The New Nation - Internet Edition

Md. Anwarul Kabir

A Chinese proverb suggests, “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 and so we should 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 & Communication 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 of knowledge-based society by the year 2006. In view of this, a country-wide 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 gulf away from transforming ourselves into a knowledge-based society. In line with a 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, I emphasize on 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, I would like to present following relevant factors for the readers convenience.

A. 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.

CountryCountry Adult Literacy RateAdult Literacy Rate Youth Literacy RateYouth Literacy Rate

Sri Lanka Sri Lanka 92.192.1 97.097.0

ChinaChina 90.990.9 98.998.9

India India 61.361.3 73.373.3

NepalNepal 44.044.0 62.762.7

PakistanPakistan 41.541.5 53.953.9

BangladeshBangladesh 41.141.1 49.749.7

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% and 20% 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 groth 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 near future.

GDPGDP 2003-042003-04 2004-52004-5 2005-62005-6 2006-72006-7 2007-82007-8

GNPGNP 418418 441441 447447 487487 554554

GNIGNI 440440 463463 476476 523523 599599

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 d,, 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.

ItemItem 20082008 20062006 20042004

Population(million)Population(million) 140.6140.6 138.8138.8 135.2135.2

Mobile Phones(millions)Mobile Phones(millions) 36.436.4 11.011.0 3.83.8

Fixed Lines (PSTN) (millions)Fixed Lines (PSTN) (millions) 1.21.2 1.01.0 0.90.9

Total telecom users (millions)Total telecom users (millions) 37.637.6 12.012.0 4.74.7

Teledensity (%)Teledensity (%) 26.826.8 8.68.6 3.53.5

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 High Way through an under sea submarine cable. But this single submarine cable frequently faces disruption resulting in slow bandwidth.

d) Use of internet: For the ICT development Internet users of the country must be increased.