Project_Grant

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
Tanglin P O Box 101, Singapore 912404

Name of Organization submitting the proposal:	Institute of Computer Management and Science (ICMS Computer College)
Contact Person/Designation:	Hakikur Rahman, Member-Secretary
Permanent Address:	Country: Bangladesh ICMS Computer College Mirpur 10-B, Avenue-1, Plot-3 Dhaka-1216, Bangladesh.
Mailing Address: (if different from permanent)	Same Country:
Telephone:	880 2 8012458
Fax:	880 2 8012458
E-Mail:	icms@bangla.net
URL:	http://geocities.datacellar.net/icms_bd

Title of Proposed Project:	Connecting a Despised Cluster of Masses to the Internet
Country/Region where the project will take place:	Dhaka City
Duration of Project:	From (yy/mm)	To (yy/mm)	Total Number of Months:
	October 2000	September 2002	24

The Project is aimed to develop strong foundation of Internet awareness in the cluster of a society where simple computer literacy can barely be afforded. This project participants, specially youths completing 12 years of schooling with high motivation would emerge as the base of research potentials at their higher study in the field of Internet networking, policies and its realistic technological applications. Moreover, few extraordinary outsiders would enhance the accumulation of Internet based knowledge in the society through fast dissemination in the form of sharing experiences through daily life activities and necessities. Broadly speaking, the project would like to look into the practice and habits of the local society in the eye of Internet connectivity and dig down to the depths of the requirement for providing information en-masse in real life through Internet. The ultimate trend will be to focus towards a generalized Internet policy and Internet database management system for their daily use.

The project will offer to the participants an easy access to the Internet through specifically designed databases in respect of their demand through the Kiosk. This would only be possible by use of a generalized Internet download policy available locally in the local server by virtue of proper technological approach.

The participants will share the Kiosk by accessing the Internet to avail the opportunity of obtaining information for their daily use, like cultivation pattern of any agricultural product, harvesting information, seed availability with price, production cost elsewhere in the country with availability, distribution of agricultural products, marketing information, pond preparation with detail of aquaculture, information on poultry and farming, information on easy technology transfer for home consumer electronics, etc. In this way, the project is going to enhance rapidity and the trend of progress towards a sustainable community with gender equity and social equity. Main beneficiaries will be the rural youths to whom this type of information would never reach through any other media at this shortest time.

	Organization (1)	Organization (2)
Partner Organizations:	--	--
Contact Person/Designation:
Address:
Telephone:
Fax:
E-Mail:

		Local Currency	Canadian Dollars
Amount of request Grant:		2,431,000	74,450
Contribution by:
Implementing Organization:		970,000	29,400
Partner Organization(s):	(1)
	(2)

Where a simple telephone connectivity to a community still means a great opportunity and really difficult to obtain, there Internet connectivity remains a dream. Thoughts have been given to literate a cluster of this neglected community, self educated and completed at least twelve years of schooling, to basic computer literacy, computer networking basics, email correspondences and finally to Internet connectivity through popular browsers. In this way, this computer literate group will form standalone backbone of the community, thus transforming a neglected masses to a useful citizen of the global village. They would be accumulating knowledge and share experiences through Internet with other developing partners locally, nationally and globally and then disseminate their knowledge and experiences to the society for promoting developmental activities ranging from simple family planning, nature protection, pollution control, poverty alleviation, disaster management to human resource development and management.

A commercially viable and increasingly productive sector in the field of agriculture and marketing necessitates free flow of information between producers, marketing agents and related agencies regarding production technology, productivity details, availability of seeds and fertilizers, nature of production, price information, production flow, transaction flow, price deviations, solutions to technical problems, etc. and these could arise from within the community, country wide and may be from global ambience, focusing the necessity of a rigid information highway at the root level through low cost transmission media to the door step of the cultivator.

Similarly, other field of applications can be elaborated, like awareness on ecological problems, pollution control, transmission and prevention of mosquito incubated diseases, national polio injection campaign, fresh water and sanitation practice, etc. All of these human resource development related aspects can be rapidified through this type of Internet based project from where knowledge accumulation, sharing and dissemination steps out.

