FM hints further dependency on ICT

Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith today gave hints of increasing dependency on ICT in the coming days, saying, this will push up productivity in the country, reports BSS.

“Wider and multifaceted use of ICT under the banner of ‘Digital Bangladesh’ is supporting us in taking forward our agenda for reducing poverty and ensuring social mobility. To sustain the trend of higher growth in coming days the contribution of industrial sector to GDP will have to be increased which call for stronger focus on increasing productivity,” he said while placing the proposed budget for 2018-19 fiscal at the Jatiya Sangsad today.

Muhith, who was placing his 10th budget in the House, said, a strong infrastructural base for ICT has already been set up at the grassroots level of the country.

“We still continue to put in place new infrastructure and facilitate programme for extension of internet services to cope with the increasing demand. Some of the notable programmes include provision of 4.408GBPS bandwidth from 6 divisions to Dhaka, 5.928 GBPS bandwidth from districts to divisions and establishment of wireless broadband network (4G, LTE),” he added.

The finance minister further said steps have been taken to monitor cyber space and internet based cyber-crime to avert security risk of ICT infrastructure spread across the country, prevent such crime while ensuring all kinds of information/security.

“We are going to establish ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Academy’ with a view to putting in place institutional framework for encouraging youths to come forward to innovate new technology and take new initiative and building their capacity, branding and marketing of their products, as well as production of intellectual property rights,” he said.

“This will play an effective role in developing creative entrepreneurship and building small and medium enterprises while creating employment opportunities,” Muhith added.