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January, 2005 |
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Personality |
Biplav Man and Speeding
CAN
Biplav Man Singh used to deride the Executive Committee of the Computer Association of Nepal (CAN) for organising the CAN InfoTech, an information technology trade show, within a small space in Hotel Blue Star. Now he is the President of the same organisation, which is going to hold the seventh event in the series in the last week of January 2005. How does he feel about it ? ‘Individual perspective changes with time. I now appreciate the job that was done by my predecessors within the limitations of those times. All 114 stalls for the upcoming CAN InfoTech have been booked two months in advance and last year the turnout of visitors was unexpectedly massive. That was not due to recent years’ efforts alone. Those who began it with only 36 stalls in 1995 were really farsighted and they did their best. The success of the CAN InfoTech should be credited to them,’ is his comment. The President of CAN for the last four months, Singh’s entry into CAN as well as in the IT business was, however, not pre-planned, as he recalls. ‘I was made the President when our outgoing President left the position. As the Vice President I had no choice.’ Similarly, his entry into CAN was also coincidental. Some years ago he was working in a company which sent him to attend a meeting organised by CAN, but the people who called the meeting were not present at the appointed time and because of his outspoken nature he derided them. Some of his friends then suggested that they go as a team into the Executive Committee of CAN in the next election. So in the year 2000 (the Y2K year as can be recalled), he became the Vice President of CAN with Lochan Lal Amatya as the President so he and his friends had to come up with something new. The first thing they did was to shift the one room office of the association from Bagh Bazaar to a house in Putali Sadak, which had a separate meeting hall. The next thing they did was to shift the venue of the CAN InfoTech from Hotel Blue Star to Birendra International Convention Centre (BICC). The BICC venture was a risky one but Singh’s previous experience in marketing came handy. ‘We enlisted some sponsors for the event by making them the official airline, the official media and the official hotel. This way even those that were not directly related to IT and were not involved in the previous CAN InfoTechs were made participants in that year’s event. The idea was to ensure that the costs would be covered even if some of the stalls in the show may not be booked. The hype thus created paid its dividend. Fortunately, 60% of the money expected from the stall sales was realised two months earlier than the event date,’ he recalls. Now that he has become the President of the association, Singh says that his and the association’s vision is the same, i.e. to place Nepal on the global IT map, a vision that is incorporated also in the nation’s IT policy making it a national vision. ‘By the year 2008, the global IT business is projected to grow to US $ 8 trillion. Nepal has to try to get a share out of it,’ he says. But how can that be achieved? Singh points out that between there are about 4,500 IT graduates from Nepal’s IT colleges. Jobs have to be created for them but there is no environment for creating so many jobs. Therefore Singh suggests that a system has to be created so that these fresh graduates become technopreneurs who will start their own businesses and create jobs for others. He recalls that a budget of Rs. 100 million was set aside (when Dr. Ram Sharan Mahat was the Minister of Finance) to set up a venture capital fund for this purpose. It has to be revitalised, he says. Second, he suggests that banks should be made to lend to the IT sector under their priority sector lending quota. Nepal Rastra Bank has already recognised IT as a priority sector. Now it should revise its guidelines so that loans that go to the IT sector are considered as priority sector loans. ‘This should be a good way of utilising the excess liquidity that the banks are complaining about at present,’ he adds. The new IT graduates will, however, face management problems as they are not well trained on management aspects. For this, Singh says that an appropriate bridge has to be developed either by the IT Park or something similar. One way to create IT jobs is by bringing foreign direct investment to this field and Singh says that CAN is lobbying for the same . ‘Our suggestion is to introduce a genuine single-window system which should be swift and effective. Comparative advantage should be created for Nepal vis-à-vis the neighbouring countries otherwise even the FDI that is already there will go back as has already happened in the past,’ he warns. Personal background Also the entry into IT sector was incidental for Biplav Man Singh. “I would have been a journalist if the fate had not intervened,” he says recalling his entry into IT. While he was working as a marketing manager as well as a columnist in “Daily Diary”, he was invited by CAS Trading House, a company that was selling Apple computers, to lead a team of new recruits for a training in Delhi. “As the trainees were young people, they needed somebody as guide. So I was selected only on a temporary basis. But the training was later provided in Kathmandu itself. “As I was already involved, I too received the training and after its completion, CAS made me its Sales Manager,” he recounts. Later in 1991, he left CAS and joined college for Master in Science, but did not complete it. Meanwhile, partners in CAS separated and one of them set up Computer Advance System as a dealer of the products distributed by CAS and invited Singh to be one of the partners in the new venture. Now Computer Advance System has grown to a company with an annual turnover of about Rs. 60-70 million considering the business of all its associates. And, as the main PR personality for all these operations, Singh is given the credit for the success by his partners, though Singh himself says, “A marketer’s success depends very much on the quality of the product that the technologists produce.” Though his marketing skills are already proven from the experience of his own business and recent CAN InfoTechs, we still have to wait to see how he uses his marketing acumen to convince the authorities for the development of IT sector. |
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