The government has declared that expansion of information and communications technology has had the biggest impact on national development, the head of Iran’s Information Technology Organization said.
Nasrollah Jahangard added that 18,000 villages are now connected to high-speed Internet and 30 million Internet telecoms ports are currently available for villages, ICTNA reported.
Early in May, Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mahmoud Vaezi said the ministry is working to expand ICT services in villages and underdeveloped areas.
“We plan to bring Internet to 15,000 more villages,” the minister said at the time.
E-Governance
Jahangard said developing e-governance is one of the key steps that must be taken in line with the principles of Resistance Economy.
Resistance Economy is a set of principles outlined by the Leader of Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, which aims to bolster domestic production and cut dependence on oil.
E-governance has a lot of potential for growth and its expansion would create more job opportunities.
The official stressed that currently when a citizen heads to governmental organizations, for every 30 minutes wasted by employees and the overburdened systems, 1.5% of a country’s gross domestic product goes to waste.
With the optimization of governmental procedures, Jahangard said this time can be reduced to zero through the use of technology, which will boost growth in GDP.
Jahangard stressed that boosting the security of infrastructure would allow for safer data transmission.
“A system must be created to counteract the forgery of documents, which has been a chronic issue in Iran,” he said.
Stronger e-governance systems, according to the official, will ease monetary transactions and result in lower corruption.
In a meeting with the CEOs of ICT sector last week, Abolhassan Firouzabadi, the head of Iran’s High Council of Cyberspace, said Iran ranks poorly in the area of e-governance and is ranked 105th globally.
The official noted that compared to regional countries, Iran ranks at the same level of Yemen and Iraq in this area.
“This calls for the pressing need to take measures to improve this ranking,” he said.
Firouzabadi also said developing countries such as Saudi Arabia have a global ranking of 40 in the realm of e-governance.
“With correct planning, Iran’s ranking can be much higher than 40. This is a feasible goal,” he said.
The official added that the government must increase the speed of development in these areas or else the country’s citizens will accept services provided by other countries.
As an example, he said, from looking up a restaurant listing or road traffic to translation services, citizens currently use the services offered by Google.
“If the government does not speedily introduce competitive services, people would refer to foreign services in even more areas in the near future,” he said.
However, the official did not say if the government intends to tackle Google’s dominant position as a search engine.
Firouzabadi noted that to improve Internet services in different areas, tasks should be delegated to the private sector.
