A plan to move Kazakhstan’s well-regarded e-government system onto an untried, Russian-made platform has the Central Asian nation’s IT sector up in arms, worried about security and furious that domestic talent was not assigned the task.
The platform, known simply as GosTekh, was developed by state-owned
Kazakhstan’s current eGov system, which was built domestically and launched in 2006, helps citizens pay taxes, send inquiries to officials, manage real estate ownership, and much more. It is a repository of sensitive personal data.
By international standards, it works well.
Digital Development Minister Bagdat Mussin says the Kazakh platform has grown unwieldly over time, as various modules were built in different programming languages by different companies. He has argued that the
Yet the top-down nature of the deal has infuriated local business organisations.
Back in April, a draft of the memorandum was accidentally published on the government’s legal act portal, where all major decisions and bills appear before being signed or turned to law. That prompted a wave of outrage, including from the Atameken business lobby, which published an open letter incorporating feedback from 20 Kazakh IT experts and seven IT associations arguing that the GosTekh platform was laden with security and financial risks. What’s more, turning to a foreign-made product could put 5,000 Kazakh developers out of work, Atameken argued, forcing them to emigrate.
Government officials apologised and the minister promised that any deal would be put out for tender before being signed.
That didn’t happen. The public learned about the memorandum only after it was inked on
Nurlan Isin, president of the
“The IT industry of
Another IT expert, Timur Bektur, has praised the
According to the memorandum, the two sides are to work out a detailed implementation plan by the end of this year. The main parameters and technical aspects of the platform will be developed in the first quarter of 2022. Moreover,
The memorandum identified
Olzhas Kudaibergenov, an economist at the
“It’s a political decision rather than economic. At least the coding should be done by the Kazakh IT industry. [That would] reduce the risk greatly and the industry would gain experience building huge platforms,” he wrote on Facebook.
Zholdas Orisbayev is a recent graduate of Michigan State University’s journalism school.
This article originally appeared on Eurasianet here.
©2021 bne IntelliNews
, source