MAHMUDUL HASAN

For the second time in two weeks, a bill was passed in the parliament that has taken its relevant industry stakeholders by surprise and is now facing a pushback.

The Agency to Innovate (A2i) Bill 2023, which was passed on Wednesday, empowers Aspire to Innovate (a2i), a special project of the ICT division to facilitate the government’s Digital Bangladesh agenda, to form a company.

The subsided state company would be able to participate in government tenders, run e-commerce, do IT consultancy and make software and hardware -- a development that the promising ICT industry says would pose a threat to its very existence.

The industry stakeholders fear that all government projects, which is a healthy source of revenue for them, would be going for direct procurement of IT products and services with the view to patronising a2i instead of the existing practice of competitive tender.

Subsequently, from the moment the ICT division-drafted bill was passed by the cabinet in May last year, they have been opposing it. And the parliamentary standing committee on the ministry of posts, telecommunications & information technology, which has been tasked with scrutinising the bill, appears to have taken their grievances into account.

But the version of the draft that eventually became the law does not reflect the committee’s decisions, raising questions about the point of the exercise. There is no scope to change the decisions of the parliamentary standing committee.

On June 18, the committee comprising eight lawmakers sat in a meeting to scrutinise the bill, which was presented at the parliament on June 7 by Zunaid Ahmed Palak, the state minister for ICT. The committee was supposed to send a report to the parliament, which would then be reflected in the law.

Also invited to the meeting were the presidents of five ICT trade bodies: Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS), the Bangladesh Computer Samity, the e-Commerce Association of Bangladesh (eCab), the Internet Service Providers’ Association of Bangladesh (ISPAB) and the Bangladesh Association of Call Centres and Outsourcing (Bacco).

“It was unanimously decided that a2i would not be allowed to form a company,” Mustafa Jabbar, minister for telecommunications & information technology, told The Daily Star yesterday.

Jabbar attended the meeting at the invitation of the standing committee chairman AKM Rahmatullah.

“And the presidents of the trade bodies thanked the ICT state minister for accepting all of their demands including this,” Jabbar added.

The meeting agreed on three issues: a2i cannot participate in commercial activities, form a company and incorporate the presidents of the five trade bodies to the board of directors as its members.

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