Patterson and Paulwell PRIME MINISTER PJ Patterson's State visit to India due to get underway a few days ago has been postponed indefinitely, with the Indian authorities citing "bad timing" among reasons for the postponement.
Accompanying the Prime Minister was supposed to be a delegation of local businessmen, led by the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Technology Phillip Paulwell on a trade mission to recruit 50 Indian professors to train Jamaicans in Information Technology(IT).
Mr. Paulwell staked a great deal on this trade mission as the initial impetus for his IT revolution in Jamaica. Indeed in June of this year, Mr. Paulwell's junior minister, Colin Campbell, told the House of Representatives, that the Minister would be leading a mission to India for the recruitment of senior Indian IT personnel. He said at the time that the Indian professors would be replaced by trained Jamaicans over a three-year period. Advertisements were to be placed in the local and overseas media to speed up the recruitment.
Mr. Campbell said that in pursuit of its objective of 40,000 jobs in the IT sector, Government's plans were well advanced for the delivery of 8,000 such jobs this year. This latest news will come as a set back to the Minister's plans and to some extent will put back his timetable.
A spokesman in the Office of the Prime Minister said yesterday: "The official State visit to India has been postponed. The trip was to combine aspects of IT trade agreements and it is my understanding that a delegation of Jamaican businessmen were to use the opportunity to make business contacts".
It is not clear just why the trip was postponed.
Indian High Commission Second Secretary Sudhir Joshi said: "The visit that was supposed to take place this month has been postponed and the Jamaican foreign office is finalising a new delegation list. We are expecting the visit to go ahead early in the new year."
Technology Minister Phillip Paulwell made the trip a centre piece of plans to educate local people in IT skills. It was hoped that bringing professors and other IT specialists to Jamaica would help fulfil his mission of creating 40,000 jobs in the information technology sector over the next three years.
