Editors note: This post comes from Anir Chowdhury, a policy advisor in the Bangladesh Prime Minister's Office on their Access to Information Programme.

Today many of the marvels of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian architecture around Bangladesh have come alive in a new way on Street View. Some may find this surprising given that, at its birth in 1971, Bangladesh was given the title ‘bottomless basket’ by scholars in the developed world because it was considered to be a country with no hope.

Some forty years later, it is still a poor nation with low literacy and an international image characterized by challenges and disasters — both natural and man-made. Yet Bangladesh is also a country of ‘impossible attainments.’ Over the past few years, Bangladesh’s economy has grown quickly and our country is on the fast lane towards digitization. 43 million Bangladeshis are now online, more than 120 million are mobile phone users and our capital city, Dhaka, has become home to an exploding freelance IT and IT-enabled outsourcing services industry.

In this context comes our country’s honor of joining Google Maps as the 65th country to come online to its Street View service. Through this collaboration between Google and the Access to Information Programme at the Prime Minister’s Office in Bangladesh, people around the world will now be able to see high-quality 360-degree imagery of the country’s capital city Dhaka and the port city Chittagong through any Internet-connected device. In addition to making our two biggest cities available through Street View, today we’re also introducing digital panoramic imagery of forty two of the country’s most important historic, heritage, and tourism sites on Google Maps.

Here are a few of the scenes that have been captured to help you get acquainted with our country:

Gulshan Ave, Dhaka, Bangledesh
Hazrat Hazi Khawja Shahbaz Khan Mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Small market off Rd No 8 in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Dhakeshwari Temple, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Outside Baldah Garden, Dhaka, Bangladesh
This is just a first step. We hope to work with Google going forward to bring Street View to other regions of the country so that we can bring even more of Bangladesh’s important sites online for everyone to see. The virtual walkthroughs now possible with Google Street View allow us to show the splendors of Bangladesh to international tourists on the lookout for new destinations to visit, and will help the growing number of domestic tourists find their way in a new city. Visitors can use their computers, tablets and smartphones to move around these places — cities and tourism sites alike — and virtually explore them as if they were physically present.

Initiatives like this are part and parcel of the country’s Vision 2021: Digital Bangladesh, an effort to leverage technology to create better opportunities for our country. By introducing Google Maps with Street View in Bangladesh, we aim to boost tourism, attract foreign investment and further enhance our economy by helping our country’s small and medium businesses go online and improve their web presence. A shop-owner in Old Dhaka, for instance, could link to Street View images from their website and social media to help customers locate the shop more easily. Street View can also help us innovate new ways to teach and learn about our country — teachers here at home and around the world could use the new imagery of Bangladesh in lessons about culture, history, geography, architecture and the local economy.

We’re excited about the new possibilities we have opened to our country, to our people and to interested tourists around the world with Street View, and look forward to sharing more of Digital Bangladesh over the years.

Posted by Anir Chowdhury, Policy Advisor, Access to Information Programme, Prime Minister’s Office, Bangladesh