In 2015, the previous government adopted a strategy of building “IT parks” (later re-branded as “high tech parks”) as a means of implementing its “Digital Bangladesh” vision. Unfortunately, this was a completely misguided decision, based on the fundamentally wrong assumption that Bangladesh’s IT industry lagged behind that of countries like India due to a shortage of commercial real estate.
This assumption was obviously incorrect given the huge amount of construction always underway in Dhaka city, but at the time it was accepted uncritically by those in power. One can speculate that the real motive was to provide lucrative construction contracts for all those IT parks to well-connected individuals. Now, almost a decade later, the interim government is faced with the task of trying to find some use for the dozen or so underutilized “high tech parks” scattered across the country.
When the policy of building IT parks in various districts was first proposed, I had written an article for the Dhaka Tribune objecting to it entitled “Better education, not IT parks” -- the objection raised then still holds; the main limit to the expansion of the IT industry in Bangladesh is a lack of trained IT professionals, not office space.
So, the best way to facilitate growth of the IT industry is to increase the number of technical universities, which will increase the number of computer science graduates entering the job market every year. This in turn will allow the local IT industry to grow faster. The obvious solution, then, is to re-purpose the unused IT parks as technical universities.
Fortunately, re-purposing the unused IT parks as technical universities should not be that difficult or even take too long for that matter.
Usually, establishing a new public university by the government takes many years simply due to the delay in acquiring land and constructingbuildings -- in the case of the IT parks, these major hurdles have already been overcome. The only thing lacking is a decision by the government to establish universities at the IT park premises.
There will, of course, have to be some modifications to existing buildings to incorporate classrooms, academic offices, student residences and professors’ residences; but hopefully this can be done quickly. Once the civil work is done, the professors can be recruited and classes begun.
None of these hurdles are insurmountable. Hopefully, within the tenure of this interim government, quite a few new technical universities can be started up within the currently wasted facilities of government IT parks. This would represent a very significant increase in the number of IT graduates per year within just a few years.
Since the IT industry depends on highly trained people, in the long term, this is likely to be the most effective step the interim government can take to ensure it’s continued growth.
Zeeshan Hasan is a director of Kazi Farms Group and Kazi Media, the company behind Deepto TV. He is also the managing director of Sysnova.