Towards a digital Bangladesh

IT professionals at work in a firm in Dhaka.Photo: STAR

With the landslide win of the Awami League in the election held on December 29, the making of an ICT-driven society in Bangladesh is now a real possibility.

The AL election manifesto, to the credit of the AL policy planners, is strewn with ICT commitments that cut across a whole range of social, economic and governance development issues, some of which I addressed in my last column.

As in many other fields, in ICTs also Bangladesh was an early adopter (as early as 1963) but then it fell behind most countries in the region as evidenced by various indices of ICT readiness such as PC penetration rate, internet penetration rate, and others. In fact in the latest network readiness index published by the World Economic Forum, Bangladesh ranked behind India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. So the clarion call of the AL-led grand alliance for building a 'digital Bangladesh' could not have come a moment sooner.

This is specially so because in the last 12 years Bangladesh has pushed the ICT agenda on the national platform with great fanfare but with not-too-great a progress except on the telecommunications front. The great euphoria in Bangladesh surrounding the explosive growth in global software and IT services business in the mid-nineties, specially the dot com boom in the Silicon Valley (California, USA) could not be translated into real achievements. Even then the previous AL-led government must be given credit for initiating a series of programmes in 1997 to kick-start the software industry with specific focus on exports of software and IT services.

This is especially significant since the software development and IT services industry in Bangladesh was not recognized either inside or outside the country at the time and such exports were virtually non-existent in spite of the fact that a decade earlier a company by the name of Machine Dialogue had developed and sold software to Volvo Motor Company of Sweden.

In 1997 the government formed a committee led by the then Buet professor and the founder director of Buet Computer Centre, Dr. Jamilur Reza Choudhury (now vice chancellor of BRAC University) to study the meteoric rise of India as one of the largest exporters of software and IT services and thereafter submit a plan to emulate their success in Bangladesh. The committee visited the Indian IT capital Bangalore and then submitted a report containing a set of 26 recommendations to get the software industry in Bangladesh off the ground. In the backdrop of all this the software and IT services companies of the country organized themselves under the banner of BASIS the national association for this fledgeling industry.

Because of the initial thrust given by the JRC committee and the incessant efforts of BASIS, the exports from this sector has risen steadily from almost nil in 1996-97 to more than 25 million dollars in 2007-08.

On the domestic front there are now more than 300 dedicated software and IT services companies catering to a market of around Tk350 crore. Of course we still have a long way to go before we can claim a sizable piece of the global software & IT services pie but the foundation is already there.

A lot of work has gone into creating an enabling environment for the development of this industry, which is mostly invisible to the general masses. For example, EPB started supporting participation in IT exhibitions for software exports in 1998, the copyrights law was amended in the year 2000 to recognize software and other intellectual properties in the electronic medium, ICT Task Force was instituted in 2001, an ICT policy was approved in 2002, and an ICT incubator was established and an e-govt programme under the ICT Task Force were started in 2003.

To build on this the government, the industry and the academia now need to get their heads together in forging a concrete plan to take the country forward in realizing the mandate of the people for a 'digital Bangladesh'. A 'digital nation' can have many different meanings to different people but generally speaking it would mean reaching an information technology enabled environment where all national information and knowledge are available electronically and on-line.

However, such a situation can bring its own dangers if we do not carefully plan to include the socially marginalised sections, the so-called have-nots of the 'digital divide'.

In Digital Nation, Tony Wilhelm of the US Department of Commerce talks about these issues and shows how to build a more inclusive information society avoiding the pitfalls of social exclusion.

He argues, forcefully, that the use of information technology can empower or control, unite or divide depending on how we use it.

However, our ultimate goal as a digitally empowered nation is to become what is known as a 'Knowledge Society' a society where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. A Knowledge Society "creates, shares and uses knowledge for the prosperity and well-being of its people" (Wikipedia).

When that happens AL will win the hearts of the people and the whole country will win as a digital nation marching in sync with the developed world.

The writer is the founder CEO of Technohaven Company Ltd and is the current president of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS). He welcomes feedback at hnkarim@gmail.com.