Things may be moving fast in mobile technology, with the subscriber base reaching almost 170,000 since its launch in 2003, but the pace is slow in Internet and computer usage, according to the director of the information department, Tenzin Choeda.
The total number of computers in the country is between 10,000 to 12,000 and most of it was with the government and corporations and in the urban areas.
An IT official said that political will and commitment was crucial for things to happen in the IT sector. “The right people or the leaders have to be driven. For example, in Hyderabad, India, where the chief minister saw an opportunity in ICT and changed things around,” he said. “If the will is not there, the budget won’t come.”
Director Tenzin Choeda said that the total budget to develop ICT during the ninth five-year plan was almost Nu 80 million, which is actually the cost of building one higher secondary school with boarding facilities. For the tenth plan, the budget has increased to almost Nu 2 billion and that is the same amount that the government would be spending to develop Thimphu’s urban area. “We need the budget to make things happen and for which we need concentrated attention from our leaders to develop ICT,” he said.
The last two to three years was spent on building the foundation, laying infrastructure and developing policies to see more things happen, according to officials. “A great achievement would be to complete some of the e-governance applications this year,” said Tenzin Choeda. A number of useful applications have been identified and are in the process of implementation, such as the online issuance of security clearance, the agriculture marketing system to provide market rates and information, online forest clearance and land transactions. He also said that 90 percent of all government forms can now be downloaded from the Bhutan portal website.
One of the major works was the Thimphu wide area network (WAN) project to connect all organisations and agencies in Thimphu valley through high-speed optical fibre for information sharing. The work had started two years ago and is still ongoing. “The delay was there because government approval took a long time and we had to do some rectification work because the Doebum Lam construction had destroyed many of our cables,” said the head of the applications department, Karma Wangdi. However, at present, 42 organisations are benefiting from the high speed connection, according to the officials.
“We could move a lot faster, if significant importance is given to ICT development,” said another IT official of the information department. She said that the benefits of ICT are not directly visible as that of health or agriculture sector but people need to understand that it helps in facilitating other agencies to meet their objectives.
Director Tenzin Choeda also said that the different components of IT, such as the internet, were not moving so fast also because of the cost factor as well as the lack of adequate local content on websites. “Computer and internet costs are high compared to the earning level of Bhutanese,” he said. “On the other hand, we need more useful local content for Bhutanese people to increasingly use computers.”
Officials also said that, among the e-governance applications, Dzongkha localization was also important because whole messages on the computer should come out in Dzongkha if a greater impact is to be created.
Within the next five years, the government is aiming to establish IT parks, community information centres in all 202 gewogs in the country, set up e-governance applications, implement national broadband network and reduce internet rates within the next year. “For all this to materialize, we need resources and, more than the resources, we need the political will, commitment and support from all agencies,” said DIT officials.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Phuntsho Choden
Quelle/Source: Kuensel online, 26.04.2008
