Most
of us can hardly be blamed for imagining that information technology (IT)
conjures up the image of software “geeks” ensconced in plush IT outfits in
Silicon Valley or even Bangalore. They are young professionals who earn a
fortune, work virtually round the clock and are almost a breed apart, even if
they burn out quickly. Not for a moment would one expect them to be in the least
concerned about the well being of their less privileged fellow citizens.
Development
experts are only too painfully aware of the “digital divide”, which
separates all those who do not enjoy the benefits of being connected – not
just to the Internet, but to the telephone itself – from those in the cities
who take these things for granted. As we are constantly reminded at world
development meets, there is a staggering number of people who have never made a
phone call in their lives, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
India’s
Murky Digital Picture
In
India too, the disparities are enormous, despite all the tall talk about being
an IT “superpower”. In 1994, there were just 1.39 phones for every hundred
people; this figure has inched up to 5 this year. Break this down into urban and
rural, and the picture gets even murkier. In rural areas, there are only 1.5
phones as against 15 for every hundred people in cities today. Internet drives
an even deeper wedge. The International Telecommunications Union estimates that
in 2001, India had 3.2 million Internet subscribers and 7 million users (thanks
mainly to the proliferating cyber cafés in cities), which is pitiful in a
billion-strong population.
This
number of 0.7 users for every hundred people compares unfavourably with China
with 2.6, not to mention Hong Kong (39) and South Korea (52). What is more,
there is a high degree of geographical concentration of users: three years ago,
just two cities – Mumbai and Delhi – accounted for more than a third of all
users. By contrast, the two most populous states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar had
just 20,000 and 8,000 users respectively.
And
yet, this vast disparity does not tell the whole story, as participants at a UN
Development Programme workshop in Delhi recently discovered. The title was
“ICT4D”, which itself was gibberish to the uninitiated -- standing for
Information, Communication and Technology for Development. Economists and IT
professionals have been analysing how these tools can be used to promote human
development, and their findings are nothing short of exciting. The fact is that
they can help a country take shortcuts on certain paths to progress. As Brenda
Gael McSweeney, who heads UNDP in Delhi, underlined, ICT was its “corporate
priority” at present. She mentioned how Amartya Sen, India’s 1998 Nobel
Prize Winner in the field of economics, had pointed out that sustainable
development was possible with a free media and good governance.
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In
rural areas in India, there are only 1.5 phones for every hundred people
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A young official from Andhra Pradesh cited how his was one of the first states
to not only use IT but also advocate “open architecture” – patent-free
software – for this purpose. In the district where he worked, there is an
“e-seva” or service portal, which makes it possible for anyone who is barely
literate to access crucial data on such services as old-age pensions, women’s
self-help groups and waiting lists in the housing department, while district
supply officers place their requests through the net. A third of 18 such
services had been computerised by the beginning of the year. This may not seem
an earth-shattering advance for urbanites, but for the illiterate villager, such
information may literally prove a matter of life or death.
India’s
‘Wired Villages’
Even
more ambitious are the 70 “wired villages” around Warana Nagar in Kolhapur
and Sangli districts in Maharashtra state. This is a decentralised scheme aimed
at carrying computers to rural users, to increase the productivity of existing
cooperatives by setting up a communications network and providing farming,
medical and educational information to villagers at information booths and
linking the villages to the Internet. Moreover, it enables villagers to access
distance education facilities at the primary and higher education levels and
establishes a Geographical Information System (GIS) to facilitate transparency
in administration, particularly regarding land records. At the Delhi workshop, a
speaker observed that litigation over land must be one of the biggest financial
drains – apart from marriages! --in rural India.
However,
the Warana costs are quite large. The project is implemented by the National
Informatics Centre, run by the central government, the Maharashtra government
and local education NGOs for some $500,000. If the rest of India’s 550,000
villages were to be similarly wired, it would work out to about 13 per cent of
India’s GDP five years ago. And this has to be seen against the dismal
backdrop of declining public expenditure on education as a proportion of GDP,
which was 3.2 per cent in 1995-96, while primary education comprised an abysmal
1.5 per cent, against the government’s own target of 6 per cent. Thus IT only
offers some hope in certain sectors and activities, while it may not prove
universally applicable as of now.
While
the Warana experiment may be considered an exception because it takes place in
the prosperous sugarcane-rich areas of Maharashtra, other projects indicate that
IT can raise rural incomes for poor families. The Chennai-based M.S. Swaminathan
Research Foundation has started ten “information villages” in Pondicherry,
which employs a hybrid wired and wireless network to transmit voice and data
transfer. Electronic Knowledge Centres can be set up in temples, local
government (panchayat) offices, government buildings and even private premises,
to provide information about crucial items like prices of farm inputs, including
seeds, as well as produce. They can inform people about their entitlements at
banks, health care centres, hospitals etc. Even illiterate villagers can in some
instances access data by touch-screen techniques.
Optimistic
About Cost Drops
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India’s
‘Simputer’ performs elementary tasks
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The
fact is that IT advances are taking place at a juncture when prices of hardware
and software will drop sharply in the months to come. Thailand already has a
personal computer for less than $200 and a laptop for only about twice as much,
while India has toyed with the “Simputer’ that performs elementary tasks. In
certain villages and slums, there are “Hole in the Wall” experiments, where
poor people have access to computers. The lesson to be learned is that health, education, ICT and human development go hand in hand. At
the other end of the development divide, between a tenth and a quarter of
international trade takes place electronically today.
As the UNDP workshop underlined, the use of Open Source Software – what
techies like to call FLOSS, with Free, Liberal as a prefix – will drastically
reduce the cost of communication in the very near future. IBM has just announced
the launch of its PC in India with Linux, so-called “free” software, at
$744. According to techies, Linux -- developed by Linus Torvalds, a student,
in 1991 -- does not crash, unlike Windows. There are as many as a million free
software packages, some of which run on a third of the capacity that Windows
needs and can even work with a 386 PC.
Indian
experts are already working on language software, which would truly make
information accessible to the masses. China, it is important to know, has
already insisted that every PC sold in the country should have Chinese language
support. Hindi is the language spoken by the fourth largest number of people in
the world, but enjoys no such support. There are some 40 user groups that are
operating on FLOSS in India, but it needs a boost with a major player like a
major government department to take the lead.
Darryl
D’Monte is the founder President of the International Federation of
Environmental Journalists and is serving a second term till 2003. He is also the
Chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India (FEJI) and a
syndicated columnist and freelance writer. He has published two books:
“Temples or Tombs? Industry versus Environment: Three Controversies”, Center
for Science & Environment, New Delhi, 1985 and “Ripping the Fabric: The
Decline of Mumbai and its Mills”, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2002. He
was previously the Resident Editor of the “Indian Express” (1979-1981) and
of the “Times of India” (1988-1994) in Mumbai. Your emails will be
forwarded to him by contacting the editor at: ScienceTech@islam-online.net.
