A Campaign Far From A Complete Success

Government boasts its "Digital Bangladesh" campaign as one of its most successful projects. But when it comes to realize this dream, it has miles to go to call this campaign a complete success. A quick look at some of the projects under the banner reveals that people's right to information and as well as access to public information has been digitized to a great length. Spread of e-commerce and online payment system led the new entrepreneurs to embrace ICT to overcome major stumbling blocks of a new business.

However, there are still unexplored territories that call for urgent attention. Why these crucial and vital sectors have not yet brought under the clutches of this Digital Bangladesh campaign remains a mystery to many, including me.

Take for instance, the delay in launching the planned automated payment system of Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation(BPC). BPC is undoubtedly the country's biggest company with annual turnover of TK 500 billion. The planned automation is supposed to cut the payment time to 4 days from 10 months. BPC faced stiff resistance from a certain quarter that does not want to see BPC receives revenues from its oil sales from state-run petroleum products marketing and distribution companies in such a short span of time.

If payments take as long as 10 months to reach BPC coffer, then it is pretty understandable that those who benefited from this delay will leave no stone unturned to strew the road to automation with all kinds of hurdles. Holding BPC's payments for 10 months , they can invest it to somewhere else and make lots of money. Frankly speaking, they can open 3-month or 6-month-long deposits at banks and earn huge interests. Or they can erect a whole new multi-storey building at any part of Bangladesh. In addition, such time lag also raises the possibility of leakages in the system. A news report divulged that a local company already developed the payment software, but it could not proceed with the scheduled launching due to the resistance from this vested quarter.

Another area that requires attention of staunchest advocates of Digital Bangladesh is the transport sector. Reckless driving and utter disregard of traffic rules everyday kills scores of people in Bangladesh. Even the issue was advanced to wage a popular movement to change the rules and ongoing practices. Little changes took place. In Dhaka, we had once a well installed transport policy that was literally thrown away because of political consideration.

A World Bank study revealed that politicians and corrupt bureaucrats involved in the transport business, which is merely a mean to whiten illicit money. Urge to start the change is not there. These public transports ply over from one end to the other end of Dhaka. So it is easy for a quarter to transport contraband from one entry point to other entry point using this transport system since it is not subject to police checking.

Despite an overwhelming number of casualties from road mishaps and drug invasion, we do not see any concrete step from the government to regulate the sector. For instance, in light of digital Bangladesh government can easily set up a database containing names and addresses of drivers and assistants of buses and taxis. Similarly vehicle tracking system, radio communications system can be introduced so that traffic department can monitor in real time the status of a vehicle in a busy working day. This will also help in check the plying of unfit vehicles.

Unfortunately government is not enthusiastic to digitize the transport sector.

We also witnessed from the part of government to launch a local social media platform. In this end, our neighbour surpassed us with the launch of MM Social. It all happened when Facebook took off several pages and accounts regarding Myanmar Armed Forces. Now Myanmar will have a leading advantage in operating this kind of platforms and problems they pose.

Ours still remains a dream. We have no short of talents at home, but we should not be shy taking assistance from outside. A country that can easily be made a strategic partner in our Digital Bangladesh endeavour is Russia, which is already implementing several energy and military procurement projects. Russia also has social media platform like Vkontakte. Bangladesh can invite Russian Social media platforms to launch joint initiatives in this country, opening up opportunities for local tech savvy population and small entrepreneurs.

Russia has also made great leap forward in innovative textiles, which have technical challenges in making them. According to a news report, Russian innovative and smart textiles market is estimated at $1.3 billion and is growing at pace faster than European countries. Using the thawed relations, Bangladesh can embark on collaborative projects with Russian textiles universities and manufacturers to speed up its ongoing automation, to manufacture smart textiles that will dominate the future clothes market, to initiate research on effluent plant to deal with hazardous textiles residue and to have a leading edge in computational textiles that will help both the countries.

It is indeed disappointing that government's "Digital Bangladesh" is trapped inside banal slogans and lofty ambition. No concrete plan has yet been unveiled in crucial strategic sectors. Noticeable is the politically biased implementation of some digital Bangladesh projects. To create continuous ripple of change, Digital Bangladesh campaign should focus on the crucial sectors.

