Govt boasts of ICT success
The country has made major strides in achieving its vision of Digital Bangladesh and there is a likelihood that it could make the vision a reality before the 2021 deadline.
The government has done more than half the job of Digital Bangladesh by 2021, one of the election pledges of the ruling Awami League, said Zunaid Ahmed Palak, state minister for post, telecommunications and information technology.
Digital centres in 4,547 union parishads, 321 municipalities, and 407 wards in 11 city corporations have already been set up, according to data of Access to Information Programme of the Prime Minister's Office.
Kabir Bin Anwar, project director of the Access to Information Programme and director general of the PMO, came up with the information at a PMO press briefing on Tuesday's Digital Centre Entrepreneurs Conference.
The conference at the National Parade Ground would mark the fourth anniversary of the union digital centres. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her IT Affairs Adviser Sajeeb Wazed Joy would be there.
Kabir said at the conference Bangladesh would celebrate getting the World Summit on Information Society Award and World Information Technology and Service Alliance Award.
The data of the Access to Information Programme shows that the digital centres provide 60 kinds of public and private services, including computer trainings, land registrations, public exam results, government form downloads, birth and death registrations, online university admissions, employment information, and mobile banking.
The centres have already served people 12 crore times with services like registration of seven crore births, and more than 20 lakh overseas job-seekers have had services from the digital centres.
Around 10,000 young ICT entrepreneurs have become self-reliant in the 4,547 union digital centres, Kabir said, adding that time and money of the people had been saved and the entrepreneurs earned Tk 140 crore.
Minister Palak said even Bill Gates praised Bangladesh in a global ICT forum recently saying that people of the country had been widely adopting new technology.
“But we are not satisfied as there is still a long way to go to achieve the vision of Digital Bangladesh,” he added.
He said by 2016 all union digital centres would be connected via fibre optic cable with one mbps Internet connection. Besides, there was a plan to set up call centres at the village level, he added.
The government is now producing 500 mobile phone apps to deliver government services instantly to people, he said, adding that the work to introduce e-office was about to be completed.
Within this month, digital signature facility would be introduced down to the additional-secretary-level officials and this facility would be taken to the upazila level by next year, he added.
He said offices of the deputy commissioners and upazila nirbahi officers have already been digitalised and around one lakh WiFi zones would be set up across the country with the help of China.
Palak said Joy, also the prime minister's son, has a plan to set up village-based ICT clubs and language clubs in union digital centres by 2018.
“Though the prime minister set 2021 for building Digital Bangladesh and a middle income country, we will be able to achieve that much before the deadline,” Palak said.
Naimuzzaman Mukta, people's perspective specialist of Access to Information Programme, said people were now opening facebook accounts at a much higher rate than the child birth rate, indicating Bangladesh has progressed a lot digitally.
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