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ICT Policy Challenges for Digital Inclusion in Bangladesh: Evaluating Policy and Practice

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The study explores a critical scrutiny of goals and means behind the ICT policies assessing the policy impact and effectiveness for digital inclusion in Bangladesh. The analysis takes place in two interlinked stages. The first phase is related to the national ICT policies. It investigates to what extent the idea of digital inclusion is set consistently and rationally in the respective objectives and their strategic themes and action items in order to ensure digitally included and integrated society. Second, this part is related to the UISCs (Union Information services Centres) project that has been operationalized under the ICT policy objective of ‘social equity’. It explores to see whether the policy claims of ensuring social equity, gender parity and equitable participation through ICTs are matched with social reality or only rhetoric. These considerations are followed by an interrogation of the literature that conceptualises the digital inclusion. This firmly links the current conceptual debate and previous researches and provides a comprehensive definition and a sound rationale for this study. Theoretically, it also includes a range of interlocking concepts that are appropriate considerations for the reviewing ICT practices and policy discourse involving digital inclusion in Bangladesh. The study is designed based on qualitative approaches using goals-means analysis and close reading of relevant policies mainly National ICT Policy (NIP), which is a key legal framework for ‘vision 2021’ and ‘Digital Bangladesh’. It analyses the appropriation of the policy process in both claims and practices as well as examines in the context of critical ICT for development discourses. Having examined the policy challenges in relation to digital inclusion, the study concludes that the ambiguity and inconsistency are visible in the suggested means that proposed to attain the desired policy goal. The policy is structured with the narrow digitisation frame of reference (access manners), where techno-centric ICT mechanism of policy process does not address the comprehensive issues associated with the inclusion, such as social inequalities, gender disparity citizen rights and inclusion, while economic growth and e-commerce are prioritised.
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