Govt. seals major IT project deals totaling Rs.4 bn

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By Chandeepa Wettasinghe
The new regime has closed tenders for 4 new national IT projects coming under the Information Technology Communication Agency (ICTA), according to an official speaking at summit in Colombo.

“We’re routing out 3,500 government buildings—linked with 100Mbps edge nodes, we’re having a 100Gbps backbone in the 25 districts, we have the Lanka Government Cloud Platform coming up—which will be the government’s data centre, and we have the government’s first big data initiative starting with 1 Petabyte of storage,” ICTA CEO Muhunthan Canagey said.

Sources said that the projects are expected to cost around Rs. 4 billion, while another 10 national IT projects are in the pipeline, worth Rs. 5 billion.

Currently dependent on isolated computers, servers and physical records, the cloud platform is expected to reduce the government’s IT costs by up to 50 percent, and increase IT productivity by 2,000 percent, according to Canagey.  

He further said that the big data programme would allow the government to pool together all available data on the country and its citizens. This would allow the government to create models which could predict future scenarios when changing dynamics such as tax rates.

“The tenders closed 2 weeks ago and all these would be actually rolled out within the course of the year,” he further added.

Canagey said that these projects are undertaken to give citizens access to more information, participate in e-governance services and promote transparency, as well as to increase speeds, as doubling broadband speeds leads to the GDP growing by an additional 0.3 percent.

“We will have a seamless digital connectivity across the country. We might be having internet, but I’m personally not happy with the speeds that are being given. That’s predominantly when the whole world is talking about giving people 1Gbps, we’re still cramped around with 10Mbps or 16Mbps. That’s not a line we want to take,” he said.

Canagey added that the free Wi-Fi programme has seen great success with population segments previously not absorbing digital information,  making use of the facility, which will cover the entire country by the end of 2016.

He noted that the upcoming edge nodes would allow for faster free Wi-Fi access in public buildings, and allow the government to provide free Wi-Fi to locations around them through a direct connection, unlike the current practice of relying on the mobile service operators.

Currently, free Wi-Fi is has a 100 megabyte monthly bandwidth limit. Launched in March with just 300 public locations equipped with access points, it will reach 1,000 locations by the end of August drawing Rs. 1 billion in public funding.

Canagey said that the projects are a thrust by the new regime to invest in soft infrastructure over the previous regime’s focus on hard infrastructure.