ICT

Two years back, a software company in San Francisco came to Bangladesh to find engineers who could do their programming. The programmers they met were decent, but the technology infrastructure was pathetic. Reluctantly, they gave the project to Pakistani programmers, even though the Bangladeshi-origin CEO desperately wanted to bring some business to his native country.

This year, a colleague of mine set up an outsourcing company in Dhaka, hoping to get a slice of the billions of dollars of outsourced work that is going to India. But who is going to bring business to Bangladesh, with a crumbling technology and communications infrastructure, when they can get world-class infrastructure in India, Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia? So far, he has bagged nil clients.

A Bangladeshi student was the first to invent an anti-virus for the global Chernobyl virus. If it had been an Indian boy, the Indian government would have tirelessly promoted this invention, and this inventor would have ended up on cover of "Businessweek" (as another Indian did, two weeks ago in "The Rise Of India" story). Bangladeshi authorities frittered away the golden opportunity to tell a different story about a young, tech-savvy generation.

India, Pakistan and others all have country-specific domain names (.in, .pk, etc.). I once heard from a Dhaka technologist that the reason Bangladesh didn't have .bd is because the technology powers-that-be could not get their act together to apply properly. I don't know whether the claim is true, but certainly Bangladesh is the only country I know without a country domain address in 2003!

Dear ICT Ministry, technology is a young person's game. Some of the BUET graduates I meet can run rings around top-level programmers in New York. Jettison the old generation (anyone over 50!) at your ministry and hire young programmers and technologists, especially those only a few years out of college. There is still time to join the twenty-first century!