Development in ICT:Royal road to knowledge-based society
Anwarul Kabir | Friday, 25 July 2008
(The key points of this article were presented in the national roundtable on ICT roadmap on the 21st June, 2008 at AIUB, supported by Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC), Gov3 Ltd., Spinnovation, D.Net and Bangladesh Telecentre Network (BTN).
A Chinese proverb goes, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will do." However, as for our future existence in this competitive world, we need to develop our ICT arena significantly and rapidly so that we might have a concrete roadmap for this endeavour. A realistic and achievable national ICT policy can be considered as such roadmap. In the context of non-achievement of objectives of the National ICT Policy, 2002, the Ministry of Science and Information & Communications Technology has been initiated to reformulate a new ICT policy for the country.
The vision of 2002 ICT policy has been stated as below: "This Policy aims at building an ICT-driven nation comprising knowledge-based society by the year 2006. In view of this, a countrywide ICT-infrastructure will be developed to ensure access to information by every citizen to facilitate empowerment of people and enhance democratic values and norms for sustainable economic development by using the infrastructure for human resources development, governance, e-commerce, banking, public utility services and all sorts of on-line ICT-enabled services."
However, even in 2008, in the field of ICT, our achievement is very insignificant and we are still eons way from transforming ourselves into a knowledge-based society. In line with Humphrey's proverb, "If you don't know where you are, a map won't help", the ICT Policy 2002 has reached its obvious destiny. Now it has been realised that in 2002, we were overambitious and without assessing the harsh realities of our socio-economic and cultural aspects, we envisioned and formulated the ICT policy 2002. So, at the advent of reformulating new National ICT policy, this scribe would like to emphasize assessing our strength and weakness relevant to development in ICT of the country. For this, with a view to evaluating our status in this respect, following relevant factors are being presented for the readers' convenience.
General Features: a) Literacy rate: For overall improvement of ICT, general literacy of a country is a crucial issue. Although literacy ranking of Bangladesh is the lowest among some Asian countries as noted in the table, we are not far behind Pakistan and Nepal.
Table1: Literacy rate of some Asian countries Source: Wikipedia
b) English literacy rate: From different sources, it has been learnt that, English literacy rate of Bangladesh is less than one percent. Whereas English literacy rate of India and Pakistan are 60 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.
There is a strong correlation between English literacy and ICT development in the present context of globalisation. Especially, in the arena of ICT, as English has become Lingua-Franca and as we have not localised Bengali in the domain of computing, English literacy is a must for our ICT development. Unfortunately, in this case our position is the worst one.
c) Per capita income and growth of GDP: According to the latest statistics, the per capita income of our country is $599, whereas for India and Pakistan, this is $840 and $652 respectively.
It may be noted that the threshold per capita income for a country's transforming into middle-income country is $750. No doubt, Bangladesh is one of the promising countries to be a middle-income country in the near future.
Table 2: Per capita GDP and Gross National Income (GNI) of Bangladesh (2003 to 2008) Source: Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BSS)
The progress of per capita income as shown in the table 2, is due to high growth of remittance. However, this is one of the positive aspects of the country.
B. ICT Infrastructure
a) Power deficit: Latest statistics reveals that Bangladesh faces a power deficit of up to 2000 MW against demand of 5000 MW daily. It may be noted that for proper ICT development an uninterrupted power supply is a must
b) Teledensity: Teledensity of the country is one of the important parameters for developing ICT infrastructure of a country. The following table reveals the tremendous growth of teledensity in Bangladesh.
Table3. Teledensity of Bangladesh: Source: BTRC, January 2008
It may be noted that the increase of teledensity is mainly due to expansion of mobile networks. But for making cost effective ICT infrastructure and communication, we need to have more growth in PSTN.
c) Network infrastructure: Outside Dhaka, at present a few computer network infrastructures have been developed so far. Apart from some educational institutes outside Dhaka, observation finds that most of the LAN setups are Dhaka-centric. This observation reveals the reality of the digital gap even within the country.
Since 2006, Bangladesh has been connected to worldwide Internet Super Highway through an submarine cable. But this single submarine cable frequently faces disruption resulting in slow bandwidth.
d) Use of internet: For the ICT development, the number of Internet users must be increased in the country. In this case our position is a worst one as shown in the table.
Table 4: Use of Internet Source: ITU (Data updated in December 2007)
e) Use of open source software: Many countries (eg. France and Malaysia) has started to use open source software in ICT development projects for its cost effectiveness. Unfortunately, in our ICT development domain, the culture of using open source has not yet been introduced.
f) Networked Readiness: Networked Readiness Index (NRI) measures the propensity for countries to exploit the opportunities offered by information and communications technology. It is published annually. The NRI seeks to better comprehend the impact of ICT on the competitiveness of nations. The NRI is a composite of three components: the environment for ICT offered by a given country or community, the readiness of the community's key stakeholders (individuals, businesses, and governments) to use ICT, and finally the usage of ICT amongst these stakeholders.
Table 5: Networked readiness of some Asian countries (2006-7)
Source: University of Harvard
In the above table, unfortunately Bangladesh's ranking is one of the lowest among the Asian countries.
g) Growth in export-oriented Software Development: Software exports in the last financial year: $30 million only. This is indeed a very insignificant contribution to the total revenue earning from the country's export sector!
Domestic market for the locally developed software product too has not been expanded too. One survey (by the author) has revealed that less than 10 per cent of the BASIS member software firms work only for domestic market.
