More than 88 per cent of public offices have no officials to deal with IT operations and 70 per cent of the employees in government offices do not use computers, said a government report.
The situation is the worst with departments, corporations and commissions as 95 per cent of such offices have no ICT professionals, considered instrumental in making e-governance initiatives successful.
According to the findings, government offices have 28 personal computers for 100 employees, suggesting that the country’s e-governance status is still nascent. The disclosure was found in a sample survey on the e-Government Initiatives in Bangladesh. The planning ministry conducted the survey during April–May in 2008.
Experts consider e-governance as an integral part of digitalization and feel the present government’s dream for a Digital Bangladesh will remain illusive if the government machinery is not properly digitalized.
BUET’s computer science and technology department teacher M Kaykobad said the policymakers were enough sincere in dealing with ICT issues. ‘They may not be sincere enough. That is the why the e-government status remains in such a poor shape although a project in this connection has been implemented since 2003,’ he said.
Kaykobad said successive governments had failed to give recognition to ICT professionals in carrying forward any e-governance move. ‘Non-professional experts are getting the privilege in ICT projects.’ He said his department had produced many ICT experts in 25 years, but the policymakers could hardly find them out.
Most of such young people are forced to take overseas jobs. Some get on job with local mobile operators while others try to start their own ventures. Kaykobad criticised the Awami League government for its ‘tall talk’ about digitalization by 2021. He recalled that the Awami League had declared ICT a thrust sector in 1996, but there had been no significant progress in the sector.
Admitting the there are a few ICT officials in government offices, the Bangladesh Computer Council’s executive director Mahfuzur Rahman said a new project was under way to absorb ICT professionals for public offices. Rahman, an additional secretary, said the Computer Council in the past had helped the private sector to recruit ICT people. He hoped the number of ICT officials would increase after the implementation of new government projects.
The Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services general secretary, Nahid Ahmad, said recruitment of ICT officials alone would not improve the sorry state of e-governance. Such officials need to be engaged in policy formulation and working out strategies and they should not be burdened with day-to-day affairs or maintenance works, he said, suggesting public servants should be trained properly to adapt to the new system. ‘E-governance is not an isolated issue. It is related to many others things such as improvement in local ICT industry. Success in digitalization is not possible without coordinated efforts,’ he said.
Experts also blamed the BNP-led government for making ‘false promises’ about ICT development. They said the BNP government had given an impression that the installation of submarine cable would bring about a revolution in the ICT sector. But more than 70 per cent of the submarine cable capacity had remained unused for lack of farsightedness of policymakers. The cable was installed in 2005 at a cost of more than Tk 500 crore and its underuse means waste of public money, people in the ICT industry said.
-New Age