Simple Internet based database could be a smooth starting point, but in course of time, this database could become a really enormous RDBMS and would invoke a major research work in Internet based database development aspect, which is to be used at the main hub and regional hubs for easy and faster access of information on the Internet. Mode of communication would be preferably Bangla and it would be the most challenging contemporary research work on the Internet in Bangladesh.

The project aims to create an appropriate tool for achieving and facilitating exchange of information among the participants to design and implement plans for sustainable human resource development in Bangladesh. Project participants would be given access to the e-mail and Internet facilities along with the access to a database maintained by the host organization ICMS, connecting to government agencies, media agencies, NGOs, research organizations, educational institutions and their national/ international counterparts and the civil society in general. Successful achievement of this cluster activity through proper observation, monitoring and evaluation, regional activity centres could be taken into consideration, replicating the ideas and thought of the central node.

ICMS Computer College is taking the challenge to be the host organization for Bangladesh to implement this Internet based project which could be transformed to a nationwide IT network in the course of five to seven years span.

The participants/ beneficiaries at the Information Kiosks shall include the members involved in the project, but most importantly the private producers, traders and marketing intermediaries would form a large corporate group, requesting information to be needed for supply of commodities at the shortest possible time from the locally available points.

Primary beneficiaries are meant to be the educated under privileged youths successfully completed their 12 years of schooling. Secondary beneficiaries are their family elders who would be given access to the network participation through workshops, discussion forums and other developmental activities. Tertiary and final beneficiaries are general social mass aimed to utilize the network for agricultural information, weather forecast, population control, water and sanitary awareness programme, agricultural marketing information, community based information, family planning related activities, female education, etc.

A cyber cafe in the form of Kiosk at the college campus with 2-3 PCs is the primary attempt of this project where project participants will be coming at regular intervals and they would be given access to the Internet at barely minimum cost as compared to other locally available ISPs. Email account will be given to all of them through which they will be corresponding to each other, to national and international organizations for gathering knowledge and sharing information. Internet access to the cyber cafe will be given to the members keeping certain cost, presumably at 50% cost of other ISPs and email accounts will be given at free of costs to all registered members. This fund will be incurred for the development and upgradation purposes. A membership fee of Tk. 100 (2.00USD) will be taken for one year and this accumulated fund will be kept as operation and maintenance cost. Cost of sundries and stationary will be recurred from print out fees taken from the email users. The project is expecting that nearly 200 participants will be taking full services from it.

Information on similar aspects which falls within its perview of dissemination of information on sustainable development can be channeled through this network, resulting in some form of e-commerce practice during detailed download through the databases.

At the first phase, several seminars will be arranged with the idea of collecting prospective project participants and for that purpose letters will be given to all the neighboring education institutes who runs Higher Secondary Certificate level (‘A’ Level) courses. Their educational result and reference from the head of the institutes will be added advantage for the selection. A percentage of the participants will be taken from outside, for whose case their interest, intellect and reference from local elite will be given preference.

In second phase, several interest groups will be formed by categories of their interest, as cultural, education, music, research, agricultural, marketing, business, history, science, engineering, professionals, etc. These groups will be sitting together at regular interval for discussion, Internet chatting and other IT related activities. Each group will be formed with members ranging numbers between 10 and 20.

During the tenure of 24 months of the project, the final phase is being thought of for arrangement of several nationwide seminars at regional level to create awareness and motivation to the tune of the main theme of this project with the expectation of emerging regional level hubs at the end of the second year or at the beginning of the third year, provided necessary funds would be accumulated by that time from home and abroad.

The project is visualized as a wide-area network with the central hub located at the college campus with regional hubs at the six divisional headquarters, namely Dhaka, Barisal, Chittagong, Khulna, Rajshahi and Sylhet. Emphasis will be made to form collaboration with other networks engaged in Internet connectivity in the field of sustainable development, to minimize manpower involvement and infrastructure development of this project. This domino pattern could be replicated at the district level following similar criteria, making information kiosks at the district level outlets for the beneficiaries to obtain Internet connectivity and related facilities. These information kiosks may involve related government sectors, like Agriculture, Horticulture, Marketing, Flood control, Energy and Technology. In course of time the project will be heavily involved in technology transformation and information exchange between central hub to the district level hubs including time to time involvement of specialists from abroad working in the field of Internet technology.

