The Minister of Economic Reforms, Science and Technology Milinda Moragoda last week said that e-Sri Lanka initiative should be spearhead by the Parliament itself.

"The apex body for starting this e-Sri Lanka concept is the parliament. In the parliament there is an electronic voting system, which was installed two years ago. But still we do not use it as due to some reason the parliamentarians do not believe in it. A swipe card system for parliamentarians and the staff is also installed but still we could not make out what to do with it. The e-Sri Lanka initiative must be started from the apex of the country which is the parliament," he said.

Inaugurating the 5th International Information Technology Conference 2003 (IITC) last week Minister Moragoda said e-Sri Lanka concept that envisage using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to develop the economy of Sri Lanka, reduce poverty and improve the quality of life of the people has increased the challenge on the government during the past months.

The 5th IITC conference focused on the theme "Towards an ICT enabled Society" and was intended to make participants aware of the opportunities and advantages that would accrue to the citizens of Sri Lanka by a society driven by ICT.

"IITC 2003 brings together some of the world-renowned authorities in the field of ICT who will speak on the trends and the directions in ICT, affecting industry and research. The e-Sri Lanka vision which is expected to realize through a five program strategy which encompasses building the implementation capacity, building information infrastructure and an enabling environment, developing ICT human resources, modernizing government and delivering citizen services, and leveraging ICT for economic and social development, through public-private partnerships," Minister Moragoda added.

During the conference, seven keynote speeches and over twenty five internationally refereed papers were presented by local and foreign ICT professionals and academics on topics of interest to the educational, medical, legal, financial, banking, communications, security services, trading, shipping and transport sectors, both public and private.

The workshops discussed how e learning and the use of ICT can improve the way we teach and learn by using real life examples. It also addressed questions as to how to improve the individual's teaching skill and why the role of a teacher is important to a student. The tutorial on bio informatics looked at high speed computing power at one's disposal and major problems in Biotechnology linked to the human genome sequences currently in the public domains.

The European - Asian IT and C stake holders meeting, e-Commerce security problems, solutions and trends, computational intelligence in the real world, how to build a successful e-government, developing secure Java applications, broad band access, implementation of UNICODE compatible Sinhala language support, tutorial ion web services, business process re-engineering and the main key areas were other issues the IITC focused on.

The Sri Lanka Telecom and NCS of Singapore were the strategic partners which sponsored this years IITC conference. The co-sponsors are Virtusa, IDM, Softlogic, JICA, SIDA, BSS, e-Wiz, LankaCom services and Ceylinco Internet Services.