Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) of Sri Lanka selected the country’s parliament as one of the potential organisation where they could showcase the benefits of the ICT and implemented their first pilot project in 2004.
This initiative undertook a system study to gather the requirements for the ICT enablement and a website for parliament.
The English version of the site was launched in 2006 and ICTA further extended their support to Parliament to develop the Sinhala and Tamil versions of the said website since ICTA believed in taking the benefits to all the citizens in their mother tongue.
A test version of the Sinhala and Tamil websites was carried out on May 12 and was officially launched by the Speaker of Parliament on May 14, 2008.
“This is a tremendous and remarkable achievement for the parliament and ICTA as there are very few government trilingual websites which offer information in a very comprehensive manner,” ICTA Chief Operating Officer Reshan Dewapura says.
“We can correctly claim that the parliament website is the biggest, dynamic and interactive trilingual Sri Lankan website,” he added.
The benefits of this parliament trilingual website are two-fold. One aspect is that the members and staff of the parliament could login to their personalised area and make use of the system to publish materials for the public use, could access the documents published and etc.
“The other important aspect is that the citizens could in their mother tongue make use of the information published and could also interact with the parliament,” Thusha Mukunthan Project Manager of ICTA says.
“The citizens could interact with their representatives online and submit their petitions or grievances online; they could access the parliamentary information such as Hanzards, Committee Papers, and Agendas etc online,” she explained.
Any citizen from any remote village even could come online via their closer “Nenasala - Rural Tele Center” and access the entire parliamentary related information and interact with the parliament very effectively, which is the ultimate goal of this remarkable achievement.
ICTA already set up more than 500 ‘Nenasalas’- Rural information centers with the aim of empowering rural communities with ICTs.
“Our ultimate goal is to provide all the government citizen services to the rural public using information and communication technologies,” Wasantha Deshapriya, Director of the Government Re-engineering Program said.
Source: ICTA
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