Nadaleen Singh

Gov­ern­ment is one step clos­er to fi­nal­is­ing an ICT pol­i­cy for T&T. Nigel Chi­napoo, chair­man of e-busi­ness, in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­mit­tee at the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce, said goals were ac­com­plished dur­ing the ICT Round­ta­bles be­tween 2012 and 2013.Chi­napoo said cur­rent­ly be­ing looked at are e-pro­cure­ment, e-pay­ment and "laws to al­low ease of do­ing busi­ness with gov­ern­ment".

"That has been steam rolling for the last two to three years, build­ing on the work done a few years ago. We saw that be­tween 2012 and 2013. More hap­pened than in the pre­vi­ous years, not enough but more," he said­Chi­napoo said a new con­sti­tu­tion has been de­vel­oped and the mem­bers of the Round­table are now re­port­ing to the Min­istry of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing.

"With Ni­herst and oth­er bod­ies in that mnistry we think that a lot more could hap­pen be­cause of the ded­i­cat­ed fo­cus that is be­ing giv­en. Be­fore the com­mit­tee moved around dif­fer­ent min­istries. With this par­tic­u­lar min­istry and the stream­lin­ing that's been done we are def­i­nite­ly see­ing that e-busi­ness Round­table (and oth­er) ini­tia­tives have been get­ting a lot more ded­i­cat­ed fo­cus," he said.

Chi­napoo said the vi­sion of the com­mit­tee is to see mem­bers of the small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es sec­tor us­ing the ser­vices of e-busi­ness. Now that some of the laws have been pro­claimed it is in the hands of the min­istries to put things in place.