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22/01/2013 IDG Connect Dan Swinhoe (Asia) - Bangladesh: The Next India?

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Dan Swinhoe (Asia) - Bangladesh: The Next India?

For years, IT in Asia has revolved around a b ig four; India, China, Singapore andSouth Korea. Other countries

may get mentioned occasionally, but on the whole, the smaller neighb ours are forgotten about. But Bangladesh is

on the up - a b looming outsourcing industry is beginning to boom within the country. Fuelled b y a young tech-

savvy generation, this new wave are willing to work for cheap, developing software and websites for almost half the

rice of neighbouring India.

Microwork

What's interesting abou t Bangladesh is the scale of everything. While in Ind ia, schools are teaching in thousands

and companies are employing in equally large numbers, in Bangladesh there are thousands of freelance workers

working alone . Ten thousand of them, according to the Bangladeshi Software and Information Services

Association (BASIS), work ing for com panies across the Western World . This Micro-work ing is popular amongst

students and those with other day job s, and BASIS reckons that they have now overtaken the formal IT- and I CT

enab led services industry in sales volume.' Alongside the lone wolves are hundreds of SMBs; of the 800 estimated

IT software companies in the country, less than a dozen employ m ore than 100 professionals. According to

Richard Sykes, the rise of Bangladeshi IT can b e attributed to "good universities [inherited] from its colonial days

as East Bengal, and with it a fast-growing pool of well-trained IT engineers that can b e recruited at salary levels

well below those of neighbours India." He cites the opening of Sam sung's new R&D center as proof of progress.

Despite this growth however, there are is still a divide b etween the blossoming IT sector and the rest of the country.

Less than 0.1% of total employm ent within Bangladesh is i n computer software & services and the country suffers

from a chronic poverty problem - alm ost half of the country is in poverty, while on ly5% of the country is able to

access the (generall ypoorquality)internet.

Digital Bangladesh

As part of Sheik h Hasina's election to Prime Minister in 2008, her Awami League created the Vision 2021

manifesto to create a Digital Bangladesh'. The idea was to push technology into people's lives, from a numb er of

e-Services to including technology in classrooms in a bid to improve the everyday lives of people. And things are

improving. Laptops sales are up around50% year on year, and mobile phones are now owned by around2/3 of

the country, though smartphonepene tration is estimated to be less than 5%.

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7/29/2019 Bangladesh- The Next India

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Internet in Bangladesh has been poor for many years, the country being served by one undersea cable and

generally suffering download speeds a fifth of the worldwide average. The introduction of3G earlier in the year will

boost connectivity for the many mill ions who use their phones for web surfing (thought to be up to 95% of

Bangladeshi Netizens) and hopefully encourage even more to join.

In 2010Gartner nam ed Bangladesh one of the top 30 ou tsourcing countries in the world, bu t in many areas it was

still lagging b ehind the b igger players. As time goes on, though, and as the effects of DB 2021 and technology

become even more of an everyday part of life, Bangladesh could soon be a major player.

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