ict leaders’ conclave
Digital Bangadesh: Progress and Plans The focus of our plans has been to use ICT for improving delivery of services to citizens By Anir Chowdhury, Policy Advisor, A2I Programme, Prime Minister’s Office, Bangladesh
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he current Bangladesh government took office in early 2009 but in late 2008 they published a “Charter for Change” that talked about poverty, human resource dev, employment, health and power and energy as the four key areas. Underlying all this is IT-facilitated socio-economic development which we call Digital Bangladesh.
Focus 2: Demonstration and Upscaling We are seeing some encouraging signs under various initiatives. For example, the e‐Purjee system generates SMS‐based purchase orders for sugarcane farmers. From 2 mills in 2009, it now covers 15 mills. This has empowered farmers, increased transparency and improved efficiency of mills. This experience has given confidence to policy makers that ICT can actually improve service delivery. In the last few years, we have moved from a process of automation to one of improving services. The citizens have also seen how ICT can help them in many different ways. The eTathya
Focus 4: Leadership Development Technology only contributes a small part to the egovernance revolution. Business Process Reengineering and change management form the bulk of the task of improving service delivery. Elected representatives, officials at different levels, media personnel, private sector and citizens are being targeted for developing a leadership for the entire effort. Focus 5: Execution through Partnership Through a partnership of the public sector, the private sector and people, backed by technical assistance from development partners, we are working towards converting the vision of Digital Bangladesh vision into reality.
Digital Bangladesh Charter for Change Focus 1: Change of Mindset Unless the bureaucracy and politicians do not change the way they see service delivery – not as patronage but as an obligation to people, improvements would be difficult. We are seeing a change in mindsets and hence a decrease in harassment and reduction in costs and time of services. The driving slogan here is “Citizens will not go to services, services will come to citizens”
Focus 3: ICT Infrastructure Development Development and optimal utilisation of ICT infrastructure is a key focus area. About 15 years ago Bangladesh Railway lent its fibre to Grameenphone which is owned mostly by Telenor and that caused a cell phone revoulution in the country. The Power Grid Company of Banglasdesh has recently given its fibre to the private sector so that a broadband revolution can happen. We have identified about 156000 institutions around the country for this revolution.
Kosh is an encyclopedia where about 200 partner organisations are working to aggregate livelihood information in multimedia format. We are also planning to develop a National Population Register which is going to be a ground-breaking effort as far as interoperability is concerned. An interoperability framework has already been published and the NPR will make it happen. Standardization of Services and Interoperability Labor
Police services
Education
Immigra tion Legal services
Birth registration
National National Population Register
Taxes & VAT
Health
Voter ID Loans
Social safety safety nets
Licenses
Focus 6: Planning and Coordination ‘Strategic Priorities for Digital Bangladesh’ aims at identifying the role of technology in socio‐economic transformation by 2021. This has now been mainstreamed into National Planning in the 6th Five Year Plan. We have developed egovernance focus points in every ministry and the entire effort is coordinated from the PMO. The ICT priorities are becoming sectoral priorities in health, education agriculture etc.
Lessons Learnt The focus till recently was on automation. Most efforts aimed at automating particular functions of govt without looking at how it would help the citizens. That is now starting to change. We have not yet touched cities, but have started at the lowest level of govt. The top level is making policies and plans but actual implementation is happening on the ground, leading to central planning and decentralized implementation. We have also learned from the mistakes of others and from our own, and reward innovation and risk taking. September 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov
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