Few years back, Information Technology industry was on a roll all over the world. There was an insatiable demand for IT guys from many developed nations so it started a trend among Nepali students to pursue their career in the field of Information Technology.And, so as to meet their requirements, numerous colleges, providing various degrees in IT related courses, mushroomed out. BIM, BCA, BCIS, BCIT and many more were all the outcomes. But soon the global IT market saturated and the graduate IT students did not get as welcoming atmosphere as they had dreamt of. At present there are mainly two classes of IT jobs in Nepal - Software application development and web development.

Besides few self-employed programmers, there are very few established software developing houses in Nepal. The market is extremely diminutive as well. IT has been best implemented only in the banking sector (specially in major ones like Standard Chartered, Nabil, Nepal Investment, Himalayan and Laxmi). There only few are few other production houses like Golchha that have good Information system. Government itself is lagging behind in the use of information technology. Departmental stores and travel agencies also contribute a small fraction to the demand of IT services. There not much of outsourced jobs available in this sector of IT in Nepal.

As there are more web related jobs (both internal and outsourced), this sector appears to have the larger share. There are highly qualified programmers and designers in Nepal who are ready to grab projects at minimal pay rates. This is one of the main reasons that large volume of web related projects are dumped in Nepal from USA, UK, India and many other European countries. Usually, the developers do not directly get the outsourced jobs. There normally are two or more persons or parties in between that forward the jobs. That is why the final earning of the developer is squeezed to a small amount. World Link and Mercantile are the big fishes (since they are the chief ISPs as well) but the way they treat their programmers (particularly, on financial grounds) is really shameful. Mercantile has somehow got the authority to provide .np domain names (which is for free) but they have made their own biased rules for giving away domain names. There could have been a bigger market in Nepal but the lack of proper cyber law, e-transaction acts and e-commerce rules have ruled out its chances.

IT industry in Nepal - A late start posted by Pradeep Chand @ 10:45 PM

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