Govt told to create action plan to boost ICT sector growth
Urip Hudiono, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The government needs to formulate a definitive action plan for the country's information and communications technology (ICT) sector in order to speed up its growth and utilization, industry players have said.
The action plan should include incentives so that a wider public can own computers and gain access to the Internet.
"ICT in a developing country like Indonesia needs the government's support -- in the form of concrete action, not just a political will," Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association (APJII) secretary-general Heru Nugroho told The Jakarta Post over the weekend.
The first and most crucial step, Heru said, was to put ICT under one roof as in other countries.
"It should not be like now, where information, communications, and research all come under the purviews of different ministries," he said. "It should at least be the responsibility of one coordinating minister."
The government should then take measures to drive down the price of Internet access and to expand the use of computers as the expense of accessing the Internet and a lack of computers remained the main obstacles to the growth of Internet usage here.
The government needed to pay attention to the development of ICT infrastructure as the lack of infrastructure was the main reason why Internet access in the country was still expensive.
"The Internet in Indonesia would be best served by a combination of cable, satellite and wireless technologies," he said. "It should also be developed as part of the Internet backbone to avoid the need for leasing expensive bandwidth from other countries."
Heru suggested that the government provide subsidies, especially to schools, so that they could buy computers and enjoy cheap Internet access.
"They could also negotiate with proprietary software producers to sell their products at affordable prices to the schools, or encourage the use of open source software," he said.
Indeed, the government began to do this when it launched the "One School One Lab" program last November, and the "Indonesia Goes Open Source" program in June.
Heru explained that if such actions were not taken, then Indonesia's ICT industry would never experience the kind of growth it has experienced in other countries, where their governments fully supported the ICT sector.
The APJII, which has some 130 members, expects the number of Internet users in the country to reach 12 million by the end of this year.
Although the figure this would represent a 50 percent rise from 2003, it would still account for just 5 percent of the country's 220 million population -- far from the target set by the World Summit on the Information Society, which expects to see 50 percent of the population having Internet access by 2015.
Elsewhere, Indonesian Computer Business Association (Apkomindo) chairman G. Hidayat Tjokrodjojo expressed the hope that the government would cut import tariffs on computer components so as to make the price of computers more affordable.
"It would also encourage the local computer assembling industry," he said.
Although locally assembled computers account for some 60 percent of annual computer sales, their components are imposed with tariffs ranging between 5 percent and 20 percent, while similarly imported built-up computers are not.
Apkomindo is expecting to see sales of 1 million computers by the end of this year, up 30 percent from the 750,000 sold last year.
Hidayat also hoped that the government would help finance Apkomindo's "Personal Computer Ownership Initiative" -- a project to supply 100,000 computers priced at a low US$300 each to schools and local government offices.
"We are not expecting the government to subsidize the compo nent suppliers, but to help the recipients with their initial purchases of the low-cost computers," he said.