Bangladesh Telecom is missing in global list

Of the Bangladesh Government failure to hand in the necessary inputs on time has cost Bangladesh a place in a worldwide telecommunications publication heavily leaned by the outsourcing industry.

The UN International Telecommunication Union recently published the ICT Development Index (IDI) based on information and communication technologies indicators, grouped into three clusters of access, use and skills, of some 155 countries--but not Bangladesh.

The index is a standard utility that Governments, development organisations, operators, researchers and others use for measuring the digital divide and ICT performance to compare within and between countries.

The index is published every two years, with the studies illustrating the level of ICT development by the countries that since the last publication.

"Exclusion from the list would affect the promising outsourcing business of Bangladesh," said Mahboob Zaman, a former president of Bangladesh Association of Software and information services.

He said that the developed countries companies consider their outsourcing destinations after getting the ICT standard or rank of the developing countries.

"It is nothing but a political and bureaucratic negligence," said one analyst who preferred not to be named.

According to the Ministry of telecommunications regulatory Commission (BTRC) Bangladesh telecommunications is responsible for sending the information to the UN body.

And according to an official, the BTRC data are sent to the UN body--but it did not meet the deadline.

"This is unfortunate because the IDI is a way of assessing some progress has been made through the initiative" digital Bangladesh "," said Rohan Samarajiva, President and chief executive of the telecom Colombo-based think tank LIRNEasia.

Talking to the Daily Star, Telecom analyst Abu Saeed Khan said, "the authorities have failed miserably by not complying with the deadline for the feeding of ITU telecom-the very basic indicators. As a result, Bangladesh has swept from the global telecommunications map. "