3rd IT Park in Kazan and integration of State Services: plans for Digital Economy announced in Tatarstan
Aspiring to reach the format of “problem solving in three clicks”
Tatarstan Minister of Digital Development, Information Technologies and Communications Ayrat Khayrullin talked about the implementation of Digital Economy national project. According to him, the main task is to make sure that information technologies benefit the republic and its residents. The IT industry has been experiencing a dynamic rise in Tatarstan in the last years.
“We are working on making the lives of our citizens easier in terms of bureaucracy. The IT industry is working to make sure services are provided faster and people do not have to wait for a reply for a month if they submitted an application to some agency,” Khayrullin stressed. “Now 1,150 days of information processing has been reduced in total in 140 services, every service is seven days shorter on average.”
The Ministry of Digital Development is pinning its hopes on a neural lab that recently opened at the Bashir Rameyev IT Park. According to Khayrullin, it allows objectively evaluating how simple and transparent the procedure of using state services is for an ordinary user.
“A special neural physiologist who has a university degree in medicine detects a citizens’ parameters when testing a state service: if this citizens is stressed, if it was easy and convenient to find a specific button in the corresponding menu. A road map is created as a result of this testing, it will conclude how convenient this or that procedure is, if a person spends too much time to look for the necessary button, to solve the problem in three clicks, so to speak,” Ayrat Khayrullin specified.
3rd IT Park built in Kazan, while the sector’s revenue can triple
Nowadays the ministry is studying the possibility of building the 3rd IT Park in Kazan. “We are looking for suitable locations for construction. We are receiving a lot of requests from companies from other Russian regions who want to move to Kazan. They are ready to rent a total of 6-8,000 square metres. However, we don’t have extra space,” the minister said.
Specialists calculated that over 200 IT companies have popped up in Tatarstan recently, which led to a bigger number of specialists in this area — by 2,000 people.
Revenue in IT in 2023 was 177 billion rubles. Ayrat Khayrullin noted a dynamic growth of the sector and stressed that annual revenue was expected to reach 500 billion rubles. It is planned to reach 225 billion rubles next year.
If it used to be trendy to be an oil worker, economist or banker, now more and more people are choosing the career of a programmer or IT developer. The Ministry of Digital Development says that the average salary in the sector is 101,000 rubles, while people with greater experience earn five times more.
“Now a student leaving the university earns more than 80,000, while a specialist but with 10 years of experience gets half a million,” Khayrullin stressed.
A lack of IT specialists in the country
Ayrat Khayrullin reminded the audience of a lack of IT specialists. He said that it was planned to create a Eurasian online university with starred professors and a technological platform for mid and senior specialists who will not have to spend several years to upgrade their qualification.
“We lack 10,000 specialists of whom 9,000 are middles and seniors,” the minister complained. “In this university, they can obtain Master’s education in a hybrid format within a year or two, where 80% is online, the rest is internship in the existing IT centres.”
The speaker noted a notable rise in the number of young ladies studying this field. Now up to 30% of students in this sphere are women, the numbers were much lower just five years ago — 5-7%.
Cryptoeconomy (aka digital economy, data economy) is another promising area. However, he gave the audience to understand from the very beginning that this area is new and hasn’t received a lot of research.
“The market is huge, the market is developing, there aren’t definite decisions either from the Russian Ministry of Finance or the Ministry of Digital Development. There is no yet any vision of how to act,” he explained.
Khayrullin shared some statistics too — 76% of the users of the State Services portal are women. He doesn’t think this is unexpected because precisely women deal with documents for children, submit applications for the kindergarten or school and apply for subsidies.
In addition to this, he stressed that a person on average spends 4.5 hours a day online, which in general has a negative impact on the moral and physical state of a person. He recommended doing sport and have a rest to avoid anxiety and nervousness, which can be caused by an excessive use of social media.
“Use the smartphone only when you need it. Endless feed, doomscrolling and many other things do not lead to good consequences, unfortunately. People’s anxiety, nervousness goes up,” Khayrullin added.
State Services to get deeper integration to Russian services and products
There is a plan to connect the Russian State Services platform with Vk.com social network where users can get push notifications about the status of their applications or procedures.
“The instrument will free people and the administration of public institutions from bureaucracy and paperwork. It will be possible to reduce a huge amount of routine work in the institutions with their help and optimise their productivity,” the speaker explained.
“It is planned to launch this instrument in kindergartens to be able to sign documents when enrolling a child to a club on the personal account.”