(I wrote this piece during my fourth year at CUET. Why, I can't say anymore.)
E-governance Discourse: Bangladesh Perspective
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Sushanta Paul, '02 batch, Dept. of CSE, CUET
27 January 2007
Ever since e-governance emerged as a purported cure-all for corruption, red tape, bureaucratic sluggishness and impotence, nepotism, cronyism, the absence of accountability and transparency—particularly in developing nations—the strategic deployment of ICTs has promised a pathway to 'leapfrog' past the tedium of incremental economic growth and to overhaul the deeply flawed, perpetually patched systems of dysfunctional state machinery. When applied effectively, ICT holds the potential to fundamentally reshape the rigid hierarchies and centralized structures of administration and social organization, while enabling decentralized and participatory communication rooted in networked relations among government, business, citizens, and civil society. These emerging relational forms constitute an 'e-governance architecture'; yet such transformation demands a government that is genuinely committed and operationally sound. This article examines Bangladesh as a case study of an institutionally fragile state in urgent need of systemic reform. It explores how the lack of transparency, the fusion of political and administrative interests, endemic corruption, and what might be termed 'integrated clientelism' obstruct e-governance-led reform, while proposing an ICT governance framework and identifying obstacles that must be overcome for its realization. For Bangladesh, the allure of ICTs lies partly in their promise to circumvent lengthy, resource-draining stages of incremental growth, each carrying a steep opportunity cost. Yet evidence suggests that modest, evolutionary change remains more the norm than revolutionary upheaval or sudden transformation—and there is no reason to assume that developing countries will prove immune to the familiar gap between technological promise and actual delivery. Indeed, constructing durable systems of governance and cultivating an attitudinal shift whereby the new regime becomes as natural as breathing—these may well demand more time than simply providing the technical apparatus for data management and communication. The understandable impulse to leapfrog tensions against the risks that come with such haste; incremental change may yet prove the wiser moderator.
E-governance
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A collaborative research initiative sponsored by the United Nations Division for Public Economics and Public Administration, along with the American Society for Public Administration, defined e-government as "utilizing the Internet and the world-wide-web for delivering government information and services to citizens." According to the World Bank, the growing interest in e-government—and particularly in electronic service delivery—represents a response to the mounting fragmentation and complexity within modern governance structures. The thoughtful application of ICT in government enables efficient, swift, and transparent dissemination of information to the public and other agencies alike, thereby strengthening the performance of governmental administration.
# E-governance and Digital Transformation
E-governance redirects focus away from government as sole actor, beneficiary, and controller—moving beyond the useful but centralizing whole-of-government model—toward broader engagement within a whole-of-community framework. This shift occurs because attention pivots from process alone to integrated processing and communication technologies that unite people, processes, information, and technology in service of governance goals. It draws us away from narrow technical achievement toward the real gains users seek from that technology. E-governance is thus fundamentally “transformational”—not merely incremental refinement of traditional systems. Its core objectives are to restructure administrative functions and processes, dissolve barriers to coordination and cooperation in public administration, monitor government performance, and deepen relationships between government and its stakeholders. A robust e-governance infrastructure is therefore essential to administrative efficiency and procedural simplicity. E-governance enables decentralized networks for administrative work, dismantling traditional centralizing patterns and creating conditions—through loosened central control over information—that render the system transparent, participatory, multilayered, and accountable.
With the rise of Internet technology in the early years of the last decade, policymakers in developed nations leveraged new ICT advances—particularly the TCP/IP protocol—to realize good governance objectives. E-governance introduces an Electronic State Management System built on information and communication technologies, including the Internet. Yet the reverse holds true: failure to adopt new technologies threatens development in a world and commercial landscape where ICT sectors dominate. Developing countries may find themselves with little choice but to conduct business on terms dictated by influential partners. Tellingly, where traditional infrastructure falls short, business may be encouraged to migrate from its geographical center—the physical locale of industry—into cyberspace, the virtual realm of services and negotiation.
