State Minister for Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak has said Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, has declared her next vision to build Smart Bangladesh and it is to transform Bangladesh into an inclusive, innovative, sustainable, knowledge-based, smart nation.

While delivering a keynote speech in Singapore, he said Smart Citizens, Smart Economy, Smart Government, and Smart Society are the four major pillars of Smart Bangladesh.

"Based on those, we have different kinds of policies and partnerships with different stakeholders, like industry, academia, government, and international players," he said.

Back in 2008, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina declared her vision to build Digital Bangladesh. "Back then, we started introducing policies regarding Digital Bangladesh and started to collaborate with different stakeholders," Palak said.
 
Over the 15 years of time, he said, they have been able to provide 2 million jobs, nearly $2 billion in export income from the IT sector, and develop nearly 7 lakh freelancers.

"Now, we are looking forward to introducing frontier technology-based government services and meeting the necessities of the private sector by developing our strategies and introducing new laws," Palak said.

Recently, he said, they introduced a cybersecurity law. "Now we are drafting our private data protection act, and are going to make an AI policy."

So far, 2500 government services have been digitized.

And nearly a thousand services are available online.

"We have introduced 52 thousand websites. We are combining AI tools to provide our government services. Recently, we have decided to introduce four pre-trained Transformer GPT services, including constitution, education, health, and investment," Palak said.

He said they have organized hackathon to capture the ideas of young entrepreneurs and innovators.

"We are connecting our private entrepreneurs with government mechanisms. This is how we are achieving all of these successes within a short period of time," Palak said.