Min­is­ter of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion Has­sel Bac­chus vows the coun­try will be “dig­i­tal­ly trans­formed” by the end of this gov­ern­ment’s term lead­ing to more ful­fill­ing jobs, and set­ting stan­dards that won’t be eas­i­ly over­turned even if there is a change in gov­ern­ment.

Bac­chus was speak­ing at his first post cab­i­net news brief­ing on Thurs­day as he gave the coun­try an up­date on what his Min­istry was do­ing. 

The Min­is­ter said gov­ern­ment is mov­ing for­ward with Dr Row­ley’s cam­paign promise to have a unique iden­ti­fy­ing num­ber for every cit­i­zen which would tie them to state, mak­ing it eas­i­er to do busi­ness. Bac­chus point­ed out that a pass­port may on­ly tie a per­son to im­mi­gra­tion, and a dri­vers’ li­cense to the trans­port di­vi­sion but there is no one card that does all. 

He said cru­cial to this would be an up­com­ing trip to Es­to­nia with whom this coun­try signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing sev­er­al years ago to help the process along. Es­to­nia is seen is the gold stan­dard world­wide in hav­ing a so­ci­ety in­ter­act­ing with state en­ti­ties dig­i­tal­ly.  

But the Min­is­ter al­so ac­knowl­edged, that our so­ci­ety might not al­ways been ac­com­mo­dat­ing to change and em­brac­ing tech­nol­o­gy. Of­ten, up­grades can lead to job joss, but the min­is­ter said he un­der­stands the fears.

“Tech­nol­o­gy scares peo­ple,” Bac­chus said. “Does tech­nol­o­gy re­place me? Do I be­come ob­so­lete? How do I fit in this world? In this dig­i­tal so­ci­ety Part of that is a good part of our be­cause one of the ways that we have to fix that is through Symon [de No­bri­ga], through com­mu­ni­ca­tion. An­oth­er way that we have to fix that is through Dr Dol­ly, through ed­u­ca­tion. The me­dia has a big part to do with that.”

Min­is­ter Bac­chus went as far as to say, the tech­nol­o­gy could in fact make jobs more ful­fill­ing. He gave the ex­am­ple of a work­er in a min­istry whose sole pur­pose was to re­ceive an ap­pli­ca­tion form and file it away. 

“One of the things that tech­nol­o­gy could do is re­place that job by sim­ply say­ing fill out this form on­line. Do it a dif­fer­ent way. Just about that per­son that be­comes ob­so­lete. That is not true!” he said.  

He said in­stead that per­son could now be tasked with quick­ly redi­rect­ing a per­son who has filled out a form in­cor­rect­ly to the right place, sav­ing a re­turn trip to an of­fice or a trip to a new of­fice. 

He ex­plained, “That per­son who was sim­ply just col­lect­ing a form and look­ing at it and can now have a more ful­fill­ing job of be­ing able to con­tact them and say, ‘Lis­ten, we've no­ticed you ap­plied for this for this par­tic­u­lar thing. You've ap­plied in the wrong place. I can help you fix it.’ What does that do? It's the same per­son. Min­i­mal up­skilling. They have a more ful­fill­ing job as far as we are con­cerned in terms of what they're do­ing.”

Bac­chus was asked about the pub­lic scep­ti­cism this could be done with­in his tenure as min­is­ter. 
He was pre­sent­ed with the ex­am­ple of the dig­i­tal vac­ci­na­tion cards which were nev­er rolled out. Bac­chus strong­ly de­fend­ed the cards say­ing the tech­nol­o­gy is there, and it works, but it has sim­ply be­come ob­so­lete now. He vowed, how­ev­er that by the end of his term the coun­try would see some trans­for­ma­tion that will with­stand the test of time. 

“My man­date does not ex­tend be­yond the nat­ur­al life of this [ad­min­is­tra­tion]. So I have to fin­ish. not try­ing, I will fin­ish what I have to do with­in that time frame,” he said. “But un­der­stand what I'm say­ing. That doesn't mean that Trinidad and To­ba­go will be dig­i­tal­ly trans­formed come 2025. It means we will be well on the way there and the things that will be put in place, re­gard­less of which regime takes over or if we con­tin­ue, it will be very dif­fi­cult to re­place.”

He said the mea­sures will be in­te­gral to not just how peo­ple func­tion in­di­vid­u­al­ly, but with how the in­ter­act with the state as well.