"Work in America without leaving your family and homeland," reads a newspaper advertisement by Touchstone Communications, a US contact centre located in Islamabad serving the US and British financial services companies.

The chairman of the Call Centres Association of Pakistan, Farukh Aslam, described the nation's call centre and IT-based outsourcing as "nascent" with just two dozen companies employing 1,000 people.

But Aslam predicted the industry would rapidly expand.

"Next year over 10,000 people can get jobs in these industries, it's probably 1,000 percent growth," Aslam said, who is also country manager for US-based Touchstone communications.

Aslam, who left his home city of Lahore to study in the United States in late 1983, said Pakistan's IT-based industry was coming off a very low base, largely due to government apathy.

"To my shock and dismay there was no clear-cut policy of the government of Pakistan in March 2000, when I first set foot in this industry here," Aslam said.

Aslam said he took an active part in advising the government on amending laws to facilitate the entry of call centres.

"The next two years were spent in changing those laws and reducing bandwidth cost to make it possible for call centre businesses to flourish," Aslam said.

While progress has been made, Aslam said the government still lacked the vision required to harness the full potential of the outsourcing industry.

"Call centres... are a 600 billion dollars global industry. Can't we get a 10 billion dollars share out of that? Absolutely. We can, but we need visionary leadership," Aslam said.

"It could be the largest foreign exchange earner for Pakistan."

Aslam said the call centre industry required a good English speaking workforce and urged the government to make English medium schools accessible for everyone, rather than just the rich.

"People who really need these jobs can't get it because they can't speak good English," Aslam said.

Investors agree that Pakistan has strong potential to provide low-cost IT-based services.

Maazz Ahmed Shamsi, business development manager of call centre provider ZRG International, told AFP his company had performed very well in its 10 years in the industry.

"We are the first Pakistan-based telecom solutions company to have exported call center solutions abroad to Mobitel, a cellular phone company in East Tanzania," Shamsi said.

"For companies like ZRG there is tremendous potential in call centre services and remote IT services in Pakistan."

But while Shamsi said authorities had taken "good steps to provide incentives" to the local IT and telecoms industries, he also said much more government support was needed to tap into the international market.

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