<DIV>Hi !</DIV>
<DIV>Even I would like to write to the editor economist to give them an idea about the ICT4D..</DIV>
<DIV>What they report from India has got merit,</DIV>
<DIV>the grass root realities are different... </DIV>
<DIV>Internationally funded MSSRF knowledge centers </DIV>
<DIV>or the n-Logue's hard nosed for profit info-kiosk both fail to become meaningful to rural citizen's.</DIV>
<DIV>That is why ECONOMIST report is relevant and to the point...</DIV>
<DIV>Hope Andy I will recieve the e-mail ID for the editor ECONOMIST...</DIV>
<DIV>Incidentally I had circulated this report to several in Govt responsible for ICT4D</DIV>
<DIV>If done right, ICT4D can be made a reality, else it will remain a candidate for such skeptical criticism whether we like it or not...<BR><BR><B><I>Mikhail Doroshevich <mikhail@e-belarus.org></I></B> wrote:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid"><BR>Behind the digital divide<BR>Mar 10th 2005<BR>The Economist<BR><BR><BR>Development: Much is made of the “digital divide” between rich and poor.<BR><BR>What do people on the ground think about it?<BR><BR>IN THE village of Embalam in southern India, about 15 miles outside the <BR>town of Pondicherry, Arumugam and his wife, Thillan, sit on the red<BR>earth <BR>in front of their thatch hut. She is 50 years old; he is not sure, but <BR>thinks he is around 75. Arumugam is unemployed. He used to work as a <BR>drum-beater at funerals, but then he was injured, and now he has trouble<BR><BR>walking. Thillan makes a little money as a part-time agricultural <BR>labourer—about 30 rupees ($0.70) a day, ten days a month. Other than<BR>that, <BR>they get by on meagre (and sporadic) government disability payments.<BR><BR>In the new India of cybercafés and software tycoons, Arumugam and<BR>
Thillan,
<BR>and the millions of other villagers around the country like them, seem<BR>like <BR>anachronisms. But just a few steps outside their section of the<BR>village—a <BR>section known as the “colony”, where the untouchables traditionally <BR>live—the sheen of India's technology boom is more evident in a green<BR>room <BR>equipped with five computers, state-of-the-art solar cells and a<BR>wireless <BR>connection to the internet. This is the village's Knowledge Centre, one<BR>of <BR>12 in the region set up by a local non-profit organisation, the M. S. <BR>Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF). The centres, established with<BR>the <BR>aid of international donor agencies and local government support, offer <BR>villagers a range of information, including market prices for crops, job<BR><BR>listings, details of government welfare schemes, and health advice.<BR><BR>A conservative estimate of the cost of the equipment in the Embalam<BR>centre <BR>is 200,000 rupees ($4,500), or aroun
d 55
years' earnings for Thillan. <BR>Annual running costs are extra. When asked about the centre, Thillan <BR>laughs. “I don't know anything about that,” she says. “It has no<BR>connection <BR>to my life. We're just sitting here in our house trying to survive.”<BR><BR>Scenes like these, played out around the developing world, have led to <BR>something of a backlash against rural deployments of new information and<BR><BR>communications technologies, or ICTs, as they are known in the jargon of<BR><BR>development experts. In the 1990s, at the height of the technology boom,<BR><BR>rural ICTs were heralded as catalysts for “leapfrog development”, <BR>“information societies” and a host of other digital-age panaceas for <BR>poverty. Now they have largely fallen out of favour: none other than<BR>Bill <BR>Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, derides them as distractions from the <BR>real problems of development. “Do people have a clear view of what it<BR>means <BR>to live on $1 a day?” he a
sked at
a conference on the digital divide in <BR>2000. “About 99% of the benefits of having a PC come when you've<BR>provided <BR>reasonable health and literacy to the person who's going to sit down and<BR><BR>use it.” That is why, even though Mr Gates made his fortune from<BR>computers, <BR>the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, now the richest charity in the<BR>world, <BR>concentrates on improving health in poor countries.<BR><BR>The backlash against ICTs is understandable. Set alongside the medieval <BR>living conditions in much of the developing world, it seems foolhardy to<BR><BR>throw money at fancy computers and internet links. Far better, it would <BR>appear, to spend scarce resources on combating AIDS, say, or on better <BR>sanitation facilities. Indeed, this was the conclusion reached by the <BR>recently concluded Copenhagen Consensus project, which brought together<BR>a <BR>group of leading economists to prioritise how the world's development <BR>resources should be sp