## Current Issues in Bangladesh
Bangladesh demonstrates clear signals of commitment to e-initiatives and explicit implementation pledges, positioning itself as a nation with deliberate government focus on published ICT policy—in many ways well-suited to a fundamental shift into the Information Age at scale. With this in mind, a nationwide ICT infrastructure will be developed to ensure every citizen can access information, thereby empowering people and strengthening democratic values and norms for sustainable economic growth through human resources development, governance, e-commerce, banking, public utilities, and comprehensive online ICT-enabled services. Bangladesh’s e-government strategy aims to introduce new technologies facilitating inter-agency and intra-agency communication and cooperation, thereby delivering information and services to citizens more effectively.
Professor Jamilur Reza Choudhury observed at a Melbourne conference that developing countries will require considerable time to deploy ICTs as tools and leverage them as catalysts for governance improvement.
# E-Governance in Bangladesh: Policy Aspiration and Implementation Reality
Even where governance has emerged as a focal point, the emphasis has typically remained on elementary transparency gains—wider and faster information access, leveraging ICT’s most straightforward capabilities. This is a hollow kind of transparency, for it demands nothing more than passive reception; it incorporates no active response, no mechanism for continuous improvement. Yet even this modest opportunity encounters formidable obstacles: computer ownership remains startlingly low despite various purchase incentives. Expanding channels for global connection faces its own barrier—the persistent problem of affordability for ordinary users. The Bangladesh Government’s IT policy is admirable in its stated ambitions, but it depends wholly on both the availability of machines and the capacity of those who must use them, and so implementation has faltered predictably. A vicious circle is evident in the policy itself: preference in employment is promised to those possessing IT literacy, yet such literacy can only materialise through access, training, and sustained attention to capacity-building. Policy design, therefore, remains only weakly, almost rhetorically, tied to actual resource capacity.
The Government of Bangladesh has begun to acknowledge this gap, setting in motion a process meant to identify and address training deficits across all government levels. Service provision through technology encompasses land records and transactions, government procurement, health records and counsel, utility payments, postal services, taxation, recruitment, and the redress of grievances. Yet the web portal has been sluggish in gaining broad adoption, hamstrung by entrenched restrictions on information disclosure. Law has not yet evolved to accommodate digital transactions with the security they demand. Here lies the traditional bureaucratic instinct at work: first, a resistance to releasing information, born of the fear that transparency diminishes institutional power; second, a reluctance to prioritise unfamiliar legal innovations. In each instance, the detailed objectives of the Bangladesh Computer Council remain either inadequately realised or entirely unmet. Some of these—the enactment of legislative safeguards for intellectual property rights and cybersecurity, for instance—lie squarely within the power of executive and legislative bodies and demand no technological investment whatsoever. The failure here is one of bureaucratic and political negligence.
Bangladesh’s experience exposes a profound rupture: between high-level policy proclamations and commitment at ground level, between broad infrastructure capacity and the realities of field-level work. The necessity of centralised management in e-governance as the linchpin for coordinating progress and embedding ICT into a transformed operational culture is undeniable. Bangladesh’s Finance Minister AMA Muhit unveiled a nationwide information and communication technology strategy aimed at making technology accessible to all citizens. The ICT and telecommunications sector will receive a combined allocation of 563 crore taka (US$82 million) in the proposed 2009/10 fiscal budget—298 crore taka (US$42 million) more than the previous year.
The allocation includes Tk 142 crore (US$20 million) for an annual development program for the Science and ICT Ministry, Tk 221 crore (US$32 million) for the Post and Telecommunication Ministry, a special allocation of Tk 100 crore (US$15 million) for ICT development and Tk 200 crore (US$30 million) for the Equity and Entrepreneurship Fund for ICT promotion. He announced that automated systems would be introduced in the education, land and health sectors and tax administration would be phased in over the next few years. Steps have been taken to integrate land surveys, land records, and land management and bring the whole land administration under digital management. Once this initiative becomes successful, we shall be able to resolve many complex issues surrounding land administration, which will realize our goal of building a Digital Bangladesh. Attempts will be made to introduce e-governance and e-commerce by 2014 and 2012 respectively, to make the administration and business activities more efficient and transparent.
