Digital Bangladesh Essay

Bangladesh is a developing country. She achieved independence 42 years ago but still she depends on foreign helps regarding many issues. She is trapped in a lot of problems such as poverty, over population, unemployment, corruption, health hazard, food and accommodation crisis, illiteracy etc. But, the present government has promised and started taking steps to change the situation and has determined to build a â€Å"Digital Bangladesh†. The sense of Digital Bangladesh is not clear yet. We assume that the gov. wants to make Bd fully digitalized by the year of 2021 through application of third generation information and communication technology. It was an election manifesto(2008) of Awami League, one of the leading political parties of Bangladesh. The philosophy of Digital Bangladesh comprises ensuring people’s democracy and human rights, transparency, accountability, establishing justice and ensuring delivery of gov. services to the citizens through maximum use of techn ology with the overall improvement of the daily lifestyle of people of all classes. The government further emphasized on the four elements of DB Visions which are: human resource development, people development, civil services and use of information technology in all possible sectors. It is not only e-governance or e-commerce or e-banking or operating a country wide mobile phone network, it is a combination of all of them. It is a country-wide application of 3G ICT to institutionalize the best management practices in every sectors and sub-sectors. The scope of Digital Bangladesh is very wide. It includes the following substances: democracy and effective parliament, political framework, decentralization of power and people’s participation, good governance through establishing rule of law and avoiding political partisanship, corruption free society, empowerment and equal rights for women, economic development and initiative, infrastructural development, environment etc. To digitalize Bangladesh with 3G technology in 12 years is fairly ambitious. It needs strong commitment and strategic planning for sustainable Digital Bangladesh. The starting must focus on developing infrastructure in terms of hardware, software and manpower. Merely buying millions of computers and distributing among several thousand workstations in educational institutions, commercial and medical organizations will not digitalize Bangladesh. Local qualified manpower must be available to run the system without depending on foreign experts. To produce such human resources, government must assign highest priority to the  improvement of science, technology and management education and develop our own manpower. Unless we perform the basic terms, Digital Bangladesh will make Bangladesh highly vulnerable by making dependent on those nations that manufacture, control and distribute ICT. Sustainability is more imp than starting. If we fail to manage a sustainable digital Bangladesh with our own resources, Digital Bangladesh 2021 will harm rather than benefit the nation. But if we succeed, Bangladesh will achieve independence literally.