Outsourcing Begins At Home

For the last couple of years, government has been relentlessly trying to increase the revenue from outsourcing. It staged several international events to project Bangladesh as a major outsourcing country. Bangladesh has a lot of potential in this sector. Digital Bangladesh has paved the path for it.

However, many critics view the outsourcing goals as hyperbole. The industry in general lacks uncanny frail of high-end freelancers. In 2017, Oxford Internet Institute did a survey on global online service providers. Bangladesh became second by providing 16% of the online laborers. India secured the top suppliers position by dominating the market share of software development and technology. Bangladeshi freelancers on the other hand made a stronghold in online sales and marketing. This study clearly insinuates the areas where our freelancers have comparative advantage.

But when it comes to revenues the freelancers generated every year, I have yet to see a comprehensive stat on that. There is a hush hush about it. I do not know why.

As a neutral observer I have noticed that slew of efforts have been made to tap the foreign outsourcing markets. However, at home, there are areas that have the potentials of becoming new outsourcing destinations.

Take for example our health sector. We spend lots of money in this sector to provide affordable healthcare to millions of people. Even our drugs are heavily subsidized . Our public medical facilities are far from digitalization. The health centre at upazilla levels and public hospitals everyday generate millions of handwritten prescription. Here I do not include the ones generated by private practitioners and private clinics.

Government and pharmaceutical companies have responsibilities to keep track of the patients' medical history, prescribed medicines and diseases that cause tribulations.

It will do two things: Government and policy makers will make better policies in health sector and private pharmaceutical companies will have a better understanding of drug business with the availability of the up-to-the-minute update of health data.

Digitalization of our health services could open up new alleys for our outsourcing sector. We could easily keep digital record of a physician’s prescription. Copy of the prescription can be passed to data entry operators to build a health database of the country. Anyone with knowledge of spreadsheet application and HSC equivalent Biology education can do the task. This potential operator could be equipped with a personal PC, laptop or smart phone with spreadsheet application. For the neophytes, Health Ministry or other relevant department could organize preliminary training program. The operators will get an amount for documentation of each prescription. The pecuniary earning will help students, unemployed and housewives to cover their spending.

Pharmaceutical companies could also play a pivotal role in this endeavor. They could assist the government or run a parallel initiative to digitalize the prescriptions stem forth private clinics and private practitioners.

Why does this health database matter? For many things actually. It will help the government and policy makers to make health profile of an individual and a region. Health professionals will get a deeper understanding of the diseases that crop up in a region, its severity and inter-generational affects. At the same time, production of vital medicines and its consumption could be tracked. Many of the ingredients of our medicines are imported from abroad. Recent data could help government to check the subsidy and to review its decision on imposing duty.
For private pharmaceutical companies, this health database will give an inkling towards the demand and supply of prescribed drugs, consumers preferences, productions costs and areas to focus on.

Apart from digitalization of the prescription, the health database may also subsume information on public and private health facilities dotted across the country, their operational and maintenance cost, stockpiling of drugs , service providers’ and service recipients’ records.
This army of data entry operators is available. They could be recruited individually or in a group. At prefatory stage when they will be primping themselves for this kind of task they may require trainers’ assistance. Given the minimal knowledge requirement, this creation of a health database will create decent employment at the Mofussil cities and villages throughout the year. And the update will go on every day, which means throughout the year the service of the operators will be needed.

Another sector that can also contribute to the budding outsourcing sector is the Ministry of Home Affairs . The police stations all across the country generate thousand of General Diary every day. If the Ministry outsources the task of digital documentation of General Diary, then another window will be opened for freelancers.

Similarly, there are many secretarial jobs that require extensive documentation at the bureaucracy and in many other public and private organizations. This could easily pass down to freelancers.

In a world when everything is metric, proponents of Digital Bangladesh have their hearts in the right place but the head is off somewhere in the cloud. Till now, they obtrude their views about cutting a share in the global outsourcing market. Till now, we see all the efforts have been mobilized to materialize this goal. Meanwhile, ample opportunities lie at home that none explores before and suit better to harvest the skills of homespun IT savvy population. Growing dependence of our outsourcing sector on local sectors will obviate the uncertainties of freelancers.