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State Minister for Information and Communication Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak wants to reach the benefits of the sector to every home by creating a skilled workforce.
Published : 13 Feb 2014, 08:23 PM
He also wants to complete the High-Tech Park, a project taken up in 1999 at Kaliakoir in Gazipur, to make it the icon of ‘Digital Bangladesh’.
Palak, the State Minister in the new Awami League-led government, revealed his plans while speaking to bdnews24.com recently.
The youngest of the ministers, he is seeing his responsibility as a challenge to live up to the ruling party leadership’s expectations of the youth.
“I have to be successful at all costs. Though I’m young, the leader (Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina) has entrusted me with big responsibility. If I fail, nobody will bring the youth to the forefront and give big responsibility,” said Palak, who is running just 34.
The work on the High-Tech Park had stopped following a High Court stay order over the appointment of project contractors.
The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, however, vacated the High Court stay on Jan 28, clearing the way for the resumption of work.
Palak said his ministry had already got started on the project. He, however, declined set a deadline but said the “project will be implemented in the shortest possible time”.
“High-Tech was our dream project. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina wanted to complete it during her first tenure (1996-2001). The subsequent government did not carry the work forward. Later, the court injunction stopped work. But the road is clear now,” he said.
The junior minister expressed his hope that country’s ICT sector would surge ahead once the project was ready.
He said Bangladesh was the third largest freelancer country in ICT and hoped the High-Tech Project would be regarded as a model of the sector’s development.
Palak hoped that the work on a Software Technology Park at the Janata Tower at Karwan Bazar in Dhaka would begin soon following the disposal of a related case.
He expected young people to be enthusiastic about building a ‘Digital Bangladesh’ and said efforts were on to establish an IT village or software technology park in every district.
He said the government had planned to set up software technology centres in abandoned public buildings and plots, and make entrepreneurs out of 100,000 of rural women in 64 districts.
They would be trained by the ministry and the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS) and offered bank loans at low interest rates so that they could graduate from freelance IT workers to entrepreneurs, he added.
The junior minister said an initiative was on to create 50,000 IT freelancers under the project, ‘Learning and Earning’.
He said Bangladesh currently had 15,000 of them but their number would be raised to 200,000 over the next two years.
