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Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen said about 100 million people in 60 per cent of the geographical area of the country have come under the high-speed internet facility provided by the government's Info Sarker Project.
Entrepreneurs are being provided with free 5 Mbps bandwidth service from the project for the past 04 years, which has resulted in the provision of nearly 800 million (80 crore) times government services to rural people for the past 13 years, he stated.
The minister came up with the remarks at the closing ceremony of the project titled "Development of National ICT Infra-Network for Bangladesh Government Phase-III (Info-Sarker Phase-3)" at a city hotel on Tuesday.
The project implemented by Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC) under the ICT Division of Bangladesh was completed.
The foreign minister was present at the programme as the chief guest while it was chaired by State Minister for the ICT Division Zunaid Ahmed Palak.
Chinese Ambassador to Bangladesh Li Jiming, Senior Secretary of the ICT Division of Bangladesh N M Zeaul Alam , CEO (Secretary) of Public Private Partnership Authority (PPPA) of the Prime Minister's Office Dr Md Mushfiqur Rahman and Executive Director of BCC Ranajit Kumar were present as special guests.
Mr Momen also said the development of the project has taken the most important role to achieve connecting citizens' pillar among the four pillars of Digital Bangladesh.
Union Digital Center (UDC) entrepreneurs are providing two types of digital services- one is public services such as parcha, passport application, NID, mutation, birth & death certificate, online tax return, etc., and the other is private services such as agent banking, mobile banking, e-commerce, remittance distribution, exam registration, photocopy, computer composition and so on from 2,600 unions' UDCs.
Mr Palak shed light on the current progress of Bangladesh in the information technology sector.
Depicting an overall picture of the development of Digital Bangladesh in his speech, Mr Palak said the Prime Minister declared her vision in the last election that she wanted to provide all the basic needs to the villagers.
"She declared My Village My Town Vision. If we could provide our villagers, electricity, internet, modern road connectivity, education and health, then no need to shift or relocate from village to town", he said.
"If we could get approval from both governments to implement modernisation of our urban and rural lives through ICT project, then we can really provide all the necessary modern services to our citizens", Mr Palak hoped.
The State Minister also requested the Ambassador of China to Bangladesh to specially consider approving the project.
Observing that Bangladesh has made a remarkable journey through its mass digitalisation, Mr Li Jiming said the project has helped a lot to run the country's all activities like education, business, trade, social safety net payment and so on digitally and smoothly during the Covid -19 pandemic.
"The Info-Sarker project is the example of the high quality belt and road cooperation", he said.
The Project Director (Grade-1: Additional Duties) of Info-Sarker Phase-3 Project Bikarna Kumar Ghosh delivered the welcome speech at the programme.
Executive Director of BCC Ranajit Kumar gave a vote of thanks in the closing remarks.
Managing Director of CRIG Guo Wei and CEO of Huawei Technologies Bangladesh Limited Pan Junfeng spoke among others.
The project started in 2017 with the aim of extending high-speed internet services to the rural areas of the country.
Apart from supporting to create employment in the country, the project also aimed to increase the network capacity of the Union Digital Center (UDC) for establishing network connectivity in different offices, schools, colleges, growth centers and other government offices at the union level.
Besides, to achieve the goals of the National ICT Policy 2015, ensuring access to e-services for the rural population and connecting the Bangladesh Police Network with the National ICT Network to ensure the free use of information and communication technology at all levels of police units under the GOB was one of the objectives of the project.