..................................................................
The writer is an educationist, working at the Computer Science Department, AIUB and a freelance write. He can be reached at Email: email: [email protected]
A Chinese proverb goes, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will do." However, as for our future existence in this competitive world, we need to develop our ICT arena significantly and rapidly so that we might have a concrete roadmap for this endeavour. A realistic and achievable national ICT policy can be considered as such roadmap. In the context of non-achievement of objectives of the National ICT Policy, 2002, the Ministry of Science and Information & Communications Technology has been initiated to reformulate a new ICT policy for the country.
The vision of 2002 ICT policy has been stated as below: "This Policy aims at building an ICT-driven nation comprising knowledge-based society by the year 2006. In view of this, a countrywide ICT-infrastructure will be developed to ensure access to information by every citizen to facilitate empowerment of people and enhance democratic values and norms for sustainable economic development by using the infrastructure for human resources development, governance, e-commerce, banking, public utility services and all sorts of on-line ICT-enabled services."
However, even in 2008, in the field of ICT, our achievement is very insignificant and we are still eons way from transforming ourselves into a knowledge-based society. In line with Humphrey's proverb, "If you don't know where you are, a map won't help", the ICT Policy 2002 has reached its obvious destiny. Now it has been realised that in 2002, we were overambitious and without assessing the harsh realities of our socio-economic and cultural aspects, we envisioned and formulated the ICT policy 2002. So, at the advent of reformulating new National ICT policy, this scribe would like to emphasize assessing our strength and weakness relevant to development in ICT of the country. For this, with a view to evaluating our status in this respect, following relevant factors are being presented for the readers' convenience.
General Features: a) Literacy rate: For overall improvement of ICT, general literacy of a country is a crucial issue. Although literacy ranking of Bangladesh is the lowest among some Asian countries as noted in the table, we are not far behind Pakistan and Nepal.
Table1: Literacy rate of some Asian countries Source: Wikipedia
b) English literacy rate: From different sources, it has been learnt that, English literacy rate of Bangladesh is less than one percent. Whereas English literacy rate of India and Pakistan are 60 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.
There is a strong correlation between English literacy and ICT development in the present context of globalisation. Especially, in the arena of ICT, as English has become Lingua-Franca and as we have not localised Bengali in the domain of computing, English literacy is a must for our ICT development. Unfortunately, in this case our position is the worst one.
c) Per capita income and growth of GDP: According to the latest statistics, the per capita income of our country is $599, whereas for India and Pakistan, this is $840 and $652 respectively.
It may be noted that the threshold per capita income for a country's transforming into middle-income country is $750. No doubt, Bangladesh is one of the promising countries to be a middle-income country in the near future.
Table 2: Per capita GDP and Gross National Income (GNI) of Bangladesh (2003 to 2008) Source: Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BSS)
The progress of per capita income as shown in the table 2, is due to high growth of remittance. However, this is one of the positive aspects of the country.
B. ICT Infrastructure
a) Power deficit: Latest statistics reveals that Bangladesh faces a power deficit of up to 2000 MW against demand of 5000 MW daily. It may be noted that for proper ICT development an uninterrupted power supply is a must
b) Teledensity: Teledensity of the country is one of the important parameters for developing ICT infrastructure of a country. The following table reveals the tremendous growth of teledensity in Bangladesh.
Table3. Teledensity of Bangladesh: Source: BTRC, January 2008
It may be noted that the increase of teledensity is mainly due to expansion of mobile networks. But for making cost effective ICT infrastructure and communication, we need to have more growth in PSTN.
c) Network infrastructure: Outside Dhaka, at present a few computer network infrastructures have been developed so far. Apart from some educational institutes outside Dhaka, observation finds that most of the LAN setups are Dhaka-centric. This observation reveals the reality of the digital gap even within the country.
Since 2006, Bangladesh has been connected to worldwide Internet Super Highway through an submarine cable. But this single submarine cable frequently faces disruption resulting in slow bandwidth.
d) Use of internet: For the ICT development, the number of Internet users must be increased in the country. In this case our position is a worst one as shown in the table.
Table 4: Use of Internet Source: ITU (Data updated in December 2007)
e) Use of open source software: Many countries (eg. France and Malaysia) has started to use open source software in ICT development projects for its cost effectiveness. Unfortunately, in our ICT development domain, the culture of using open source has not yet been introduced.
f) Networked Readiness: Networked Readiness Index (NRI) measures the propensity for countries to exploit the opportunities offered by information and communications technology. It is published annually. The NRI seeks to better comprehend the impact of ICT on the competitiveness of nations. The NRI is a composite of three components: the environment for ICT offered by a given country or community, the readiness of the community's key stakeholders (individuals, businesses, and governments) to use ICT, and finally the usage of ICT amongst these stakeholders.
Table 5: Networked readiness of some Asian countries (2006-7)
Source: University of Harvard
In the above table, unfortunately Bangladesh's ranking is one of the lowest among the Asian countries.
g) Growth in export-oriented Software Development: Software exports in the last financial year: $30 million only. This is indeed a very insignificant contribution to the total revenue earning from the country's export sector!
Domestic market for the locally developed software product too has not been expanded too. One survey (by the author) has revealed that less than 10 per cent of the BASIS member software firms work only for domestic market.
..................................................................
The writer is an educationist, working at the Computer Science Department, AIUB and a freelance write. He can be reached at Email: email: [email protected]