Majority of the members of parliament are not accustomed to using email IDs, which indicates the parliament secretariat’s “email notice project” failed in its intent and has forced authorities to rethink the future of the project.
“We know most of the MPs are not using the email IDs, so we still need to serve manual notice as well,” Mahfuzur Rahman, secretary of the parliament told the Dhaka Tribune last week.
“I have already talked to the new speaker about it, and she told us to serve another notice to all the MPs regarding it,” he said.
Parliament secretariat officials before starting this year’s budget session on June 3, said they are preparing to send letters to all 350 MPs informing them about using emails.
On January 2012, the parliament secretariat created email IDs for 350 MPs, with the name of their constituency while another one hundred IDs were created for parliamentary officials. At the same time, an SMS notice service for MPs was started.
Rahman said the SMS service has had some impact, but it is hard to send all the notices via SMS because of limits on text message sizes.
He said there is an option to change the passwords for IDs in the system, “so there will be no problems using the same email ID in the 10th parliament.”
Parliament sources said the secretariat used to send all notices such as to call sessions, the order of the day, standing committee notices and working papers.
Voters from any constituency can contact their MPs about any issue. So emails could establish easy communications between voters and lawmakers.
Zunaid Ahmed Palak, a young lawmaker said: “Though I use the email ID provided by parliament, most of my colleagues do not, as far as I know. They may like their own IDs.”
Meanwhile, the web pages of MPs remain unused.
On January 11, 2012 then State Minister for Science, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Yeafesh Osman promised when answering a scripted notice “dynamic websites would be built within six months for each of the parliamentary standing committees and every lawmaker as part of building a digital parliament.”
Seventeen months after the promise was made, Yeafesh said, “No doubt that the parliament should be the centre point in building a digital Bangladesh, but after few months of my promise, ICT ministry was out of my portfolio.”