ent (see
articles). The panel came up with 17 <BR>priorities: spending more on ICTs was not even on the list.<BR><BR>Still, it may be somewhat hasty to write off rural technology<BR>altogether. <BR>Charles Kenny, a senior economist at the World Bank who has studied the <BR>role of ICTs in development, says that traditional cost-benefit <BR>calculations are in the best of cases “an art, not a science”. With<BR>ICTs, <BR>he adds, the picture is further muddied by the newness of the<BR>technologies; <BR>economists simply do not know how to quantify the benefits of the<BR>internet.<BR><BR>The view from the ground<BR><BR>Given the paucity of data, then, and even of sound methodologies for <BR>collecting the data, an alternative way to evaluate the role of ICTs in <BR>development is simply to ask rural residents what they think. Applied in<BR><BR>rural India, in the villages served by the MSSRF, this approach reveals<BR>a <BR>more nuanced picture than that suggested by the sceptics, though
not an
<BR>entirely contradictory one.<BR><BR>Villagers like Arumugam and Thillan—older, illiterate and lower <BR>caste—appear to have little enthusiasm for technology. Indeed, Thillan,<BR>who <BR>lives barely a five-minute walk from the village's Knowledge Centre,<BR>says <BR>she did not even know about its existence until two months ago (even<BR>though <BR>the centre has been open for several years). When Thillan and a group of<BR><BR>eight neighbours are asked for their development priorities—a common<BR>man's <BR>version of the Copenhagen Consensus—they list sanitation, land, health, <BR>education, transport, jobs—the list goes on and on, but it does not<BR>include <BR>computers, or even telephones. They are not so much sceptical of ICTs as<BR><BR>oblivious; ICTs are irrelevant to their lives. This attitude is echoed<BR>by <BR>many villagers at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. In the <BR>fishing community of Veerapatinam, the site of another MSSRF centre, <BR>Thura
di, aged
45, sits on the beach sorting through his catch. “I'm <BR>illiterate,” he says, when asked about the centre. “I don't know how to<BR>use <BR>a computer, and I have to fish all day.”<BR><BR>But surely technology can provide information for the likes of Thuradi, <BR>even if he does not sit down in front of the computers himself? Among<BR>other <BR>things, the centre in this village offers information on wave heights<BR>and <BR>weather patterns (information that Thuradi says is already available on <BR>television). Some years ago, the centre also used satellites to map the <BR>movements of large schools of fish in the ocean. But according to<BR>another <BR>fisherman, this only benefited the rich: poor fishermen, lacking<BR>motorboats <BR>and navigation equipment, could not travel far enough, or determine<BR>their <BR>location precisely enough, to use the maps.<BR><BR>Such stories bring to mind the uneven results of earlier technology-led <BR>development efforts. Development exp
erts are
familiar with the notion of<BR><BR>“rusting tractors”—a semi-apocryphal reference to imported agricultural <BR>technologies that littered poor countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Mr<BR>Kenny <BR>says he similarly anticipates “a fair number of dusty rooms with old <BR>computers piled up in them around the countryside.”<BR><BR>That may well be true, but it does not mean that the money being<BR>channelled <BR>to rural technology is going entirely unappreciated. Rural ICTs appear <BR>particularly useful to the literate, to the wealthier and to the <BR>younger—those, in other words, who sit at the top of the socio-economic <BR>hierarchy. In the 12 villages surrounding Pondicherry, students are<BR>among <BR>the most frequent users of the Knowledge Centres; they look up exam <BR>results, learn computer skills and look for jobs. Farmers who own land<BR>or <BR>cattle, and who are therefore relatively well-off, get veterinary <BR>information and data on crop prices.<BR><BR><BR>“I'm illi
terate,”
