Turning digital dream into reality
WITH its large youth population, Bangladesh is poised to become an emerging IT-based economy, so said the country's state minister for Information and Communication Technology recently. The optimism does not also seem quite out of place, given that by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) ranking, compared to last year, we have moved a notch higher and been placed at 145th position among 166 countries on the global ICT index. What is more, at present, around 69 per cent of the population are connected by mobile phones and more than 18 per cent of them regularly access internet service available on their sets.
But all these uplifting pieces of information about the digital dream only indicate the nation's latent potential in the sector. But so far as the concrete measures needed to transform our internet-savvy youth into an economic force is concerned, precious little has been done. Regrettably, the existing job market cannot still accommodate all the youths coming out every year with their ICT diploma or graduations in computer engineering from different universities and institutions. And worse, the government incentives backed by generous funds for the would-be ICT entrepreneurs still remain a far cry.
So, for the ICT sector of the economy to take off, the government must extend all-out support to the sector in terms of both policy and finance. At the same time, to popularize the internet further as well as to make it more user-friendly, the government must reduce its access cost, which is rather high for common users.
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