Vietnam on March 28, 2017, sought cooperation from India in various fields, including cyber security and e-governance, to steer the country towards economic development on the lines of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India and e-governance initiatives.
The south-east Asian country joined a number of others, including the US, Japan, South Korea, the UK, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and Uzbekistan, that have favoured India’s Digital India and e-governance initiatives.
A Vietnamese delegation led by the country’s information and communication minister Truong Minh Tuan met Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
“Vietnam would like to tap into the experience of India in the delivery of digital services, law management and cyber security as this will help in the economic development of the country,” Tuan told Indian government officials, adding that the IT sector contributes to 25% of Vietnam’s GDP.
Tuan said that Vietnam also wants to train its officers on e-governance and wants to build smart cities after seeing the work happening in India. He added that Vietnam is open to Indian firms opening businesses in the country thereby creating opportunities for Indian engineers.
“Aptech and NIIT are already present in Vietnam and is closely working to develop IT training centres in the country. Aptech has already built one,” Tuan said.
He said Vietnam has a requirement of 1 million engineers to fulfill its digital and e-governance initiatives and already has 600,000 people working on several digital initiatives.
Prasad said India was open to supporting Vietnam with their digital programmes and proposed collaboration through working groups to carry forward the proposals.
He proposed to the delegation to work on delivering digital literacy for citizens through platforms such as common service centres and also offered cooperation with National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology (NIELET) to provide basic courses on cyber security.
The minister also suggested collaboration between India’s National Knowledge Network and Vietnam’s VinaREN in areas of high-performance computing, e-learnings, telemedicine, weather forecast, cyber security, biodiversity and big data.
Vietnam has a population of 90 million and nearly 70% of its people are on the internet. And, nearly 90% of all its computers are connected to the web.
The delegation also signed a MoU on further cooperation picking up from PM Modi’s visit to Hanoi in September last year.