E-readiness
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The United Nations has signaled the importance of addressing e-readiness and capacity in Bangladesh specifically: Bangladesh’s e-government readiness ranking is alarmingly low, surpassed only by a handful of smaller or disadvantaged nations; progress in portal development and service delivery remains sluggish; and in virtually every performance metric for service provision and uptake, Bangladesh falls into the lowest tier, even within South and Central Asia. The World Economic Forum ranked Bangladesh’s networked readiness at 118 out of 122 countries. Across readiness indicators, Bangladesh consistently scores poorly across the board, with a single exception—government readiness, where it ranks merely three-quarters of the way down the scale (WEF, Global Information Technology Reports). In Bangladesh, human resource challenges stem fundamentally from governance failure, which readily eclipses the pursuit of specific technical competencies—ICT expertise, for instance—at the point of public sector recruitment, notwithstanding high-level policy commitments to reform. Certain technologies, such as mobile phones, have achieved remarkable penetration, while foundational infrastructure—traditional landlines—and emerging alternatives like satellite systems remain critically underdeveloped. In Bangladesh, good governance itself is scarce; without adequate readiness infrastructure, a chasm widens between those possessing technical skills and those without. This digital divide has calcified into a super-elite stratum within an already rigid, compartmentalized, and hierarchical administrative and political apparatus, stifling cultural and regional diversity on the Internet. E-governance success demands far more expansive and systemic readiness—policy innovation, infrastructure investment, and human capacity building—most of which transcend mere technological concerns.
In Bangladesh, technical support remains gravely inadequate and erratic in quality, leaving actual computer use in workplaces severely constrained, mired chiefly in word processing and failing to harness the true potential of available machines. Trained personnel are scattered unevenly across institutions; their overall competence is meager, and advanced skills beyond elementary proficiency remain uncommon, the result of profound capacity shortages.
# Challenges in Digital Governance: The Bangladesh Context
Although alternative access arrangements have raised overall connectivity to nearly three-quarters, the absence of personal computers remains a decisive constraint. Without machines of their own, civil servants will struggle to engage meaningfully with ICT, perpetuating the old rhythms of bureaucratic life—pen in hand, paper on desk, files stacked in corners. Internal and external connectivity fluctuate unpredictably; dial-up remains the default. Yet there is a curious paradox: enthusiasm for email far outpaces the actual availability of computers (a contradiction borne out by other survey findings). As for e-governance awareness itself, the picture is broadly positive, though perception concentrates among senior ranks—which aligns neatly with who has direct access to machines and participates in policy discussions.
These patterns reveal a troubling truth: a genuine understanding of real need exists alongside the tendency to celebrate progress achieved and to sidestep—or quietly ignore—what that progress costs in terms of meeting stated policy goals. A gap opens between the statistics we report about technical capacity, the assumptions we make about computer use regardless of actual availability and per-person ratios across the civil service, and a stubborn blindness to how this underlying shortage must breed resistance to change—sometimes quietly (no computer to use), sometimes loudly (frustration at scarcity; retreat into familiar old ways). In such conditions, the dream of digital Bangladesh begins to sound less like a plan and more like a wish.
## Challenges
1. **The confusion between capacity to deliver through ICT and the deeper, more transformative use of ICT to reshape how work is done and how government responds.** We mistake the tool for the change.
2. **Planning deferred in favor of immediate action.** This runs deeper than it first appears, because it seems to demand postponing urgent rollout—resisting, too, the seductive promise of the modern desktop, which offers so much, out of the box.
3. **The need for an e-governance architecture robust enough to create structural and functional readiness within Bangladesh, supported by clear Government commitment.**
4. **The mandate to use Bangla in government systems—a directive that remains technically unresolved.** This is harder than it appears.
