In its efforts to provide better facilities in the liberated areas, like with the rest of the country, the Sri Lankan Government has set up 64 ICT service delivery centres in the Easter Province.

In this endeavour of ‘normalisation’, which is concomitant with the government’s effort to enable all its citizens enjoy the optimum benefits of the most advanced developments in Information Communication Technology, by now a total of 64 ICT facility centres have been established in the Eastern Province. Out of these, 32 are in the Ampara district while Trincomalee and Batticaloa districts have 16 such facilities each.

These 64 tele-centres form part of the 570 Nenasalas (out of the 1000 that have been earmarked for the near future) which have been set up throughout the country. A majority of the Nenasala centres follow a community model and will be established in a central place in a village, such as a religious institution, public library or a community organization. These centres provide a range of services including high speed internet to access national, local and international information; e-mail; telephone; computer training classes and other ICT related facilities.

Content essential to the rural community is available in Sinhala and Tamil to all users. The Nenasala centres act as resource centres to the village to disseminate knowledge and share information via the internet with the ultimate goal of reducing poverty, peace building, economic and social development and improving the IT literacy rate of the country.

The Nenasala centres are set up by the government through its ICT arm, the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) which functions under the Presidential Secretariat. Nenasala centres come within the second of the six major programmes of ICTA all of which are under the Government’s e-Sri Lanka initiative. This second major programme is named “Information Infrastructure”.

The ‘e-Sri Lanka initiative’ referred to above aims at using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to foster social integration, peace, growth and poverty reduction. As indicated above the government body responsible for implementing this initiative is the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) which became operational under the operational Technology Act No. 27 of July 2003. ICTA functions as the single apex body involved in ICT policy and direction for the nation. Initially the period set for this programme was five years. But the effort has been looked upon as an on-going programme by the new (amendment) bill passed on 23 September 2008 (ICT Act No. 33 of 2008).

ICTA Nanasala Project Manager S. Gavashkar said that the public could benefit from the facilities for e-mail, photocopy, fax, computer application,information technology training and retrieval of information on examination results and syllabuses of courses available at these centres.

Gavashkar also said that plans were underway to provide more ICT facilities.