On the way to build Digital Bangladesh

On the way to build Digital Bangladesh

Another successful Policy Café took place today (March 18, 2014) at 7:30pm in Hotel Ruposhi Bangla. Symbol of youngsters in politics, Mr. Sajeeb Wazed Joy, who also is the IT adviser and son of current Prime Minister of Bangladesh, merged his voice with the promising young entrepreneurs and professionals of the society on the point of different policy issues of ICT sector. ICT state minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak was also present as a guest. In this intensive congregation many scorching apprehensions had been discussed and taken under considerations for building a better Bangladesh for our future generation. To ease the path of professional and entrepreneurs as well as for the entire nation various suggestions and proposals had been raised to consider while framing the ICT policy in near future. Apps development, payment gateway, value added services, R&D in IT sector, disabled friendly software and hardware, fibre optic cable, IT training, IP protection law, digitization, disseminating services in the rural sector, software related recommendations came for incorporating in the policy.

More than 100 IT professionals from reputed private, public and social organizations participated in the program. The program had been arranged to facilitate the youth ICT experts, professionals and entrepreneurs to create a platform for public discussion and debate on National ICT policy of the country as the government is going to revise and formulate a complete and people friendly ICT policy within a few months.

Major recommendations from the participants

> Need to arrange specialized training on ICT profession for those who already got initial trainings
> Besides welcoming FDI in ICT we need to safeguard our native industry too. In order to build the capacity of our local IT industry we should utilize at least 40% of the local resources for each project
> Need to resolve the ‘payment gateway’ problem
> Allocation of ‘virtual credit card’ to the students might be a good way to motivate young IT professionals & freelancers.
> By maintaining family chain, using National ID cards, we can resolve land related cases and reduce the number of cases from 100% to 10%
> Providing training regarding ‘citizen journalism’ to the UISC entrepreneurs to feed information from the grassroots.
> Increasing the number of seats in ICT related subjects and throwing of ICT courses as optional subjects for all the disciplines of undergraduate level might be proved helpful.
> Need to develop the quality of entity service providers.
> A ‘pro-people with disability’ policy need to be designed
> Reformations of the complimentary policies such as intellectual property, intermediary liability protection, banking system are necessary too
> Implementation of ‘Value added service guide line’ is very important
> Following Malaysia & other countries we can draw an article in the ICT policy that before purchasing software from foreign market the buyer company has to prove that the software can’t be produced in the local market. Making this obligation we can save near about 100 million US dollar.
> 2% revenue of telecom operators should be used for providing hi speed Wi-Fi in university-colleges.
> Last mile e-services should be assured
> Formulation of a legal framework concerning digital advertisement is needed
> In policy framework prioritizing is an important issue, so need to develop a tier oriented policy

 

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