The 2012 Vietnam Information and Communications Technology Summit (Vietnam ICT Summit) opened in Hanoi on June 26 in the presence of Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan.

With the theme ‘ICT – the Fundament of National Infrastructure,’ the summit promotes the modernisation of the country’s infrastructure by applying information technology (IT) to turn Vietnam into a modern industrialised nation by 2020.

The summit will help to raise awareness of the Party’s new policy to develop ICT as the fundamental to the nation’s infrastructure as well as discuss visions, strategies and measures to develop smart infrastructure systems.

When speaking at the event, Deputy PM Nhan said that the Party and State has recognised the importance of ICT in national development quite early, reflected by the Politburo’s Directive No. 58 issued in 2000 on promoting the application of IT to serve national modernisation and industrialisation.

Nhan stressed that the Government is ready to consider proposals put forward by specialists as well as the business community in the field.

He suggested that both ministries and provinces create the right conditions so ICT can be applied during the development process while gradually putting together training courses on IT management systems.

During the two-day summit, there will be four seminars on how to use ICT to deal with socially contentious issues such as traffic congestion and accidents, educational reforms, developing smart cities and electronic ID cards.

Over the past 10 years, the ICT sector has seen some gigantic developments and revenues in 2011 were 20.7 billion USD.-VNA