eDevelopment plan geared for national reconciliation - ICTA CEO

“Every ICT enabled effort in the Government’s national eDevelopment plan is a step forward towards national reconciliation,” said Information Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) CEO, Reshan Dewapura recently.

He was speaking at the National Conference on the Role of ICT in Reconciliation at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute for International Relations and Strategic Studies (LKIIRSS) in Colombo. Dewapura said, “We are now able to reach all parts of the country. We can use ICT to accelerate this process and take the true benefit of development to them.”

Dewapura presented an overview of what ICTA initiated projects were doing islandwide to bring the benefits of ICT to the people.“Almost 400 government organisations now have a web presence with websites of varying complexity, but what is common is that all of them are in three languages. That is not just a mere facilitation, but adherence to the ICT policy of the Government.”

“An enormous divide existed previously with regard to access to ICT between those who were fluent in English and those who were not.

Together with all our stakeholders, we have been able to address this issue and have ensured that all aspects of ICT can be used in Sinhala and Tami,” he said. “It is now possible to use local languages (Tamil and Sinhala) end to end, from the starting point itself, which is from typing the web address onwards.

To facilitate this, top level domain names (such as .lk, .org, .com) in local languages had to be registered with ICANN (the governing body of Internet).”

Dewapura said, “The Mobile Digital Content Library, a bus equipped with computers and local content on many subjects, visited almost all areas of the country including the North and the East.” The ICTA CEO said that now the North and the East were also easily accessible.

ICTA, Government organisations and the ICT industry have proactively worked to meet the needs of communities in former terrorist affected areas.

The Nenasala or Arivakam are Telecentres which are established to empower rural communities across Sri Lanka with affordable access to ICT. The program aims to set up 1,000 such centres, and 700 centres have already been set-up across the country.