ICTA to make 860 Govt. agencies accessible via single, unified network

ICTA CEO (Acting) Dr. Ajith Madurapperuma (second from left) addressing the news conference. Others from left: ICTA Director Special Projects Kanchana Thudugala, ICTA Director Legal Jayantha Fernando and ICTA Director Special Projects Kanchana Thudugala - Pic by Sameera Wijesinghe

By Himal Kotelawala

Some 860 government institutes are to be connected digitally by the end of the year as part of an initiative to present a cohesive, unified public face of all state-sector organisations to the populace, the Information and Communications Technology Agency (ICTA) announced Tuesday.

According to ICTA Special Projects Director Kanchana Thudugala, 550 state institutes have already been thus connected, with a total of 3,500 locations to be linked to the network in the near future, utilising a last mile bandwidth of up to 2-100Mbps, an internet backbone up to 10Gbps and WiFi connectivity.

The project seeks to connect all state institutes to the Lanka Government Cloud, the state-owned community cloud set up to host web-based, cloud-ready e-Government systems.

“The idea is that whenever any government organisation wants to offer any service, they can make use of this huge network, communicate with other government organisations and offer a unified service. Our effort here is to put in place the platform,” Thudugala told journalists at a press conference announcing ICTA’s various strategic initiatives aimed at transforming Sri Lanka’s digital landscape.

As far as the average citizen is concerned, he said, the Government is a single, monolithic entity. The collective public consciousness, therefore, renders the existence of the various ministries and institutes irrelevant. Thudugala believes the digital interface of the state sector needs to reflect this reality.

“For this to work, all the organisations need to be connected so the data can be shared when carrying out their services,” he said.

While there are several departments that generate enough revenue to afford their own IT infrastructure (such as Customs and Emigration), not all government organisations can do that, said Thudugala, citing Agriculture and Child Welfare as examples.

“As a Government, we should be able to offer the same IT services at the same level. Meaning, whatever systems we’re implementing, we should able to host at a secure location. The Government cloud is a cloud for all government organisations that will facilitate that,” he said.

“To put it crudely, you don’t need to build a house when you can rent one. Any Government organisation can rent space and offer online services through this,” he added.

Thudugala, and other speakers after him, highlighted the various projects initiated by ICTA over the course of the year.

The much-discussed public WiFi project is still a go, with the second phase to be launched at an unspecified date. The pilot phase, which ICTA claims is active at 600 locations with over 254,000 registered users so far offers a mere 100MB of data per user per month.

Calling the initial stages of the project a “learning curve”, Thudugala said discussions are underway with key stakeholders including the ministries of Finance and Education to go into the second phase early next year with increased bandwidth. The project is also expected to provide WiFi connectivity to government institutes.

Among other ICT development projects carried out by ICTA, according to Thudugala, is its Digital Government efforts to develop custom software solutions to various government institutes - an example being an Electronic Documentation Attestation System developed for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that he claimed had reduced a six-hour process to 15 minutes.

ICTA’s other forays into digitisation include adopting digital technologies to teaching, a Hospital Health Information Management System currently installed at 15 hospitals with 35 more expected to receive the system by January next year, and digitisation of the Land Registry System. The e-Revenue license for motor vehicles launched in 2010 is also set to receive an upgrade.

A National Spatial Data Infrastructure Project is underway that seeks to digitise all maps in the country, which Acting ICTA CEO Dr. Ajith Madurapperuma said will be used in, among other areas, crop insurance, automatically debiting insurance money to the bank accounts of eligible farmers in the wake of a devastating flood.

ICTA Legal Director Jayantha Fernando, who spoke at length on the Electronic Transactions Act of 2006 and its October 2017 amendment, said that the new amendment regularises some grey areas concerning digital government transactions and who has the authority to facilitate such transactions.

He also touched on the legal validity of electronic signatures against handwritten signatures.

“The original law states that anything that requires a manual signature can be done electronically, but the new amendment further upgrades and transforms the existing parameters by allowing any technology, including biometrics, to be used as an authentication method in the place of a physical signature,” he said.

According to Fernando, this law allows for cross border business-to-business transactions, giving them legal validity.

Asked why the implementation of ICTA’s various projects have seemed slow, ICTA Projects Director Indika de Zoysa admitted that challenges in procurement and capacity building have slowed down the process.

“Preparing the backend takes time. That is where most of the delay has come from,” he said.

CEO Dr. Madurapperuma concurred that the gestation period of such big projects take time, from conceptualisation and procurement to implementation.

“We have given the [Lanka Government Network] contract Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) to implement 860 institutes to be connected by the end of the year. Starting next year, given availability of funds, we’ll connect the other 3,500 as well,” he said.

Responding to a question about the controversial Google Loon project, Dr. Madurapperuma said ICTA is awaiting a positive response from Google.

“We haven’t given up hope totally. At the moment Google has put it on hold. We’re discussing with them. They’ve said once they sort out the issue with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on the use of the frequency, they’ll get back to us. We’re following up on it, but there is no immediate ground level activity yet,” he said.

Speaking to Daily FT on ICTA’s role in the ongoing e-NIC project by the Department for Registration of Persons (DRP), Fernando said ICTA is limited to helping with some of the regulations under the Electronic Transactions Act, a component connected with maintaining records in the DRP registry.

ICTA also provides input with regard to the legal validity of those documents, he said, adding that digital information collected can be archived as electronic archives in the Transactions Act. 

Responding to a question about privacy concerns raised by various think tanks and individuals, Fernando said: “Many people raise this concern, but we have clarified it. What’s important is to ensure the implementation of the Registration of Persons Amendment Act No. 8 of 2016. That has a hierarchy with regard to who is ultimately responsible,” he said.

“There are defined powers of under what conditions data can be shared,” he said.

The Department of Census and Statistics in its latest report on digital literacy in Sri Lanka revealed that Sri Lanka’s computer literacy is at 28.3%. The disparity in urban and rural areas with regard to ICT knowhow is significantly high (41.1% and 26.5% respectively). In this backdrop, how successful will ICTA’s various ICT development projects be in the coming months?

Fernando responded that the parameters under which the literacy rate was determined need to be clarified, noting that if the number of people who are able to receive and read SMS texts are considered, the literacy rate will suddenly and dramatically go up.

“Every country’s transformation is a gradual process. If Sri Lanka has to really go into large-scale literacy more adoption is required in the rural sector,” he said.

Asked if ICTA will play an active role in improving the status quo, Fernando said the agency was “doing small strategic interventions” in that regard.

“There’s a bigger role to be played by various government organisations to take it to the next level. For example, we can do a digital transactions support base for, say the Agriculture Department, but for them to take it to the next level they too have to take the initiative. I think it’s happening slowly. It’s a gradual process,” he said.