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• National ICT policy

Building an ICT-driven nation comprising of knowledge-based society by the year 2006

With 27,000 schools in Bangladesh, teaching eight million students, ICT issues ranging from access, to professional development and infrastructure become maginfied. Recognising how the opportunities afforded by ICT within a policy framework can help in this momentous task, Bangladesh intends to use ICT as the key-driving element for socio-economic development.

A country-wide ICT-infrastructure will be developed to ensure access to information for all, empowering people and enhancing democratic values 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. Furthermore, in order to utilize ICT fully, exploiting its immense potential in the economic, social, commercial, and scientific fields a National ICT Task Force headed by the Prime Minister has already been formed.

Objectives

• Promote and facilitate use of ICT in all sectors of the economy for transparency, good governance and efficiency improvement
• Develop a large pool of world class ICT professionals to meet the needs of local and global markets
• Promote use of ICT by providing special allocations for ICT project implementation in the public sector. Train the decision makers in ICT use and promote a ICT culture
• Provide effective incentives for development of ICT sector to both local and foreign entrepreneurs
• Develop an efficient ICT infrastructure that provides open access to international and national networks
• Establish legislative and regulatory framework for ICT issues like IPR, data security and protection, digital signature, e-Commerce, ICT education etc. as well as to ensure quality ICT education provided by different private organizations
• Set up national databases that are reliable and easily accessible to all the people of the country
• Set up an ICT organization at the highest level to continuously promote and foster ICT Industry
• Enact Laws and Regulations for uninterrupted growth of ICT, in conformity with World Trade Organization (WTO) stipulations

Key thrust areas outlined in the policy include:

Human Resources Development - As the demand for skilled manpower in ICT is growing world-wide, the country needs to produce a large number of ICT professionals. Strategies towards this end, include:

• Facilities will be built to promote ICT education and computer aided education at all levels of education. Donor agencies, non-government organizations and others will be encouraged to help build the necessary capacity in this area.
• Universities, Bangladesh Institutes of Technology and colleges, both in the public and private sectors will be strengthened to produce ICT graduates in four-year Computer Science and/or Engineering courses
• Out of the three Science and Technology universities proposed in the Fifth Five-Year Plan, one will be earmarked as centre of excellence in ICT
• Establish multimedia institutes to produce skilled human resources
• Diploma and Trade courses in ICT will be offered in both public and private institutes including Polytechnics. The continual skill upgrading of existing professionals working in public and private sectors shall be ensured by in-service training programmes.
• IT-Capacity-Building of the Teachers Training Institutes (TTI) will be taken up - intensive post-graduate diploma courses will be introduced.
• Pre-service and in-service training programmes will be initiated.
• As it would be difficult to train teachers in ICT in large number using the present infrastructure, virtual ICT teachers will be deployed wherever possible.
• To address the issue of deficiency in English and mathematics education, a crash programme shall be taken up to train teachers. To ensure standard and quality of ICT education, a national certification and accreditation system shall be developed and implemented.
• Take up programmes to develop quality ICT professionals and skilled personnel to ensure success in the global software and ICT-enabled services market.
• Use the potential of ICT for delivery of distance education
• Faculty Members will be brought in from abroad in the fields where local teachers are not available.
• Syllabus and Course Curricula for all levels of Computer Science education will be updated continuously

ICT Infrastructure

• To ensure capacity building of the nation in the field of Information Technology and to attain a sustainable growth of the ICT sector of Bangladesh and to help compete in the expanding global ICT market, the Ministry of Science and Information & Communication Technology and BCC should be appropriately strengthened.
• To support the growing demand of the ICT sector, appropriate ICT infrastructure to be established immediately both in public and private sector.
• Facilitate development of telecommunication infrastructure at the least possible cost with little or no customs duty during construction of the infrastructure by June , 2006.
• The use of ICT and information services should be affordable to the people
• Basic telecommunication facilities will be extended to the rural and under-served areas
• Advanced and new technologies will be introduced to expand the existing network
• Telecommunication facilities will be made available to all segments of the society and all of the present and emerging services will be provided at an affordable cost.
• Develop a national Internet access platform without affecting the present telephone network.
• Internet will be provided to the educational institutions and libraries.
• To support the installation of ISPs in the country national high speed communication backbone for Internet will be developed and international high-speed gateway facilities for ISPs will be provided.
• An integrated flexible and reliable nation-wide transmission system capable of voice, audio, video, data and graphics transmission will be ensured.
• The bandwidth capacity and availability will be ensured all over the country at a reasonable cost to encourage the growth of Internet, ICT industries, e-Commerce and e-Government
• A central depository for collection and dissemination of ICT information and research findings will be developed.
• Solar power to be encouraged

Research and Development in ICT

• Research and development in ICT will focus on need based fundamental and applied research contributing to the improvement of quality and efficiency of the application to the ICT industry.
• Bangladesh Computer Council will coordinate ICT R&D activities carried out by the public and private sector organisations.
• BCC along with ICT industry, will formulate plans to conduct need-based R&D activities in the Universities, BITs and public & private sector R&D institutions and encourage the younger generation in these activities. The ICT industry may fund for R&D activities for new ICT products and services through Industry-Academia collaboration.
• Establishment of a central on-line data bank for scientific and technological information, which can be accessed by educational institutions and other R&D organisations.
• R&D efforts on Bangla text processing, Bangla voice recognition, translation and synthesis will be intensified. This may be extended to other languages as far as practicable.
• Technology Corporations such as Microsoft, IBM, Computer Associates, Oracle, SAP etc. will be lured to set up their R & D Centers in Bangladesh.
• Contents for Internet and Intranet will be developed in Bangladesh.