Initially there will be a lack of specialized manpower to run this project at the regional/ district levels, but hands on training/ workshops/ seminars for technology upgradation and solution making tasks in networking environment will create a large number of skilled manpower in the society. Solution of Internet based database management system seems to be extremely complex in nature with diversified demands from the beneficiaries. Manipulation, extrapolation, processing and preparing the output at the kiosk level with minimum effort of browsing, speedy downloading, simplified database architecture, optimum caching at the sub-domains, segmented search for speedy download, etc. with socio-economic justification is certainly a challenge for this project.

At the central level there is a ten member government approved and Bangladesh Technical Education Board affiliated management committee, under the presidentship of the Controller of Examinations, Bangladesh Open University including the Director of Computer Division, Bangladesh Open University as member-secretary, two professors from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka among them one is the present head of water resource engineering department and rest others are the elite and classified professionals from the society, will be providing over-all guidance to the implementation of the project with necessary monitoring. By virtue of the law, the committee meets at least five/ six times in a year with additional meeting on urgent demand. The member-secretary reports to the management committee regarding the progress of implementation and any problems encountered.

At the prospective regional level of the project there shall be 3-7 members regional advisory committees to guide and organizing the implementation of the project coping up with the local conditions. NGO representatives and IT professionals would be given preference including representatives from relevant government offices at the various levels.

The project is expected to be fully operational within 3 months of its launching and establishment and operation of regional hubs may follow a domino pattern or may be staggered.

Table – 1: Phasing of Activities (Number of centres established / upgraded)

Level	1^st Year	2^nd Year	Total
Central Node	1		1
Regional Node	1		1
Sub-Region Node	1	2	4
District Node	2	4	11
Information Kiosks	5	10	40

Level	1^st Year	2^nd Year	3^rd Year	4^th Year	5^th Year	6^th Year	7^th Year	Total
Central Node	1							1
Regional Node	1							1
Sub-Region Node	1	2	1					4
District Node	2	4	3	2				11
Information Kiosks	5	10	15	10				40

Cost Items	Quantity	Unit Price in Taka	Amount in Taka	Amount in CAD$

Capital Equipment
Computer	05	40,000	200,000	6,000
UPS	01	50,000	50,000	1,500
Printer	01	40,000	40,000	1,250
24 Port Hub	01	40,000	40,000	1,250
LAN Adapter	10	4,000	40,000	1,250
*Subtotal:*			370,000	11,250

Salaries
Project Coordinator	01X24	20,000	480,000	14,550
Network Administrator	01X24	10,000	240,000	7,300
*Subtotal:*			720,000	21,850

Professional Services
Foreign Consultant	01	120,000	120,000	3,650
Local Consultant		50,000	50,000	1,550
*Subtotal:*			170,000	5,200

Research Expenses
Research Associates	02X06	8,000	96,000	2,950
Transportation	L.S.		250,000	7,600
Contingencies			100,000	3,050
Computer Services			50,000	1,550
Inland Travels			100,000	3,050
Reference Materials			50,000	1,550
Conference Registration			30,000	950
Workshops			50,000	1,550
Seminar and Conferences			75,000	2,300
Report Preparation			30,000	950
*Subtotal:*			831,000	25,500

International Travels
INET Conference			80,000	2,500
Visit			80,000	2,500
*Subtotal:*			160,000	5,000

Cost Items	Quantity	Unit Price in Taka	Amount in Taka	Amount in CAD$

Support Services
Office Executive	01X24	5,000	120,000	N.I.
Accountant	01X24	5,000	120,000	N.I.
Security Guard	01X24	3,000	72,000	N.I.
MLSS	01X24	2,000	48,000	N.I.
Telephone			120,000	3,650
Photocopier			60,000	2,000
Sundries			150,000	N.I.
Office Rental			240,000	N.I.
Utility Charges			120,000	N.I.
Renovations			100,000	N.I.
*Subtotal:*			180,000	5,650

*Total Amount:*			2,431,000	74,450