Digital Bangladesh
The above topic seems to be the talk of the town; in drawing rooms, audio-visual and the print media in recent days. The news seems to be the "Holy Grail" for all the problems we have! It will gives us the promise for the possibility of a sort of 360degree, 24X7 openness and transparency of interaction with most public issues; practically bringing the governance to the computer website and the mobile phone in a reasonable time frame, if my analysis is rational.
So be it. This will possibly increase transparency on most matters of governance related to increased pubic interface and scope for direct interaction on popular issues except for matters of national security and in a grave emergency.
Hopefully, it will be set up on a top down basis, with views from policy makers; and not relegated to lower level government functionaries only! However, one important matter seems to have been overlooked, and not considered for digital interface and interactions, although the whole subject is closely related to maximum two-way public interaction! One wonders if it was an oversight or based on hindsight? That important subject is politics! All avenues of political activities and interaction with many persons can be easily established, more so with the growing generation, our future, who are more digital savvy, thanks to the Internet and mobile phone accessibility! This will ensure maximum openness and transparency between the government and the governed! It will definitely encourage participative democracy with healthy two way exchange of ideas and actions.
Parties will have to have serious fore-thoughts before putting up their programmes and proposed policies. Populist slogans alone will take them nowhere under this open mechanism. Once the political party gets the mandate to man the government, effective quarterly reviews can be easily programmed. The government will have to correlate their performance vis-à-vis their pre-election promises and give logical and acceptable reasons for any variance between performance and promise, throughout the tenure of their term of government!
The AL government has shown the way and hopefully they will put the policy of digital openness and transparency in governance, the sooner the better, which can be fine tuned as we learn our way towards a right mix of government authority and responsibility. At the least, they deserve thanks for taking the first step in the right direction.
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