India, Egypt can work together in IT area: envoy

Information technology is one of the areas where India and Egypt can work together as both the countries have the potential in that sector, India's envoy to Egypt has said.
Ambassador Sanjay Bhattacharyya's comments came during a roundtable "Digitisation in India and Egypt" which was organised yesterday at the Maulana Azad Centre for Indian Culture (MACIC), the cultural wing of the Embassy of India in Zamalek.
The roundtable was part of the of 'MACIC Roundtable', a monthly seminar series involving youth, academicians, civil society on the issues of mutual interest between India and Egypt.
"Egypt is quite the market leader, very defiantly, the regional superpower in IT, the kind of developing that you have, the research infrastructure of the region, the kind of startups, the youth population that you have, these factors makes Egypt a natural leader," Bhattacharyya said.

He said the growing importance of the IT sector in India makes it as one to the areas in which India and Egypt can work together.
"I usually see digitalisation is connected to the aspect of increasing information and the great desire actually for everybody to have access to it. Connectivity in a broader information state is perhaps one of the key issues that digitalisation is trying to do," he said.

"Digitalisation and information technology in banking is very important as it increases the experience of customers and make money transfer much easier," said Tamer M Sadek, Group Head at Banque Misr, an Egyptian bank.

Professor Khalid Raza spoke about the importance of bringing Information technology and bioinformatics together.
"Bioinformatics is a very new area which is a combination of biology with IT. Information technology apps are solving some biological problems," said Raza, visiting professor, Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences in Ain Shams University.