Online gateway to 25,000 govt offices

A website has brought together 25,000 government offices through separate links, allowing people to access information or file complaints easily online.

The website, National Web Portal of Bangladesh, is one of the largest of its kind in the world, Zunaid Ahmed Palak, state minister for ICT, said yesterday.

The site, which works as a gateway to government portals, has more than 15 lakh content items, including 40,000 photos of famous or historical places in the country, Palak said at a programme organised to highlight the achievements and future plans of ICT at Bangladesh Computer Council in Dhaka.

The government initiative has included details of public officials, like mobile phone numbers and email addresses, for easy access.

Citizens can also file complaints or ask for services through the portal, which was inaugurated last year. It contains details of all districts and upazilas and the information is available in both Bengali and English.

Palak said the government is now working to develop a national call centre to provide public service-related solutions through a single code number.

The government has already signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korea in this regard, he added.

The government has connected almost all the upazilas through optical fibre cable networks, which will connect 18,132 public offices under the same network, Palak said.

Moreover, the government has set up computer laboratories in 3,500 schools, and sent 100 graduates to Infosys, India's famous software institution, for training.

He said the government is providing ICT training to 34,000 people, and has already trained 26,000 youth, including 12,000 female participants, to be ICT freelancers.

The Korean government is also set to help develop an ICT master plan, while the government will bring union parishads under broadband internet connectivity, set up a big-data analytics laboratory, create 10 software technology parks and establish a digital university, he said.