Saturday, September 23, 2006 Ministry of Defence <\/p>\n
BRIDGING DIGITAL DIVIDE IS A MAJOR CHALLENGE OF GLOBALISATION : PRANAB MUKHERJEE
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\nFollowing are excerpts of the Defence Minister Shri Pranab Mukherjee\u2019s statement at the meeting of Commonwealth Foreign Ministers hosted by the Foreign Minister of Malta in New York on Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cI thank Your Excellency for giving us an overview of the status of Commonwealth Action Programme for Digital Divide (CAPDD) which has recently been renamed as the Commonwealth Connects Programme (CCP). <\/p>\n
Bridging the digital divide among different countries as also within them, is a major challenge of globalization in the modern world. India is one of the countries which has made rapid strides in the area of information and communication technology. Concomitant with our ongoing efforts to ensure that the benefits of the progress made in the ICT sector reach all sections of our society, India has been in the forefront of taking initiatives to promote cooperation among developing countries in this crucial area. India\u2019s pan-Africa E-network is a good example in this context. <\/p>\n
India is strongly committed to CAPDD adopted at the last CHOGM in Malta in November, 2005, and had announced a commitment of one million Euros for this programme. We have designated a senior official to represent our Government on the Steering Committee and have already disbursed the first tranche amounting to Euro 175,000; an equal amount would be released before the end of the current financial year. We shall continue our efforts not only to meaningfully contribute to the implementation of this programme, but also to learn from the experiences of others. <\/p>\n
I am glad to convey that our Prime Minister has, in principle, agreed to inaugurate the International Partnership Summit of the Commonwealth Connects Programme proposed to be held in New Delhi, preferably in the first quarter of 2007. <\/p>\n
I have the further pleasure to announce that in addition to our existing commitments, India is willing to provide up to five experts for periods up to six months for assisting other Commonwealth countries in developing ICT capacity and strategies. <\/p>\n
We are also ready to provide between 50-70 training slots for capacity building in reputed institutions in India to fellow developing countries in the Commonwealth, through the Commonwealth Secretariat, in some other selected areas. These slots are in addition to the existing courses offered bilaterally to several countries in the Commonwealth under our ITEC programme\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-india-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citynews.co.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citynews.co.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citynews.co.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citynews.co.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citynews.co.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citynews.co.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citynews.co.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citynews.co.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citynews.co.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}