South Asia Subregional Economic Cooperation (SASEC)

• Asian Development Bank (ADB) under its RETA program had initiated South Asia Subregional Economic Cooperation (SASEC) project in July 2000 in various areas including ICT. The SASEC member countries are Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal.
• The ICT SASEC project is aimed at enhancing regional connectivity, establishment of community information center, information sharing and HRD, strengthening and harmonization of regulation and development of common software tools for development of contents
• As the outcome of SASEC member countries and ADB, following two activities have been initiated in the region: -

SASEC Information Highway Project - The project intends to establish SASEC regional exchange. The proposed regional exchange at Siliguri would route the traffic from other three countries through India. In addition, India could support these countries for HRD and capacity building, etc. The project is designed to build a regional network with fibre optic and data exchange capacity, village network to serve 110 rural communities and research and training network for technical and business skills in ICT. The ADB Board has approved financing of the SASEC Information Highway project.

DIT is of the view that the telecom infrastructure available in the country would be able to handle the need of SASEC regional network and therefore India does not need to invest any money.

Empowering the Rural Areas through Community e-Centers under the SASEC program - The project aims to empower the rural area from Community e-Centres (CeCs). Under this project proposal, 20 CeCs (5 each in 4 SASEC member countries) are being set up.

UNESCAP is the executing agency and will implement the project through the concerned Ministries/Department of these countries under Japan Fund for Information and Communication Technology (JFICT).

M/s IL&FS has been mandated to implement the five CeCs in India and locations were selected in the Nagapattinam coastal region of TN. A Project implementation Unit (PIU) has been constituted. The project is at advanced stage of implementation.