Challenges En Route

Educational disparity is a primary contributory factor in the implementation of e-Government. A strong correlation exists between education and literacy on the one hand, and the ability to use technology on the other. Education is the most important determinant of the intensity of Internet use. This allows advanced countries with a solid human resource base to remain far ahead of others. The ability to understand, use, and deploy Internet content determines the extent of participation in the economy and society.

There needs to be a well-planned program to create a greater number of IT human resources in the country. IT literacy programs should start early in schools, the local software companies should take steps to become more prepared for handling government IT projects; steps need to be taken to explore alternative sources of power or alternative means of power generation.

To develop a skilled workforce in the ICT sector, computer courses have been made compulsory in secondary and higher secondary levels since 2005, and universities are producing about 5,000 computer science graduates every year. The government is also considering how to provide necessary ICT equipment to 10,000 institutions to promote training in ICT. Moreover, there is an ICT internship program for six months providing basic training to develop a skilled workforce. It needs to be noted that these training programs are designed and executed across institutions, government offices, and employees to continuously enable, build, and improve IT skills and awareness across various levels of workforces.

The digital world’s infrastructure is completely dependent on two things: power supply and Internet access. Be it a data center, or government offices, or organizations, or citizens connecting to computers from various places – the connectivity should work seamlessly, and this is possible when there is uninterrupted power supply and backup.

Bangladesh’s electric power sector includes high system losses, delays in the completion of new plants, low plant efficiency, erratic power supply, electricity theft, blackouts, and shortages of funds for power plant maintenance. Overall, the country’s generation plants have been unable to meet system demand over the past decade. The utility electricity sector in Bangladesh has one national grid with an installed capacity of 25,700 megawatts as of June 2022.^[1] Bangladesh’s energy sector is not able to match energy consumption per capita.

The electricity sector in Bangladesh is heavily reliant on natural gas. The government buys almost 30-40% of their Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). They are still importing LNG on future exchange markets. The additional petroleum and coal imports are causing a disruption in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by as much as 2% annually.^[2]

In relation to integration with government databases/systems of record, government offices and departments are concerned and conservative about security of data and systems when it needs to be exposed through an API for data/information. So, it is a big challenge to convince and help them with the process of technology adoption; e.g., expose the required information and connect with the National e-Service Bus. The team faced many such issues during the NID API integration. Several meetings were held with the NID authority to demonstrate to them how it will relax their IT loads, show the no-data-cache feature of the National e-Service Bus, to do some Proof of Concept (PoC), and so on. Finally, they were convinced to connect the NID API with the National e-Service Bus.

For digital integration to work effectively, it is critical that information should flow seamlessly across participating systems with low latency (time taken for data to go from its source to its destination). Many of the government services (consumer/provider using the National e-Service Bus) have data centers across various regions of the country where the Internet connectivity was not equipped with the bandwidth to provide high speed data. Hence, adopting the digital framework was an implementation challenge.

Initially, there was a lack of internal networks between different ministries and government agencies in the beginning of these e-Governance and BNDA setups. Because of that, they could not share information between ministries. However, Bangladesh has made great progress with over 126 million Internet subscribers, and 183 million mobile subscriptions throughout the nation.^[3]

Government offices have started to set up computers (internally procured or supplied by ICT) but there has been a lack of interest in using computers by officials; they were not comfortable about this change and did not know how to use them properly. Similarly, the common people of Bangladesh were not aware that a lot of work can be done online using computers through the e-Citizen Service (part of e-Governance) – for which they had to spend multiple hours/weeks to run to offices. Many rural area offices will not have specific services. The convenience of e-Governance in terms of a citizen’s benefit has to be explained, advertised, and trained through a common medium (banners, television, radio programs, mobile popups, and broadcast messages). The training program of services and underlying platforms should be supported by computer education across schools, colleges, and offices.

For the successful implementation of e-Governance and its technical/operational components, the privacy and security of the Internet are crucial. Internet fraud has long been a problem that has troubled the nation due to the lack of cyber security regulations that have affected the country’s image at home and abroad. In order to contain the activities of fraudsters, all e-payment providers, national database/information stakeholders have called for the rapid passage of the long-awaited cyber security law.

A complex and ambitious e-Government work plan requires a significant investment. A timely and cost-effective availability of funds is required, not only during the digitalization process, but also for the maintenance of projects. As we know that Bangladesh is a developing country, it is always difficult for such ambitious projects to have funds allocated.