New IT Minister calls for public views for fresh action plan

By Deepal V. Perera

The minister for Telecommunication and Information Technology Ranjith Siyambalapitiya on Friday called on the general public to  forward their views and ideas to the ad hoc committee appointed to formulate the country’s new IT action plan to raise the  country’s IT literacy rate to 75% by year 2016 and increase IT exports to a one billion dollar mark.

“Currently there is a very good action plan for the IT sector, but ever since I took over the office so many professionals and other people interested in the field are sending their ideas and comments to me to implement. So after taking all these comments into consideration it was decided to set up a committee to receive feedback from the general public. The committee will start working from 1 January 2011 and sit for 45 days in order to formulate a report which would be forwarded to the President for implementation. We also have set up a target of increasing the country’s IT related exports to US$ 1 billion mark,” he said.



Commenting on the current position of the IT sector in the country the minister said that when the Government commenced setting up Nanasela centres around the island, the country’s IT literacy was seen at 4%.

“Today we have managed to increase the country’s IT literacy to 30% and our new target is to make it 75% in 2016. We want to make IT to become a common item in our day to day activities. If you can remember, there was a time when the telephone was considered a luxury and very few people used it. But now it has become a very common item and is used by people in all walks of life.

Similarly, we want to bring IT to the same level where people can make use of it to improve their lives,” the minister said. He also said that once the new report was put out, the action plan worked out would link all government services. IT will enable people to obtain all services provided by the government without hassle.

“In doing so our focus is now on sorting out the current problems such as internet speed related issues, cyber crimes and credit card related issues. We also have an idea of setting up tele-medicine in the government hospitals, serving senior citizens and the national defence services. So the main objective of setting up this new committee is to explore how we can achieve these targets.” he said.

Chief executive officer (CEO) Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) Reshan Dewapura says that currently there are 400,000 internet broad band users and to achieve the government target of 75% IT literacy, the number of internet users has to be increased to three million.

Three million broad band users means; 2/3rds of the households should be having an internet connection in their homes. On the other hand in terms of IT related exports as a sector, the country’s IT exports currently stand at fifth position contributing to the economy to a value of US$400,” he said.

Senior Information Security Engineer of Sri Lanka CERT Rohana Palliyaguru said there was an increased trend in cyber related crimes and pointed out that an urgent plan was needed to curb it.

“There are increased internet hacking activities taking place in the country as well as password related issues where people have been victimised by stealing face book pass words and asking for ransom to return it,” he said.

He also said that cyber related crimes in the country were increasing and said that in the recent past they (hackers) managed to get into the President’s official web site too.

“There was an incident where the hackers even managed to enter the President’s official web site and hacked it. But we managed to rectify that. Since the hacking is most done from other countries, we are also planning to tie up with regional and international agencies to work together to identify these people and minimise cyber crimes in the country,” said Palliyaguru.