Himalayan News Service

Kathmandu, March 28:

Role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in development can not be underestimated with ICT affecting almost every parts of life. Education, health, entertainment,

governance and service delivery all has witnessed a considerable growth with the usage of ICT in the first world, experts urged. With the objective of disseminating ideas on egovernance and open source concept a two-day long workshop on ‘National Interaction on Information and Communication Technology for Partnership Building’ kicked off here today. South Asia Partnership Nepal and Bellanet Asia are jointly organising seminar. More than 50 people from various sector of ICT are taking part in the workshop. Speaking at the inauguration, Dr Dayananda Bajracharya, vice-chairman of Royal Nepal Academy for Science and Technology (RONAST) said that ICT contributes a largest chunk in the national economy of developed countries. It has a lot of potential in our context too. E-governance would be beneficial in providing services effectively and efficiently and the workshop like this would help in capacity building of IT organisations providing them a platform to share experiences, Bajracharya said.

Atma Ram Ghimire, member secretary at the High Level Commission for Information Technology (HLCIT) said that the vicious gap between the have and have’s not need to be bridged for the effective promotion of e-governance. “Currently the government is concerned in building IT infrastructures and there is a need of standarisation among all the government bodies in the use of ICT.” “E-governance could contribute in social transformation by bringing revolution in governance. Mobilisation of resources, centric approach from people of different walks of life and accountability of government to people would help in bringing better service delivery mechanism,” said Dr R K Nepali, executive director at SAP-I.

Giving the key note speech on e-governance, C Umashanker, resource person of the workshop

said that strong leadership is needed for the development of e-governance. The government should be made a parent body and should formulate plans and policies and make them implement, he said. “Government and non government organisation should all work together for developing a digital society, identifying the problems and launching best projects for effective service delivery mechanism,” he said. The first day of the workshop saw working papers on ‘e-governance opportunities and challenges’ presented by C Umashan-kar, IAS, ‘e-governance in government sector’ by Saurab Amatya, computer programmer HLCIT, ‘e-governance in civil society sector’ by Rajendra Poudel, president E-Network and Vikas Kanungo, Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies, India and ‘Women and e-governance’ by SEOW Yoke May, webmaster, UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme.