Bhutan government is working towards establishing ICT and e-governance

Bhutan government is now working hard to adopt ICT and e-governance. In its 10^th Five Year Plan, the government allocated a budget of Nu 500 million for the development of e-Governance and another Nu 950 million for developing a state-of-the-art National Broadband core network that would connect all the the 205 Gewogs (Group of villages) through Internet.

The government also approved a Nu 220 million project to establish 205 community centers in the Gewogs in order to provide public services to rural people via Internet.

Jigme Tenzing, senior ICT officer at the department of information technology and telecom (DIT&T), Ministry of Information and Communications, said, “The e-governance project will focus primarily on providing public services online in addition to other priority electronic government systems.”

In order to meet the growing demands, the department of Information technology and telecom also increased its personnel from 20 to 50 and number of ICT officers in the ministries and dzongkhags has been increased to 2003.

Government also undertook another ambitious project of Nu 2.05 billion called the “Chiphen RigPyel” project, under this project various training programs will be conducted where government officials, rural people and young people would be trained on Internet.