Vietnam on Tuesday sought cooperation from India in various fields, including cyber security and e-governance, to steer the country towards economic development on the lines of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India and e-governance initiatives.
The south-east Asian country joined a number of others, including the US, Japan, South Korea, the UK, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and Uzbekistan, that have favoured India’s Digital India and e-governance initiatives.
A Vietnamese delegation led by the country’s information and communication minister Truong Minh Tuan met Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
Tuan said that Vietnam also wants to train its officers on e-governance and wants to build smart cities after seeing the work happening in India. He added that Vietnam is open to Indian firms opening businesses in the country thereby creating opportunities for Indian engineers.
He said Vietnam has a requirement of 1 million engineers to fulfil its digital and e-governance initiatives and already has 600,000 people working on several digital initiatives.
Prasad said India was open to supporting Vietnam with their digital programmes and proposed a collaboration through working groups to carry forward the proposals.
He proposed to the delegation to work on delivering digital literacy for citizens through platforms such as common service centres and also offered a cooperation with National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology (NIELET) to provide basic courses on cyber security.
The minister also suggested a collaboration between India’s National Knowledge Network and Vietnam’s VinaREN in areas of high-performance computing, e-learnings, telemedicine, weather forecast, cyber security, biodiversity and big data.
The delegation also signed an MoU on further cooperation picking up from PM Modi’s visit to Hanoi in September last year.
By Baishakhi Dutta
