Today, many of the marvels of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian architecture around Bangladesh have come alive in a new way on Street View. Some may find this surprising, given that at its birth in 1971, Bangladesh was called a “bottomless basket” by scholars in the developed world, because it was considered to be a country with no hope.
Some 40 years later, it is still a poor nation with low literacy and an international image characterised by challenges and disasters – both natural and man-made. Yet Bangladesh is also a country of “impossible attainments.”
Over the past few years, Bangladesh’s economy has grown quickly and our country is also in the fast lane towards digitisation. Our capital city Dhaka is now home to an exploding freelance IT and IT-enabled outsourcing services industry, over 120 million mobile phone users, and 43 million Internet users.
In this context comes our country’s honour of joining Google Maps service as the 65th country to come online to its Street View service. Through this collaboration between Google and the Access to Information Program at the Prime Minister’s Office in Bangladesh, people around the world will now be able to see high-quality 360-degree imagery of the country’s capital city Dhaka and the port city Chittagong through any Internet-connected device.
In addition to making our two biggest cities available through Street View, today we’re also introducing digital panoramic imagery of 40 of the country’s most important historic, heritage, and tourism sites on Google Maps.
This is the first step, and in the future, we hope to bring Street View to other regions of the country so that we can bring even more of Bangladesh’s important sites online for everyone to see.
The virtual walkthroughs now possible with Google Street View allow us to show the splendours of Bangladesh to international tourists who are on the lookout for new destinations to visit. At the same time, Street View will be similarly useful to the burgeoning domestic tourism industry.
Visitors can use their computers, tablets, and smartphones to move around these places – cities and tourism sites alike – and virtually explore them as if they were physically present.
Initiatives like this one are part and parcel of the country’s Vision 2021: Digital Bangladesh, an effort to leverage technology to create better opportunities for our country.
By introducing Google Maps with Street View in Bangladesh, we aim to boost tourism, attract foreign investment, and further enhance our economy by helping our country’s small and medium businesses go online and improve their web presence.
A shop-owner in Old Dhaka, for instance, could link to Street View images from their website and social media to help customers locate the shop more easily. Street View can also help us innovate new ways to teach and learn about our country – teachers here at home and around the world could use the new imagery of Bangladesh in lessons about culture, history, geography, architecture, and the local economy.
We’re excited about the new possibilities we have opened to our country, to our people and to interested tourists around the world with Street View, and look forward to sharing more of Digital Bangladesh over the years.
