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Most
of us can hardly be blamed for imagining that information
technology (IT) conjures up the image of software “geeks”
ensconced in plush IT parks on the outskirts of cities like
Bangalore and Delhi. 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.
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, which figure has inched up
to five 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 seven 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
earlier this year 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 head in Delhi, underlined, ICT was
its “corporate priority” at present. She mentioned how Amartya
Sen had pointed out that sustainable development was possible with
a free media and good governance.
A young IAS officer from AP 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
West Godavari 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.
Even more ambitious are the 70 “wired villages” around Warana
Nagar in Kolhapur and Sangli districts in Maharashtra. 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 provide farming, medical and
educational information to villagers at information booths and
links the villages to 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 Warana Vibhag Shikshan
Mandal for some Rs 2.6 crore. If the rest of India’s 550,000
villages were to be similarly wired, it would work out to $4.7
billion, or 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 six 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 MS 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, healthcare centres, hospitals, etc.
Even illiterate villagers can in some instances access data by
touch-screen techniques.
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. Thus Thailand has already got a personal computer for less
than $200 and a laptop for only about twice as much, while India
has toyed with the “Simputer’ which performs elementary tasks.
It is at the same time quite sophisticated, because it has
text-to-speech capabilities in five languages, including Hindi,
Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. It can receive down-loaded satellite
radio communications, can operate with three penlight batteries
for eight hours and has a touch screen accessible to those who
can’t read and write, besides being in a case which is
impervious to rain, dust, heat and cold.
Another innovative feature of the Simputer is that it is not only
based on open-source software but also relies on open-source
hardware, which is the capacity to modify, change and improve with
the only condition that such improvements are universally
available. Besides, 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 recently announced the launch of its
PC in India with Linux, so-called “free” software, at Rs
35,000. 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
which are operating on FLOSS in the country but it needs a boost
with a major player like a major government department to take the
lead. Bodies like the national Centre for Software Technology and
the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing should surely be
helping education and research institutions to “migrate” to
this software in order to make it much more accessible to
everyone.
There is already an inaugural issue of a journal titled i4D, with
its website (www.i4donline.net). In it, Kenneth Keniston of MIT
pointedly asks the same question: “Can ICTs change rural
lives?” He cites Subash Bhatnagar of IIM-Ahmedabad in the
latter’s introduction to a recent book on rural IT in India, who
asks: “How can we justify the expense of ITs in rural India,
where so many basic rights are violated?” Keniston says that
“Bhatnagar’s question is profound. To visit a village where 70
per cent of all men, women and children are below the poverty
line, where children’s hair is grey and red from malnutrition,
where there is no work, no school, no medical care, to say nothing
of no infrastructure needed for IT, is necessarily to wonder
whether, when, and how information technology can help.”
All these advances in IT are occurring, ironically enough,
precisely at a time when the media is turning commercial with a
vengeance and completely jettisoning any pretence of devoting
space to development issues. Indeed, the oft-heard remark from
senior-most editors is that such concerns aren’t of interest,
because their readers don’t suffer from such problems
themselves. This is an extremely short-sighted and dangerous
tendency, particularly when one considers that India is home to
the largest number of poor in the world – using the World Bank
yardstick of earning less than a dollar a day, for convenience.
One could almost hear the owners of the media saying, in the
context of periodic deaths due to starvation, “Let them eat
cake.”
This part of the globalised world, where super-owners like Rupert
Murdoch, who has got a further toehold in the Indian media now
with his tie-up with the Ananda Bazar Patrika, looks only to the
bottom line and has little, or no, connection whatsoever with the
national agenda. One can already see the trend on the front pages
of the media, where white-skinned foreigners are almost invariably
portrayed on the front pages – the skimpier the attire, the
better.
There is also a regrettable trend towards the purveying of
“infotainment” – news which is said to entertain. When media
moghuls themselves enter the entertainment business, like The
Times of India group with its Planet M shops and Times Music
series, it is always difficult to tell which is news – i.e.
some information which is in the interest of the public to
know – and which is simply hard sell. The same group has made a
fine art with its beauty contests, promoted by Femina (into which,
along with Filmfare, the BBC, for reasons best known to itself, is
about to invest). One is forced to read utter trivia about what
these aspiring models wear – and as often, what they don’t!
– eat, talk about, and generally pronounce on every subject
under the sun.
The entire charade has been exposed with the disclosure that The
Times of India has actually started charging for people to appear
on the society pages of city supplements like Bombay Times. The
going rate is alleged to be Rs 100,000 for a single edition, and
three times that sum for the multiple editions of the paper, which
holds the enviable record of being the most circulated broadsheet
in English in the world. At the same workshop on ICT4D, the
audience was regaled by a virtuoso performance by Rahul Kansal, a
Bennett, Coleman Brand Manager, who educated people about branding
news and the like. The journalist and former CNBC anchor Paranjoy
Guha Thakurta, who is somewhat hirsute, brought the house down
when he asked him a straight question: “Mr Kansal, if we agree
to a suitable fee, will you publish my picture in Delhi Times with
the caption that I am the handsomest man in the city?”
There is thus a huge, and growing, divide between information and
the media. In the first four decades after independence,
information was mostly in the hands of the State, and was heavily
controlled. AIR and later Doordarshan had the monopoly in this
sector, with the Films Division, the largest documentary-maker in
the world (and arguably the worst!). When the Films Division
newsreels and documentaries were compulsorily screened before a
movie, it was generally the signal for men to go out for a
smoke… This writer wrote an article around 30 years ago which
said that the “m” in the first word of its title was a
mistake: it should have read “e” instead, for “Files”
Division…
Now, the digital revolution (as well as that in
telecommunications) is to some extent making access to information
much greater, even for the poorest of the poor, and information is
no longer hoarded as zealously by the government and business
interests as it used to be. Even so, it is the revolutionary work
done by organisations like the Kisan Mazdoor Shakti Sangathan in
Rajasthan, which has fought for the right to know, which exposes
the tendency of governments, right down to the lowest rungs, to
withhold information, rather than democratise it.
But, one infirmity has been replaced by another: the tendency of
business interests to dominate the media and shape its content. TV
is the worst offender in this regard, with shows looking at the
lowest common denominator. There is a “dumbing down” with a
vengeance. With Rupert Murdoch having entered into a marriage with
the Ananda Bazar group, he is seeking to expand his Star TV
channel. According to Thomas Kiernan, one of Murdoch’s most
critical biographers, the baron made his millions originally with
Australian tabloids. As the biographer writes of one article:
“The exaggerated story filled with inventive quotes; the
rewriting of cryptic, laconic news-service-copy into lavishly
sensationalised yarns; the eye-shattering usually ungrammatical,
irrelevant and gratuitously blood-curdling headline (“Leper
Rapes Virgin, Gives Birth to Monster Baby” read a typical early
front page)…all wrapped in cheap, smudgy tabloid form and
promoted with the apocalyptic fervour and energy of Bible Belt
evangelism.” Is this what Mr Murdoch holds in store for the
Indian media?
With a media moghul like Murdoch entering the fray, the Indian
media scene appears to be in for interesting times, no pun
intended. It may well be a reverse situation, where the media
purveys semi-truths and trivia, while information is more
accurately collected and disseminated by non-government
organisations and “alternative”, non-commercial media outlets.
The bigger the media house, by and large, the worse may be its
record in reporting and analysing real people’s issues. On this
tenth anniversary of Humanscape, we ought to pay a big
tribute to this and countless other small magazines, which have
kept the flag of independent and socially purposeful journalism
flying in the midst of so much utter nonsense.
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