IN PERSON
Sajeeb Ahmed Wazed (Joy) ICT Advisor to the Honourable Prime Minister of Bangladesh
an ict vision
for digital bangladesh With a vision of realising Digital Bangladesh by the year 2021, the Government of Bangladesh has initiated many of the public sector reforms along with various e Governance initiatives. Three years ago the GDP growth in Bangladesh was 4.4 percent and today the country is at 7.5 per cent in the formal economy. Bangladesh bank estimates that the growth in the informal sector is adding another 2.5 per cent. Realistically, Bangladesh is close to 10 per cent GDP growth rate. Additionally, the poverty level in Bangladesh, from the fiscal year 2006 to fiscal year 2010, has dropped by 10 percent entailing that 50 million Bangladesh nationals have been lifted out of poverty in Bangladesh. Sajeeb Ahmed Wazed (Joy), ICT Advisor to the Honourable Prime Minister of Bangladesh shares his vision for the ‘Digital Bangladesh’ with Dr Ravi Gupta and Dr Rajeshree Dutta Kumar at the Prime Minister’s Office in Dhaka, Bangladesh
H
ow in the next 5 years do you think ICT can transform Bangladesh?
Bangladesh has five main strategic thrusts towards building an inclusive economy: Building Capacity; Connecting People; Serving Citizens; Driving Economy; Breaking Barriers. The two drivers that will transform Bangladesh are a) e-Governance services or citizen services and b) industry growth. To begin with, one of the major concerns was that all the digitisation of government services would benefit only the city dwellers and the rural people will be left out leading to an increase in the existing digital divide. But we did it in such a way that digitisation is now benefitting the entire population and as a result, the greatest impact has actually been felt in the rural areas. It is a tremendous driver of growth and development beyond the cities. IT industry will become the next job creation engine in Bangladesh shaping into much higher income sector than our traditional ones. My hope is that within the next decade, the IT industry earnings will surpass the government sector. So, both in terms of the lives of the rural population as well as the job growth sector, I hope that this Bangladesh will be a transformed Bangladesh.
What is your strategy to handle the increasing cost of telecom and Internet sectors in Bangladesh? It is not telecom but the Internet that is expensive. Telecom, in Bangladesh, is one of the cheapest in the world. The government has liberalised telecom policies. Prior to liberalisation, there was only one mobile operator in Bangladesh that had very high monopoly rates. So we liberalised it, we issued six new licenses but it has not happened for the Internet sector. We looked at what was holding back the development, why Internet cost was not dropping the way the mobile and voice sectors grew, why is the data sector not growing. What we found was that there were several vertical and horizontal barriers in the policy itself, that were preventing growth. With the new policy that is coming, we wish to move towards unified licensing regime similar to what India has.
How do you plan to move towards 3G and 4G? We plan to work towards an auction of 3G spectrum by June 2012. Currently, we are finalising the policy guidelines. We are trying to decide on the kind of auction that we will have. We, certainly, do not wish to have a completely western style of auction as that will end up driving the spectrum cost up and that cost will eventually go to the consumers. We have some bandwidth available for one more operator to come in, but mobile sector is a very competitive market here. So that is highly unlikely to happen.
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egov / www.egovonline.net / February 2012