Internet wows government officials in Gilgit

April 21, 2001

SDNP aims to take ICT's to the people of Pakistan, with special emphasis on its remote areas. Towards this end, SDNP conducted an Access workshop entitled "Use of Internet for Sustainable Development" in Gilgit in collaboration with Northern Areas Conservation Strategy (NACS), for the Planning and Development Department (P&DD) and line departments and small NGOs on April 21 2001. Sixteen people from the following eleven organizations took part in the workshop:

1.   Planning and Development Department (P&DD)
2.    Local Bodies and Rural Development (LB&RD)
3.   IPM
4.   Green House
5.   Live Stock Department
6.   KARINA
7.    P&D Department
8.   Kasoner
9.   PBC, Skardu
10.  PBC, Gilgit

Mr. M. Ismail Khan NACS Coordinator Communications, welcomed the participants and briefly introduced NACS. Mr. Shahzad Ahmad from SDNP Islamabad briefly described its work and traced the history of the Internet from research oriented experimental use to today's global network of information and knowledge. He went on to explain how Internet Service Providers (ISP's) operate in a given geographic area, and answered the participants queries regarding various aspects of ISP servers. They were particularly interested in discussing the possibilities of ISP intervention in other main towns of the Northern Areas. Mr. Mohammed Ashraf from SDNP then carried out a hands-on training session on the use of email; how the system allows the user to send and receive data through the Internet, and how to open an email account.

SDNP's Pakistan Development Gateway (PDG) generated a lot of curiosity and interest among the participants, which contains vast and in-depth information about sustainable development issues related to Pakistan. They were thrilled to explore the news websites on environment and sustainable development, English and Urdu newspapers in Pakistan; and international sites such as Oneworld, IISD, and PANOS and IUCN's Red list of endangered species. They were particularly pleased to find large amount of information regarding Northern Areas and Pakistan on these web sites. Participants were also trained on searching for information using major search engines such as Altavista, Excite, Google and Webcrawler. For many government officials working on key environmental projects, the workshop provided an opportunity to overcome the "fear" of IT, because for many this was a whole new world of information and knowledge.

In the end, the Coordinator Communications NACS appreciated and thanked SDNP and all the participants for their time, focus and enthusiastic participation in the workshop, which was thoroughly covered by the media.