says one fisherman. “I don't know how to use a<BR>computer, <BR>and I have to fish all day.”<BR><BR>Outside the Embalam colony, at a village teashop up the road from the <BR>temple, Kumar, the 35-year-old shop owner, speaks glowingly about the <BR>centre's role in disseminating crop prices and information on government<BR><BR>welfare schemes, and says the Knowledge Centre has made his village <BR>“famous”. He cites the dignitaries from development organisations and <BR>governments who have visited; he also points to the fact that people<BR>from <BR>25 surrounding villages come to use the centre, transforming Embalam<BR>into <BR>something of a local information hub.<BR><BR>At the centre itself, Kasthuri, a female volunteer who helps run the<BR>place, <BR>says that the status of women in Embalam has improved as a result of<BR>using <BR>the computers. “Before, we were just sitting at home,” she says. “Now we<BR><BR>feel empowered and more in control.” Some economists might dism
iss such
<BR>sentiments as woolly headed. But they are indicators of a sense of civic<BR><BR>pride and social inclusiveness that less conventional economists might<BR>term <BR>human development or well-being.<BR><BR>A question of priorities<BR><BR>Given the mixed opinions on the ground, then, the real issue is not<BR>whether <BR>investing in ICTs can help development (it can, in some cases, and for<BR>some <BR>people), but whether the overall benefits of doing so outweigh those of <BR>investing in, say, education or health. Leonard Waverman of the London <BR>Business School has compared the impact on GDP of increases in<BR>teledensity <BR>(the number of telephones per 100 people) and the primary-school<BR>completion <BR>rate. He found that an increase of 100 basis points in teledensity<BR>raised <BR>GDP by about twice as much as the same increase in primary-school <BR>completion. As Dr Waverman acknowledges, however, his calculations do<BR>not <BR>take into account the respective inv
estment
costs—and it is the cost of <BR>ICTs that makes people such as Mr Gates so sceptical of their<BR>applicability <BR>to the developing world.<BR><BR>Indeed, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor at the Indian Institute of <BR>Technology in Chennai (formerly Madras), argues that cost is the<BR>“deciding <BR>factor” in determining whether the digital divide will ever be bridged.<BR>To <BR>that end, Dr Jhunjhunwala and his colleagues are working on a number of <BR>low-cost devices, including a remote banking machine and a fixed<BR>wireless <BR>system that cuts the cost of access by more than half. But such<BR>innovation <BR>takes time and is itself expensive.<BR><BR>Perhaps a more immediate way of addressing the cost of technology is to <BR>rely on older, more proven means of delivering information. Radios, for <BR>example, are already being used by many development organisations; their<BR><BR>cost (under $10) is a fraction of the investment (at least $800)<BR>required <BR>for a teleph
one
line. In Embalam and Veerapatinam, few people actually<BR>ever <BR>sit at a computer; they receive much of their information from<BR>loudspeakers <BR>on top of the Knowledge Centre, or from a newsletter printed at the<BR>centre <BR>and delivered around the village. Such old-fashioned methods of <BR>communication can be connected to an internet hub located further<BR>upstream; <BR>these hybrid networks may well represent the future of technology in the<BR><BR>developing world.<BR><BR>But for now, it seems that the most cost-effective way of providing <BR>information over the proverbial “last mile” is often decidedly low-tech.<BR>On <BR>December 26th 2004, villagers in Veerapatinam had occasion to marvel at<BR>the <BR>reliability of a truly old-fashioned source of information. As the Asian<BR><BR>tsunami swept towards the south Indian shoreline, over a thousand<BR>villagers <BR>were gathered safely inland around the temple well. About an hour and a <BR>half before the tsunami,
the
waters in the well had started bubbling and<BR><BR>rising to the surface; by the time the wave hit, a whirlpool had formed<BR>and <BR>the villagers had left the beach to watch this strange phenomenon.<BR><BR>Nearby villages suffered heavy casualties, but in Veerapatinam only one <BR>person died out of a total population of 6,200. The villagers attribute <BR>their fortuitous escape to divine intervention, not technology. Ravi, a <BR>well-dressed man standing outside the Knowledge Centre, says the<BR>villagers <BR>received no warning over the speakers. “We owe everything to Her,” he<BR>says, <BR>referring to the temple deity. “I'm telling you honestly,” he says. “The<BR><BR>information came from Her.”<BR><BR><BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>telecentres mailing list<BR>telecentres@wsis-cs.org<BR>http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/telecentres<BR>To unsubscribe, send a message to telecentres-request@wsis-cs.org with the word UNSUBSCRIBE
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