Gov’t working relentlessly to buildup Digital Bangladesh

Estonia, May 30 (NsNewsWire) — State Minister for Information and Communication Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak has said present government has been working relentlessly to buildup our Digital Bangladesh.

He said, Digital Bangladesh vision of our Prime Minister and its pillars are Human Resources Development, Connecting Citizens (0.4% in 2008, 53% now, 90% by 2021), Promoting e-governance (around 200 e-services now, 90% by 2021), Supporting IT industry and digital entrepreneurship (export volume: 26 mn in 2008, 800 mn now and 5 bn by 2021)
Zunaid said, The prime challenge before us is to turn digital outliers into digital adopters. Affordable and reliable internet is a key to overcome this challenge. We have expanded high speed optical fiber network up to district and sub-district level small towns. However, more than two-thirds of our population lives in the rural areas.
The State Minister said this as a panel discussant titled ‘How to manage digital citizen centric e-governance’ at “Tallinn e-Governance Conference 2018” in Estonia today.
President of Estonia Kersti Kaljulaid inaugurator the two days conference in Estonia. Among others Prime Minister St. Lucia Allen Chastanet, Director Smart Catalonia Daniel Marco and Minister for Digital Policies and Public Administration of the Government of Catalonia, Spain Jordi Puignero i Ferrer taken part in the panel discussion. Moderator was Programme Director of Central e-Government, eGA Linnar Viik.
He saids, Bangladesh government is implementing a massive project to roll out optical fiber in the rural Bangladesh. By the end of 2018, almost all the major rural growth centers will be connected by optical fiber. And we are implementing this colossal project on public private partnership basis where government will make the capital investment and private sector participator will do the operation and maintenance jobs.
Zunaid said, we have already introduced more than hundred e-services to disrupt the legacy system, which is heavily bureaucratic. To cut the redundant steps in the public service delivery system, we are doing Business Process Re-engineering before introducing an e-service.
He uttered that, One thing is critically important in this borderless cyber world and that is collaboration. Collaboration among the governments, collaboration between public sector and private sector, collaboration among government, industry and academia. All sorts of opportunities for extending collaboration should be explored and exercised. We are left with no option other than collaboration.
He said, Finally, country like Estonia and Bangladesh belong to different stages of e-governance adoption matrix. However, we have one thing in common and that is strong political commitment to digitize our nation. Our people are also very smart and resilient to adopt new technologies. I’m confident someday we’ll be at same stage and we can mutually reinforce one another, if we collaborate, Zunaid Added. Press Release