Bangladesh is going to sign a $2bn concessional loan deal with China for developing rural ICT sector, State Minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak said yesterday.
The deal will be signed during Chinese Prime Minister Le Kagiang’s visit to Dhaka in March or April this year, he told a press conference in Dhaka.
The Chinese government and agencies will provide the money which is supposed to be used to implement the government’s plan to develop business process outsourcing (BPO) in rural areas and establish broadband connectivity with optical fibre cable.
ICT Division sources said the negotiation for two projects under the deal is under way. The projects are Info Government-3 and a tier-4 data centre.
Officials said the interest of the loan would be less than 2%. But the interest is still under negotiation process in the Economic Relations Division (ERD).
State Minister for ICT said: “During Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s visit to China, the ICT sector was among top agenda to be discussed with the Chinese authorities.”
According to a senior official, the successful use of the loan can change whole Bangladesh in a short period of time.
“If we can use the loan successfully, the whole Bangladesh will change in a short time,” SM Ashraful Islam, Executive Director of Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC), told Dhaka Tribune.
He said they had stepped into a commercial contracting process for tier-4 data centre which would be established in Gazipur’s Kaliakair near Hi-Tech Park.
Tier-4 data centre, which is first of its kind in Asia and will be able to store huge amount of digital data, will cost $154m.
Bangladesh has tier-3 data centre already. The new one will be developed by the Chines company Zte.
Ashraful Islam said under the Info government-3 project the government has a plan to establish more than 50,000 Wi-Fi hot spots and all 4,500 union parishad offices across the country will be connected with that.
Replying to a question, the official said although the country has a third-generation mobile data service, for quality service it needs to have optical fibre cable connectivity.
State minister said they also have a plan to launch a “Digital Connectivity Project” and all these will be implemented with the loan.
He also mentioned a plan to establish more than 2,000 computer labs which will also be used as language clubs to improve foreign language skills of freelancers. Trainings will be given on nine languages including English, Arabic, Chinese, France, Russian, Spanish.