Financial Times

The ICTA (Information and Communication Technology Agency) has only being going for a few years now. Its job is to implement the e-Sri Lanka initiative, which is a project to use ICT to foster social integration, peace, growth and poverty reduction.

To find what was on the agenda for the next 10 years, The Sunday Times FT spoke to Manju Hathotuwa, ICTA's Managing Director and CEO.

On being asked about the two percent IT literacy rate when it comes to the country, the CEO said that it depended on what aspects of IT one is talking about.

“The overall access rate it around 9.7 percent, with that figure dropping to 3 percent in the rural areas. Then if you talk about knowledge of, say, Windows Office, then that could drop the mark to 2 percent,” Mr. Hathotuwa said.

"For the figure in 10 years, we are looking at 20 percent for rural access and at least 10 percent for competent knowledge of the basic programs available.” he continued.

The aim, it seems, is to change the life of ordinary people; to offer them something “extraordinary, that will allow rural people to increase their power to influence the way the country is run. To compete with the more educated people on the western seaboard,” Mr. Hathotuwa said.

"ITC as an industry employs around 700,000 people and is worth $25 billion in India. Why can't it happen here; ensuring a more egalitarian society, leading to more growth, equality and a real chance of peace?”

As for getting the PC to the “Last Mile”, the CEO said that due to the unlikelihood of the national electricity grid getting that far any time soon, solar power was seriously being looked at. “At the moment the cells are too expensive, but prices are dropping, and we can see this as a very viable option in the near future,” he continued.

Presently the agency is running 300 programmes, ranging from e-society to e-government, but what was needed was more “e-leadership, and the agency can do that”.

“The ICTA is needed as the agency to run the projects to ensure there is a focus point, or things would move ahead according to the slowest participant.”

To get rural teachers and government officials on board, that's where Nanasala (small IT centres) comes in. So that once they are trained they can pass on the knowledge for the former, and run their agencies more efficiently for the latter. And to help this, work has been done with both soft- and hardware vendors to produce bundled computers for prices as low as Rs 32,000, up to Rs 36,000 with 120 hours of Internet access, where available.

For e-Government, South Korea has put forward $15 million to install an intranet linking all government agencies, where presently one million civil servants are online. “The aim is to get 50 percent of the civil servants IT literate by the end of 2007, where the President wants 60 percent by 2008,” The CEO said. (RI)But it's with the rural villages where the mark can truly be made. There already is a woman from a very remote village designing websites for foreign customers, allowing the family's income to quadruple. This has lead to others in the village wanting to get involved. And that seems to be the way, looking for the e-champion in each village and letting them lead by example.