5. **Insufficient technical and policy capacity stands as a fundamental barrier.** In Bangladesh, the gap between available expertise and what is needed, combined with how public managers perceive ICT itself, clouds critical decisions: migration to IP-based networks, rollout of mobile systems, e-commerce platforms. Capacity-building efforts exist, yet a deeper awareness is lacking—awareness of what the Internet can do for policymaking, for coordinating implementation, for creating platforms where stakeholders engage, for opening government to wider public participation and scrutiny.
6. **Stakeholders hold different interests; an e-governance system must be simple enough to work.** The Government of Bangladesh must examine how strategic plans are forged, communicated, and woven into the existing fabric of public administration. And it must ask itself clearly: what must change—in structure, in process, in the people themselves?
Within Bangladesh, the most pressing challenge today lies in reconstructing or establishing institutions capable of ensuring sound governance across society—the restoration of parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary, proper checks and balances between branches of power, and the systematic dismantling of corruption, both petty and grand, that has calcified the relations between rulers and ruled.
7. More fundamentally, Bangladesh’s current political landscape stands at odds with the ambitions of its official IT policy. Yet a governance-centred approach may prove the key to resolving these tensions, reshaping how the public sector understands and executes its mandate. The command-and-control apparatus of traditional bureaucracy need not, after all, be fundamentally incompatible with governance principles. For Bangladesh, the real work will lie in extending effective governance from the capital and major regional hubs down to the village—a task that demands disrupting the deep-rooted patronage networks that have long governed rural life.
Recommendations
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When e-Commerce began its ascent as the buzzword du jour, many of our ICT champions seized upon it, lobbying policymakers to act. In 2001, their efforts bore fruit: the government formed an ICT task-force committee to pilot e-governance in Bangladesh. The rhetoric suggested transformation was imminent—that government modernization would happen almost overnight. Yet nine years on, progress has been marginal at best. True e-governance demands something more ambitious: all governmental bodies networked and interwoven, information flowing freely between departments without human intermediaries. Ideally, this requires building Inter-Organizational Systems (IOS) or Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) infrastructure. The reality, however, is starkly different. Our government’s various IT systems remain siloed, islands unto themselves, incapable of sharing data across departmental or organizational lines.
Computerization and e-governance are not the same thing. Some ministries and government agencies have begun computerizing their operations over recent years, yes—but that is not e-governance, not truly. We have only begun the long march ahead.
The obstacles are real enough: Bangladesh lacks adequate resources for e-governance. Low telephone density has been a formidable barrier to digital communication, and thus to the Internet connectivity that underpins modern governance. Yet the explosive growth of mobile networks offers a way forward. Beyond that, we have at our disposal the underutilized fiber-optic infrastructure of the railway department. And submarine cable connections, if deployed wisely, could anchor us to the global communications grid essential for true e-governance.
E-governance in Bangladesh need not wait for unlimited resources. With a clear road map—a master plan—we can build ICT infrastructure methodically, layer by layer, even reaching down to village level.
Decentralization of databases stands as fundamental to genuine e-governance. A distributed, localized database preserves local autonomy and prevents network congestion. This principle must guide how we design e-governance for our nation.
Strategically, we must prioritize which sectors of government to address first.
Local government forms the backbone of good governance, and in Bangladesh, this means our upazilla administrative units. E-governance in Bangladesh should therefore begin at the upazilla level—a bottom-up approach that makes particular sense in a country where the majority of people live in villages under upazilla jurisdiction.
Internet access remains prohibitively expensive in Bangladesh compared to Western developed nations. The cheapest option here costs US$0.50 per hour via dial-up—a luxury for most. The infrastructure itself is barely nascent; telecommunications facilities for Internet Service Providers remain in their infancy, as the country still lacks comprehensive BTCL network coverage. Our telephone density stands at a mere 0.50 connections per 100 people, among the world’s lowest—starkly inferior to our neighbors: India (1.0), Nepal (0.5), Pakistan (2.1), Sri Lanka (1.0), and Thailand (2.5). The installation charge for a new line—US$450—ranks among the highest globally (compare Pakistan’s US$90, India’s US$60), and the waiting period stretches beyond a decade. Outside Dhaka and Chittagong, a telephone connection remains a distant dream for most Bangladeshis. Even in those cities, securing one demands persistence, connections, and often, discreet payments to BTCL officials.
