A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Thursday, February 2, 2017
Sri Lanka’s ICT Policy Gone ‘Off Road’
By Kamalika Gunawardena –February 2, 2017
Catalyzed by the energy generated by working together against an
impending ‘Y2K issue’, the Sri Lankan IT industry came to its first
stage of maturity at the turn of the millennium in a unique act of
collaboration to forge an ICT Roadmap for the new decade. The resulting
document was seen by many a donor as a strong indicator of the true
potential of the industry hitherto not visible. The Roadmap document
provided the impetus for the Sri Lankan government to be able to bring a
well thought out plan for negotiating with the World Bank (among other
donors) to accelerate the ICT industry through the subsequent e-Sri Lanka initiative.
To be sure it was during a UNP-led government that the ICT Agency of Sri
Lanka was first setup to drive the e-Sri Lanka initiative to bring the
dividends of ICT to every village and citizen in the country. The
initial roadmap was further developed with input from best practice from
around the world resulting in the e-Sri Lanka programme which was to be
implemented by the ICT Agency in 2004. Built upon five thrust areas –
the so-called ‘pillars’ of Re-engineering government, e-Society,
Information Infrastructure, ICT investment and private sector
development and ICT human resource capacity building, and held together by a sixth all-encompassing ICT Policy and Leadership component,
the e-Sri Lanka project was arguably one of the more successful of the
medium scale donor funded projects executed by Sri Lanka. One of the
many reasons for success was the clear articulation of its aims and
objectives to each of the stakeholder groups including the population at
large. This success is all the more creditable considering that it was
implemented during a turbulent period in the history of the country and
survived several political upheavals even during the tenure of a single
governing party.
The rigorous final evaluation report of the e-Sri Lanka programme found
that the implementing agency performed more satisfactorily than the
donor itself in making the overall outcome of the project moderately satisfactory.
While recommending the discontinuing of some of the sub-programmes of
the project, the report recommends that several of the sub-programmes
should be continued owing to the positive outcomes they had already
demonstrated, and their potential for taking Sri Lanka to the next level
in terms of truly leveraging the benefits of ICT in accelerating its
progress to middle income country status.
Ironically, today, under another UNP-led coalition, the e-Sri Lanka
framework has been completely abandoned and ICT policy gone ‘off road’ without any coherent direction of
progress. All the more ironic is the fact that some of the leaders of
the original e-Sri Lanka initiative are MPs of the ruling party, albeit
sidelined into ministries that don’t intersect with the ministry under
which the ICT Agency resides.
Fortunately, the strong private sector industry bodies that came to be
setup and get strengthened since the turn of the millennium, have now
matured and become resilient to national politics. Their export
targets for example and manpower engagement goals continue to be
ambitious as they seek to make ICT Sri Lanka’s top export by 2022.
However, anyone who has tried to work in any industry seriously, would
know that even such a formidable lobby cannot be harnessed effectively
for the development of the country, without the supportive framework of
policy that needs to be set in place by the government. For all intents
and purposes, it appears that the ICT Agency has abdicated its role as
the government’s arm in setting the policy framework for the ICT
industry.
Today, the ICT Agency is in shambles: with as much as some 64
independent and arbitrary projects in its ‘portfolio’, hundreds of
employees recruited without any apparent rationale, the once ‘lean and
mean’ agile agency appears to have gone down the path of other
government departments which act mostly as employment agencies for their
supporters. More seriously, the ICT Agency appears to have abrogated
its responsibility of engaging with its main stakeholders leave alone the public at large.