e-Asia 2009 will provide an ideal opportunity for demonstrating Sri Lanka’s suitability for foreign investment. This was stated by ICTA’s Chief Operating Officer Reshan Dewapura at a special meeting for announcing Sri Lanka’s choice to host e-Asia 2009 attended by local and foreign media personnel and other officials held at the Ceylon Continental Hotel, Colombo recently.

Elaborating on the significance of Sri Lanka hosting the event Dewapura said that e-Asia 2009 would be an ideal opportunity for Sri Lanka to demonstrate its suitablility for foreign investment. Sri Lanka’s chairmanship of SAARC , its success in eradicating the 30-year terrorist war, the year being declared the year of English and IT, the tremendous commitment from the President for improvement in IT and the enormous success in ICT, all these, were eloquent in conceding that Sri Lanka was ideally suited to play the role of host to e-Asia 2009, he said.

Recounting the history of e-Asia and some of the lessons learned during the past four years Deputy General Manager Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies(CSDMS), India, Dipanjan Banerjee said that e-Asia, the non-Government IT research advisory service organization with annual events held from 2006 in Thailand, Malaysia and India had graduated to from a regional to an international event both in terms of participation and audience. The scope had widened beyond the four original areas of e-Government, education, e-health and telecentres. He commended the great strides Sri Lanka had made especially in Telecentres with nearly 600 Nenasalas set up island-wide.

"The Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (IC TA) aims to organise successfully the Information Technology exhibition and conference that will be held in Colombo from the second to the fourth of December this year", Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka Chairman Professor P. W. Epasinghe asserted expressing the great enthusiasm with which ICTA had taken up the responsibility as the host organisation of the event.