Good goal, ways to get it done questionable

The project had no financing and neither did it have any Development Project Proposal (DPP) approved by the planning ministry. Yet, the cabinet's purchase committee in late February approved a project to install a "tier-four" national data centre at a cost of $154 million.
The job was given to Chinese ZTE Corporation.
According to a highly placed source at the information and communication technology (ICT) ministry, only a few years ago Bangladesh Computer Council had installed a "tier-three" national data centre. Just 20 percent of it is being utilised.
"Even if we incorporate all data of all government institutions, 60 percent of the data centre will remain unutilised," the ICT ministry source said, adding: "Bangladesh does not need a tier-four data centre."
However, according to an IT specialist, "A robust and large data centre will always be useful for the country where the IT sector is rapidly growing. Our existing data centre is only handling the government data. If the private sector ventures like banks or multinational companies are offered competitive price for data storage, everyone would use this data centre, instead of spending a lot of money to have their own."
A level-four data centre increases the reliability of data protection by having independent power source and maximum redundancy.
While there is a worldwide debate whether a tier-four data centre was at all required considering the cost, the ICT ministry in August 2014 had signed a “commercial contract” with ZTE and ZTE Holding to install the centre.
This project is supposed to be implemented under a government-to-government arrangement, which is supposed to be participated by only government owned companies. Though the Chinese government owns only 32 percent of ZTE, it has been shown as a "state-owned company" in this deal.
Despite such anomalies, the cabinet's purchase committee conditionally approved the deal in February asking the authorities concerned to seal a loan agreement with Chinese Exim Bank and also have a Development Project Proposal (DPP) approved by the planning ministry.
The purchase committee had never before approved a deal that does not have financing or the DPP.
"The China Exim Bank will hold a meeting tomorrow [Thursday] to decide on giving $134 million for this $154 million project," said the ICT ministry source.
The source added that the ICT ministry struck a commercial contract with ZTE based on a pre-feasibility report on whether Bangladesh should have a new data centre. The pre-feasibility report had recommended a complete study before making such a decision. But no such feasibility study was done.
The idea of tier-four data centre popped up on the basis of a Chinese proposal in 2012.
According to the ICT ministry's proposal to the purchase committee, the government had the plan to build a high performance, earthquake tolerant, well-organised data centre as part of the government's vision of Digital Bangladesh 2021. This data centre will conserve data of all government and private companies and it will be built in Kaliakoir High-tech Park. 
The proposal added that as the country's citizens were increasingly becoming dependent on online services, a tier-four data centre had become necessary. On the basis of a government-to-government deal, the ICT ministry signed a memorandum of understanding with ZTE in August, 2013, following which a primary concept paper on the project was approved by the planning commission.
Following this, the ministry held negotiations with ZTE and the project's cost was fixed at $154 million under which various equipment would be procured.
“The proposed site is in Kaliakoir which is 40km away from Dhaka and thus it will be far away from all businesses. The proposed building for this data centre is one-storied building. In context of Bangladesh being a flood prone country, this is not a good idea,” said the official. “We do not have enough technical hands to run the existing data centre, who is going to run another one?”