Bangladesh suffers from crippling infrastructural deficits: electricity, telephone networks, and more. With only 1.1 percent of the population having electricity access, computers lie beyond reach for the vast majority. We have but one PC per 1,000 people, against 585.2 per 1,000 in the United States. Despite efforts over the past decade to lay submarine cables—aimed at accelerating overseas data transmission and Internet speed—we face a critical shortage of IT expertise to manage existing initiatives. Most IT institutions, barring public universities, train computer operators rather than professionals.
Financial constraints loom large. Yet if government demonstrates genuine resolve in deploying resources wisely, funding need not be insurmountable. We might reduce software costs through open-source or free software for e-governance modules. Funding could also flow from the World Bank, UNDP (already supporting certain government ICT projects), DFID, the EU, Microsoft, and others.
In our vision of Digital Bangladesh, we anticipate transformation in commerce and industry—though mainstream e-commerce scarcely exists yet, and fiscal frameworks for it remain unformed.
ITC can be used for marketing and promotion of products, for increasing internal efficiency, and for communication transactions between businesses. It is essential that the software and hardware industry of Bangladesh becomes a part of the global supply chain for ITC products and services. Our computer experts also have the knowledge to develop supporting components to improve the quality of a device. So, a government initiative with long vision is needed and in addition developing counties like us can jointly invest and develop a project for building hardware plants in a selected place. We should not forget that here we have a big market and to some extent, we can be dependent on own products.
Finally, the tendency of both ruling and opposition parties to politicize everything in Bangladesh has had an adverse effect on the desired growth of ICT initiatives at both the public and private levels. As political power changes hands between the two major parties in Bangladesh, the bitter rivalry between the BNP and AL often results in the abandonment of policies pursued by the previous government. This feature of the country’s political culture has thwarted efforts to promote the IT sector in Bangladesh.
Conclusion
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Infrastructure, governance and education, the three most vital areas for the nation’s growth should be transformed into a digital system. The government must take steps to empower its citizens with access to ITC and the skill to use it. We must establish technology-driven e-governance that encompasses e-administration, e-commerce, e-production, e-agriculture, e-health, and more. E-governance enables the continuous enhancement of state action, focuses on the efficiency of internal administration, and establishes an Information Management System to streamline internal processes and accelerate decision-making at all levels of government. E-governance aims to bring government within reach of all citizens, increasing transparency and citizen participation. Thus, the development of e-governance should promote universal access to government services, integrative administrative systems, networks, and databases, making such information available to citizens via the Internet. Operationalizing e-governance will not come down to an assertion of leadership through ever more comprehensively designed policy—that has been done well enough—but by demonstrating that government and its governance arrangements can be made strong enough to lead such a disruptive intervention with its own practices and its citizens’ expectations aligned; that is, “the chief challenge for government is not the implementation of new technologies; it is the organizational change required to develop more productive information flows”.
Encouragingly enough, in two crucial respects, the Government of Bangladesh is well positioned to benefit from ICT-related governance reforms. The first lies in the level of awareness among its senior public sector management—awareness both of policy development’s importance and of leadership’s role. The principal obstacles to building on this foundation can be overcome, but only with considerable additional commitment and at an affordable cost.
I appreciate you sharing this text, but I should clarify: this appears to be an English-language policy or academic document about e-governance and digital transformation in Bangladesh—not a Bengali literary work that requires translation from Bengali to English.
My expertise is in translating *from* Bengali *to* English. This text is already in English, though it reads as formal policy analysis or a government white paper rather than literary fiction.
If you have a Bengali text you’d like translated into English prose that captures literary quality and voice, I’d be happy to help with that. Or if you’re looking for editorial feedback on this English document to improve its clarity and flow, I could offer that as well—though that would be copyediting rather than translation work.
Please share a Bengali original if you’d like a literary translation, and I’ll give it the careful, artful attention it deserves.