The GoB along with non-government organizations and donor agencies have made extensive

efforts through the implementation of various plans and programs to improve the living
condition of millions of poor people. As a result, Bangladesh has made considerable progress in
reducing poverty over the years, despite the series of climatic and commodity price shocks.
Poverty fell from 49% in 2000 to 40% in 2005, propelled by a decent economic growth rate and
relatively stable inequality (World Bank, 2008, p. xi). These improvements occurred at similar
rates in both urban and rural areas. Despite this recent success, Bangladesh remains a poor
country, with about 56 million people identified as being poor in 2005 and there are continuing
disparities across occupational groups, geographical regions, and between genders (World Bank,
2008).

As a result, the Transparency International's annual CPI for 2009, Bangladesh scores 2.4
compared to 2.1 in 2008, is among nine countries that have improved most (Transparency
International Bangladesh, 2009). In the same vein, the recently published The Daily Star-Nielsen
Opinion Survey, which was conducted for performance rating of the present Bangladesh
government's first 1 year in office, reported that 53% respondents said they thought corruption
had decreased (The Daily Star, January 8, 2010). As the GoB has firmly expressed its policy of
zero tolerance for corruption, more robust initiatives need to be taken to fight against it

The Evolution and Continuing Challenges of E-Governance S91 Today, Web-based

information technologies continue to proliferate and strongly influence the information
environment. For example, extensible markup language, or XML (World Wide Web Consortium
n.d.), makes it possible to convert information among many different display formats without
losing coherence, structure, and meaning (Gil-Garcia et al. 2007), assisting information sharing
across both systems and organizations — a major theme in most policy domains. Other technical
standards, such as open document format, help ensure that government records are accessible on
different platforms and applications and across succeeding generations of technology (ODF
Alliance n.d.), thus providing an improved foundation for electronic records management and
digital preservation. At the same time, IT consolidation and centralization continue to figure
prominently in the IT management agenda. Finally, the growing collection of tools characterized
as “Web 2.0” (e.g., blogs, wikis, social networking, and virtual worlds) provide for user-initiated
information sources, exchanges, and dialogues about public issues that complement, and to some
extent compete with, government sources and services. Mayors (USCM), and Electronic
Commerce Coordinating Committee (eC3). In all cases, e-governance-related topics are among
the major themes listed on these organizations’ home pages or located by simple searches. 4
Some, such as security, cross both branches and levels of government; others, such as broadband
deployment and e-commerce concerns, are more specific to certain offi ces. None of the
organizations expresses an explicit priority of issues. Accordingly, the topics listed in table 2 are
given in alphabetical order. Nevertheless, a rough approximation of priority can be discerned
from the number of resources devoted to each topic by each organization. These resources
include research reports, briefing papers, best practice guides, white papers, and toolkits
produced or posted between 2005 and mid-2008. By this rough measure, security is the most
pervasive theme (a total of 33 resources on these topics appear across these organizations).
Whether labeled as computer security, cybersecurity, homeland security, Internet crime, or
another similar name, security is a major focus for executive, legislative, and technology leaders.

“All corruption is a deceit, a lie that sacrifices the common good or the public interest for
something much less.” This is an age-old phenomenon, which has become salon-fähig (in
fashion) in the development debates (Ruud, 2000, p. 271), and prevalent in almost all countries
across the world. In recent days, there has been an extraordinary global concern for public-sector
corruption. A 2004 World Bank Report on corruption noted that bribery has become a trillion-
dollar industry, and caused far more wealth to flow from poor countries to rich countries than
those same poor countries receive in foreign aid. Whereas an estimated trillion dollars of foreign
aid has been given to poor countries since World War II, at least 5% of the world's domestic
product (amounting to 1.5 trillion USD in 2001) goes into the financial markets of the wealthy
countries in the form of money laundering (Werlin, 2005, pp. 517–518).