Total Solutions 8 March, 2010 - The Nu 2.05 bn total solutions project will see 7,200 civil servants, including the prime minister, cabinet ministers, government secretaries and dzongdas attending specialised ICT courses to improve the ICT capacity of the government.

“At the cabinet level, the programme, which is for a few days, will explain the role of ICT in society and help the leaders to be more familiar with latest ICT updates and programmes in their own ministries,” said the secretary of the ministry of information and communications (MoIC) and head of the coordination committee of total solutions, Dasho Kinley Dorji.

Others will go through longer and specialised courses specific to their areas, for instance, the role of ICT in judiciary, police, dzongkhag administration and corporations.

“Each sector will get different specialised courses and sector leaders will be familiarised with ICT, which will impact the overall ICT literacy in the society,” said Dasho Kinley.

The courses are being designed by the royal institute of management, in close coordination with NIIT India.

The secretary said that the total solutions project comprises five main sectors. These are the courses for 7,200 civil servants, ministry of education for schools, royal university of Bhutan for tertiary institutes, labour ministry for VTIs and department of information technology in the villages.

“DIT will be looking after building community service centres in gewogs across the country for ICT education and also for ICT services,” said Dasho Kinley. There are around 200 services and many of them will go online, so a farmer can, for instance, get his timber permits from the centre without having to come to Thimphu. Under the ministry of education component, 168 schools across the country will be equipped with ICT facilities like computers and training of 4,000 teachers. It will also involve the developing of an IT curriculum. Bhutan will also be able to use the online education network in India and beyond.

Under the labour ministry, around eight of the existing VTIs will be given ICT facilities, like computer labs to ensure that the graduates from these institutes are proficient in the world of ICT. “In this component, people looking for jobs will be trained from basic ICT to courses like film editing,” said Dasho Kinley.

The RUB component will see that four tertiary institutions of Sherubtse, College of Science and Technology, Jigme Namgyal polytechnic and Geddu Business college are fully equipped with ICT facilities and are connected to each other.

The infrastructure part of laying broadband lines and a second broadband line from Gelephu is also covered in the project.

A presentation on the implementation module for the total solutions will be made later this month to the cabinet and the project is expected to kick off by late April on the sidelines of the SAARC summit.

NIIT is the lead Indian agency and is working in close coordination with MoIC and the various sectors in finalising the details of implementation. “This project is going to empower Bhutanese society through ICT education, right from the village urchins to leaders of all arms of the government,” said the secretary.