Quality Assurance plays a vital part in Software Lifecycle but still why people consider it as secondary option in IT industry while choosing project?

This used to be the case all the time, partly I feel because with automated testing, As Arno puts it testing had fallen into the developers hands. Quality Assurance personel have more of a role in developing the complete set of test cases/edge cases, which now in most companies is merged with the Business Analyst duties, since the analyst gathers the requirements, does a gap analysis , provides use cases, test cases and edge cases which then the developer uses during development and testing. The only time testing is truly required is user accptance testing to ensure it performs the way it's needed.

For me, quality assurance is the last line of defence before going live. However, I imagine some people don't think about it that way. Probably many of those people think that because the barriers to enter testing is quite low. What I mean is that one doesn't necessarily have to have programming skills or other technical specialities.

I agree with Arno on the sentence that  one "necessarily need not have to have programming skills or other technical specialities". This was put into place during waterfall model of development where there was a team of testers for the test cycle prep/planning/execution. With all that changing now testers need to upgrade their skills as the need of the hour is Developers who can test their own code and integrate into the system. Most of the biggies in the industry either follow the whitebox tester concept or the developers themselves do appropriate testing. Most of the specialised test teams exist to identify issues like performance/security and not the functional issues anymore. QA is neccessary but with a changing face.