Smart Bangladesh: People show little enthusiasm for AL’s call
Editorial Desk :
After failure in materialising Digital Bangladesh, the Awami League government has come up with the slogan of creating Smart Bangladesh as part of its Vision 2041. It wants to build Smart Bangladesh on the ‘launch pad’ of Digital Bangladesh as the next destination towards realizing Bangabandhu’s dream of Sonar Bangla, the golden Bengal. The slogan sounds good in ear though.
Digital Bangladesh was more a slogan than a reality however. The government still has not succeeded in making available to people many of its services including the crucial land recording. In the prevalent land record keeping in papers, it is easier for the corrupt people in the department to do corruption and they created stiff opposition against digitising land records. What Bangladesh has done so far in this regard has been achieved by many least developed countries without the sloganeering of the Bangladesh government.
According to Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index of 2022, Bangladesh has ranked 121st out of 141 countries in terms of mobile internet speed. In December of the previous year, the maiden download speed in the country stood at 14.34Mbps. Still, the ever increasing digital divide was acutely felt during the time of pandemic when the students of the richer section of society could attend online classes but students of the poor parents could not. In owning a smartphone, women are now lagging far behind than their male counterparts. So much about Digital Bangladesh!
What does the government mean by Smart Bangladesh? Primarily, it is about going cashless. No use or very little use of cash transfer. Payment would be made digitally through smartphones instead of handing over paper money like what China has achieved years ago, turning their cities into smart cities where the traffic is controlled through the remote cloud computing system. In the Middle East, many cities have been turned into smart cities with the Chinese technology of Huawei.
However, in capital Dhaka, the traffic police are still using physical gestures to direct traffic in all the major thoroughfares instead of using light signals. One can imagine now what would be the fate of Smart Bangladesh that will have to turn cities into smart cities. Computer and internet-based cloud computing for Bangladesh in managing traffic is a far cry.
Going cashless can create a problem for citizens of a democratic country because through it the government can have control both on the money and personal information of citizens. This cashless system fits well with the present corrupt authoritarian government in Bangladesh. It has to be known, then, to what extent Bangladesh wants to go cashless. Smart Bangladesh is touted as “more than 5G internet, more than 100% smartphone penetration, more than 100% high-speed internet penetration, more than going cashless.” This Smart Bangladesh would have four pillars: Smart Citizens, Smart Government, Smart Economy and Smart Society. Again all this sounds good in ear only.
In Bangladesh, at the present moment people’s fight is about establishing their democratic and internationally-recognised human rights, free press and ability to form their own government in a free and fair election. People want rule of law in the country. That is why they have given a lukewarm response to the government’s call of Smart Bangladesh. In this election year, the government raised this slogan, but it fell on the ground like the AL leader, Obaidul Quader, while uttering this slogan fell along with other leaders on the ground at Dhaka University as the stage holding them collapsed.
