. Comparative figures for 1996 show software professionals in the US, Japan and Germany costing 11 to 13 times as much as their Indian equivalents.
The sheer number of staff available to Indian software houses has also enabled them to take on larger projects than most of their foreign competitors could contemplate and this has in turn resulted in a rapid rise in professionalism. A study commissioned by the World Bank in 1995 showed that India was the most favoured nation for out-sourcing of software development among vendors in the US, UK and Japan, and by the end of 1996 India will have more software companies with ISO 9000 certification than any other country.
Recently, Bill Gates said India could become an economic and software superpower in the 21st century by having the largest source of trained manpower for global IT industry, if its invests in the tools which would drive the country into the future, namely basic infrastructure, education and information technology.
India is one of the top three countries in the world for Microsoft’s investments in 1996-1997 and Gates visited India early this month and launched Microsft India’s “University Advanced Technology Labs Programme” (UATL) at five Universities in India where he declared that “unleashing creativity at all levels will be the mark of the future use of computers”.
During the Sixth Malaysia Plan, 1991-1995, Malaysia had a shortage of over 7,000 IT-related manpower involving skills in the areas of systems development and engineering, operations management, consultancy, training, R & D, software development and data base management, and this shortage has now become even more acute, standing between 20,000 to 30,000 IT-related personnel. These figures to do include top-notch IT experts.
Malaysia not only faces the problem of acute shortage of IT personnel and experts, but the socio-political and cultural conditions to unleash the “creativity” of our IT manpower if Malaysia is to be a world software leader through the MSC.
In his recent dialogue with Barisan Nasional leaders, the Prime Minister said the MSC with a 50 km by 15 km area will be a testbed for experiments in IT to protect Malaysians and that whatever adverse effects resulting from MSC, if they occur, will be confined within the area. What could be these adverse effects that could be kept confined to the MSC as if it is a cordon sanitare in a world which has become borderless? In any event, what is the best-case and worst-case scenarios for the MSC.
In raising these questions, I want to make it clear that the DAP supports the MSC concept as an international IT hub, but we want to make clear our three primary concerns: firstly, it should not be at the expense of the balanced and equitable development of the National Information Infrastructure so as not to create a new division between the “information-rich” and “information-poor” in Malaysia; secondly, that there is national back-up to support and sustain the development of the MSC to become a world IT hub; and thirdly, that MSC does not become a glorified Free Traze Zone eventually benefitting foreigners rather than Malaysians themselves.
I commend the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamed for the great coup of getting the Who’s Who in the world IT industry like Bill Gates of Microsoft, James Barksdale of Netscape, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Louis Gerstner of IBM, Scott McNealy OF Sun Microsystems, Fred Gluck of Bechtel, Nobuyuki Idei of Sony, Bon Moo Koo of LG Group of South Korea, Noboru Miyawaki of NTT, Eckhard Pfeiffer of Compaq, Lewis Platt of Hewlett Packard, Gary Tooker of Motorola, and Stan Shih of Acer to serve on the International Advisory Panel (IAP) on the MSC to provide advice and counsel to the Prime Minister and the Malaysian Government on strategic issues related to the MSC, such as infrastructure and the environment, policies, marketing and incentives, and the development of domestic industries.
The views and concerns expressed by the panellists at the first meeting of the IAP at the Stanford University in California in early January should be given serious attention, such as the shortage of skilled workers, how to market the products from the MSC to neighbouring countries, how the proposed cyberlaws could be taken outside the MSC and the country, doubts as to whether the proposed MSC with a liberalised environment could be achieved with the present structure or time frame, the unpredictability of the IT industry, etc.
Equally pertinent are advice about the difference between the Silicon Valley and the MSC, as the former is “totally uncontrolled” and that for Malaysia to attract the entertainment industry to the MSC, “the creative people must be given a lot of freedom”.