The Nu 14.75 million community information centres (CIC) set up to help farmers at the gewog level has failed and there are poor IT security systems at the central government level, coupled with an unclear IT tendering process for the Nu 28 million local area network at the dzongkhag level, say audit reports on IT systems in the country.

The CIC was a pilot project established in Trongsa and Lhuentse.“CIC has failed in making any meaningful changes to the livelihood of rural communities,” said auditor general Ugen Chewang.

Despite its failings, the auditor general said, the government was bent on replicating the CIC system in gewogs across the country.

The CIC project was aimed at making information like crop price, livestock disease, reproductive health, market opportunities, and weather available to farmers. Facilities like printing and photocopying are also available.

“These centres are used by teachers, dropouts, and local literate for email but no farmers have sought any information from it,” said an audit official.

Information villagers sought, like livestock, health, education, markets and prices, were not provided and the centre’s main software was delivered three months late. “This is a breach of contract but DIT did not impose fines and instead paid a higher price for low quality and incomplete products,” said the report.

The country also showed several security weaknesses in financial and personal information stored in computers. Agencies like the ministry of labour and human resources, royal monetary authority, and Bank of Bhutan were some examples.

There was no mechanism or security strategy to prevent and handle computer security breaches and hacking. There was poor security in the operating systems with almost all cases not having user log-in authentication. This allows outsiders to access and manipulate operating systems, says the report. Some operating systems were also poorly configured which could lead to unrestricted access.

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Tags: agrotech, cic