Raphael John-Lall

The Gov­ern­ment in­tends to im­ple­ment an "e-cit­i­zens card" which will re­place the ID card and dri­vers' per­mit in the fu­ture, said act­ing Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Gillian McIn­tyre, Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties. "The e-cit­i­zens card is a unique iden­ti­fi­ca­tion num­ber which will al­low cit­i­zens to ac­cess all Gov­ern­ment ser­vices on and off-line. "It is an­tic­i­pat­ed that this iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem which will even­tu­al­ly re­place all oth­er sys­tems such as dri­vers per­mits, ID cards and smart cards will en­cour­age a more ef­fi­cient de­gree of Gov­ern­ment ser­vices," she said. Ag Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Gillian McIn­tyre, Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties was speak­ing on be­half of Em­manuel George on Thurs­day night at the me­dia launch of the "I-cre­ate" 2010-2011 Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion of Na­tion­al Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Or­gan­i­sa­tion (Can­to) Re­gion­al e-con­tent com­pe­ti­tion at Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA).

The com­pe­ti­tion will be­gin in Jan­u­ary 2011. "We are set to im­ple­ment a new ICT strat­e­gy that will be­gin in 2011 it will em­pha­sise in­creas­ing us­age and up­take which would be in­creas­ing ac­cess to and util­i­sa­tion of in­for­ma­tion and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy such as the In­ter­net, com­put­ers and smart phones," she added. Al­though T&T is one of the more ad­vanced coun­tries with ICT in­fra­struc­ture de­vel­op­ment, the lev­els of lo­cal con­tent in T&T is low when com­pared to oth­er Caribbean coun­tries, she said. "Dis­cus­sions are al­ready un­der­way to ad­dress this crit­i­cal is­sue. "A new ICT vi­sion is soon to be de­fined by the Gov­ern­ment and it will sup­port the view that T&T can sup­port re­al and last­ing im­prove­ments in its so­cial, eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al spheres through­out the eq­ui­table dis­tri­b­u­tion of ICT," she said.

She said the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TATT) is cur­rent­ly re­view­ing the na­tion­al broad­cast pol­i­cy. "This as­sess­ment will ad­dress is­sues such as lo­cal con­tent de­vel­op­ment and a pro­pos­al to re­view and es­tab­lish a pub­lic broad­cast e-ser­vice and mar­ket con­cen­tra­tion and re­lat­ed reg­u­la­tions. "It is en­vi­sioned that the cre­ation of lo­cal con­tent which will be sup­port­ed through the es­tab­lish­ment of pub­lic broad­cast­ing ser­vice will pro­mote among oth­er things preser­va­tion of na­tion­al iden­ti­ty, counter bal­ance the in­flu­ence of for­eign me­dia and pro­vide use­ful ed­u­ca­tion con­tent," she said.