The government continues to be gung-ho about the progress of its Digital Bangladesh vision by 2021, but in reality, no significant development has taken place in the last five and a half years.

"Over the last five years, we have created an enabling environment and infrastructure for ICT. Following this, Bangladesh has already reached the threshold of becoming a technology-driven modern state," Finance Minister AMA Muhith said in his budget speech yesterday.

However, analysts see no clear indication of further development of

the I CT sector.

The concept of the vision was to provide services using digital technologies to turn Bangladesh into a middle-income country having transparency in all sectors.

But due to a lack of coordination between different machineries in the government the target could not be fulfilled, said TIM Nurul Kabir, secretary general of the Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh.

He said different ministries are working in their own ways and there is no collective effort, while calling for formation of a high-level committee to monitor the progress of the differ-

ent wings of the government.

The government has to run the offices including the ministries through digitalised systems to implement the dream, but the public offices are still serving through the traditional filingsystems.

Mustafa Jabbar, an ICT expert, said: "We do not see any change in the government offices. If you cannot digitalise them, you will never be able to change the country."

So far, the initiative has yielded 4,500 union information centres, some mobile-based services and websites of the government offices, he said. "And the government is thinking that it has been digitalised. The concept should be changed and the government should do some basic work."

The Digital Bangladesh Taskforce, which is the supreme body of the vision spearheaded by the Prime Minister, had only one meeting in the last five years.

The land automation could not be implemented yet.

Ananya Raihan, executive director of D.Net, a development organisation, said most of the programmes under the initiative are suffering from 'perpetual pilot syndrome'. There is no enterprise approach to implement the vision, he said.

However, the use of mobile phones has increased drastically for the last couple of years: more than 11 crore people are taking mobile services and more than 4 crore people are using internet.

Mobile based money transfer or banking has reached a significant stage and has increased the money flow from the urban to the rural areas. Currently, more than 1.5 crore people are using the mobile financial services, with more than Tk 120 crore transactions taking place a day.

On the other hand, electronic payment is still lagging far behind, with only Tk 6 crore transacted a month.

The government's target was to establish a high-tech park and a software park, but it failed to implement those.

The software industry is still in the incubator, though the country is now exporting $250 million IT and IT enabled services and products to 30 countries.

However, the finance minister has proposed to allocate Tk 3,229 crore for 72 different projects in the ICT, telecom, post, education and land sectors, while the amount wasTk3,176 crore in the outgoing fiscal year.