A year ago today, after a long fight with cancer, S M Kamal died. His name will mean little to most of the people now working in the industry he helped create, which is the point of this piece. In the 1980s, when “information technology” and “digital” were words from someone else’s country, Kamal was the person who decided that Bangladesh should have a computer industry, and then spent thirty years arranging it.
Who he was
He was born on 1 February 1946 in Bhanga, Faridpur. In the 1960s he graduated from the first batch of Dhaka University’s Institute of Business Administration, and in 1968 he joined IBM — the most powerful technology company in the world at the time. He could have stayed abroad and lived comfortably. He came back. In the 1980s he led the founding of the Bangladesh Computer Samity (BCS), the hardware industry’s association, and served as its first president. When the software industry needed its own body, he sat on the founding executive committee of BASIS and later became its president too. He represented Bangladesh at national and international forums for decades.
What he actually did
The work was unglamorous and essential. A colleague who wrote the first book in the “Heroes of Information Technology” series about him recalls the long campaigns: to get import duty on computers withdrawn, so a PC could cost what a family could pay; to get the Windows operating system into school textbooks, so students learned the machine they would actually use; to get VSAT satellite internet permitted, years before the submarine cable arrived. Every one meant meetings with bureaucrats and ministers who did not see the point, and most of those meetings went badly. The younger people in the room, the colleague admits, lost their tempers and gave up. Kamal did not. He kept his temper, kept his aim, and came back the next week.
What people say about him
Abdullah H Kafi, a longtime friend and former BCS president, described him as honest, selfless and averse to publicity. The image his colleague reaches for is a root: the part of the tree that holds it up and is never seen. The camera flash, the centre of the stage and the easy applause never touched him, and he never went looking for them.
The debt
The tribute ends on a note of shame that deserves to be repeated. Neither the IT industry nor the state gave S M Kamal the recognition his work earned in his lifetime. The tax-free laptop, the software export figure the ministry quotes, the BASIS office, the very existence of a trade body that a minister must meet — these are his infrastructure, and the country walks on it without knowing whose it is. A year after his death, that is worth saying plainly, and worth fixing.
