State Minister for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Zunaid Ahmed Palak has said that no money has been spent on creating an app for Covid-19 vaccination programme.
He made the comment following a newspaper report that Tk90 crore was spent to create an app for vaccination.
Palak termed the news ‘false and baseless’.
“It will not cost any money,” he said, adding that their in-house programmes are working on creating the app based on the existing platform.
The new app for vaccination will be named as ‘surukkha platform’.
The ICT division has been providing technological support to the health department and other relevant authorities from the beginning of the pandemic. One of their initiatives was to help the government provide financial assistance to 5 million families.
“So we have a database ready and on that database, our in-house programmers are building the surukkha platform. That will be the app,” he explained.
“They (ICT division programmes) will do it using our own manpower, office and resources. We did not contract it out to any third party or organisation. So there is no question of spending money to create the app.”
“We have been told by the Prime Minister's Office that since a database is ready and tested, we have to use that database to create the ‘surukkha platform’. We will finish the work as soon as possible,” he said.
He also said that ministers and state ministers can spend up to Tk50 crore for a project. For a work worth Tk 90 crore, they will have to go to the cabinet committee on government purchase.
“We did not seek any money from the finance division or health directorate. So, the issue of spending Tk90 crore to create the app is completely fabricated,” Palak said.
Director of the health directorate’s MIS department Dr Mizanur Rahman told Bangladesh Post that the ICT division is working on the app for them. “We did not spend any money for that”.
The government earlier announced that the Covid-19 vaccine will reach Bangladesh by January 25 and the vaccination drive will begin from the first week of February.
Using the new app, people will be able to register themselves using mobile and NID numbers for vaccination.
An official of the health ministry told Bangladesh Post that the main cost will be to host this huge amount of information on the cloud server after creating the app, verify the NID and mobile numbers, and provide millions of SMS to the vaccine recipients in a year.
For cloud hosting, international standard cloud servers will be used. But, all the other steps will be completed by various government departments, such as Teletalk sending SMS, and relevant departments verifying NIDs.
These are not related to making an app in any way, the official said, the government initially had plans to involve outside organizations for making the app.
But they asked for a huge amount of money. For example, the cost of such a vaccine management solution from Japan's NEC is about $30 million.
Then, the prime minister’s office decided to do it using the government's own manpower and resources. So the story of spending Tk90 crore is misleading, said the official.