A former commerce minister used to often say that Information
Technology (IT) is a national buzzword and in every town and village-
market and people talk about it all the time. Another former Science
and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) minister once
narrated a story that after a severe flood in a rural town, one
family appealed to him only for replacing their damaged home personal
computer (PC).
The euphoria around IT over the course of the last ten years raised
tremendous hopes that the country would move on riding on the back of
this mystical beauty that remained as elusive as the mythical unicorn
of folklore. But beyond the mysticism and tech gadget savvy 'addas'
of young crowds in coffee shops, IT is not yet recognised as a mover
of the economy either in exports or local productivity. There is no
dearth of seminars, workshops, conferences and studies on IT though
and the wheels of the buzz-machine are whirring faster than ever.
The telecom industry, however, caught on with the buzzing spirit of
the nation and five mobile and even a larger number of landline phone
operators in the private sector are ringing up revenues of more than
ten thousand crore taka, an amount that rivals the annual education
budget of the nation.
Of course we are taking pride in the fact that in the last ten years
our telecom penetration rate has gone up from under 1 per 100 people
to 28 per 100 people as of last month. This nearly forty-fold
increase in our telecom density has put us on the map as one of the
fastest growing telecom markets in the world. While this development
has lowered the communication and information-
the nation in ways that was unfathomable before, cynics point out
that this industry plays to the talkative instinct of our people.
This instinct has been attractive enough to bring in more than $ 2
billion worth of foreign investments giving away more than 90 percent
of our market to the overseas fortune hunters.
When we contrast this to the less than $ 10 million worth of Foreign
Direct Investment (FDI) in the IT industry including software and IT
enabled service industry of the country, we can see how anemic is the
FDI flow to a sector that is a close cousin of telecoms industry.
Whatever investments we have in IT is overwhelmingly by the local IT
entrepreneurs whose passion and dedication has given us a foothold in
the global IT services market as well as some measure of progress in
the adoption of IT in domestic industries and government.
The growth prospects of IT notwithstanding, we are far behind in the
growth curve this industry has chalked up in India for many years and
in China, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam of late. For
us IT has remained a slithering invertebrate and no matter how much
we sung and danced, the supine industry never stood up and showed its
true colours. With our network readiness ranking among the bottom
five nations, according to the World Economic Forum, and our external
marketing efforts lacking the punch of competing countries, it's not
difficult to see why.
These days, however, many prefer to include telecoms with IT in the
bigger acronym called ICT, in the name of convergence. While
convergence may be inevitable from a regulatory perspective, from the
perspective of the economy, IT and telecoms are distinctly two
different industries. The former primarily home-grown and having the
potential of multi-billion-
primarily foreign investment led (at least thus far) and generating
only domestic revenues but creating long-term foreign-currency
liabilities resulting in huge pressures on our forex reserves.
In the human development index, Bangladesh fares better than many
neighbouring countries despite endless challenges on many fronts and
this has been possible due to many home-grown solutions. Some of them
are being replicated in other countries in open adulation of our
ideas that has worked wonders such as collateral-free credit to the
ultra-poor, non-coercive family planning among religious
conservatives and reducing infant mortality through infomercials.
It gives us hope that we can also take charge of our destiny in IT by
combining the efforts from the industry, government and academia in a
monolithic fashion with a razor-sharp focus on the deliverables. Some
of the deliverables are the white-collar job-creation by Small and
Medium Enterprises (all knowledge/IT workers are white-collar in
nature), homogeneous internet access throughout the country (e.g.
today a 512 Kbps internet connection costs Tk 18,000 in Dhaka city
but the same costs Tk 168,000 in a town like Rangpur or Bagerhat),
creation of knowledge-based industry clusters around all major
universities of the country and projection of the Bangladesh IT
capabilities and success stories in international marketing forums
repeatedly.
Song and dance routines in the cultural arena have gone through a
remarkable makeover in recent years by combining global skills with
local motifs. It is about time the IT song and dance routine also
undergoes a makeover in form and content so that the industry,
government and academia sing in tune and dance in step all the way to
bank in no time.
The author is a software entrepreneur and can be reached at
hnkarim@gmail.
Published:
http://www.thedaily
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mobilebangladesh
Disclaimer:
ICT Of Bangladesh Group is not responsible for the content of external website links and messages that has came from it's members.
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
__,_._,___
0 comments:
Post a Comment