Digital divide or chasm?
IT EXPERIENCE IN INDIA — Bridging the Digital Divide: Kenneth Keniston and Deepak Kumar — Editors; Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., B-42, Panchsheel Enclave, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 250.
IT WAS that colourful villain, Goldfinger, in the James Bond novel of the same name, who declared that while anything happening once could be written off as happenstance and twice as a coincidence, three times was proof of enemy action. What would he conclude about the editors of this compilation, one wonders.
`Digital divides'
In putting together the contributions at a workshop, that together help to define the IT experience in India, the editors detect the presence not just of that usual suspect, a "digital divide" but of four such divides — between the digitally empowered rich and poor; across the English language cultural gap; between rich and poor nations and the last the divide between those they dub the "digerati" elite and the rest of us.
Four such divides surely make for a major chasm and the authors of the 10 papers most of them seasoned IT "watchers", perhaps, unsurprisingly, are very successful in highlighting the formidable problems; less so in offering fixes.
Telecom scene
And while the editors claim to have sent the original Ford Foundation-supported Bangalore workshop proceedings for revision, the resulting book brought out this year, still claims in the very first pages, that the telephone density in India is three per hundred, at a time when galloping mobile connections have taken it well beyond twice that number.
T.H. Chowdary makes a strong case for government to put in place the enabling regulatory structure and then leave it to private enterprise to deliver the solutions. Today, thankfully, the process has gone so far that no future government, whatever its ideology, can reverse the process.
P.D. Kaushik uses telling case studies from the rural heartland to back his strong case for harnessing electronic tools to alleviate poverty.
An experiment in Pondicherry to create a village information system is a heartening instance of creating linkages for ensuring basic food security. It is described by a quartet of scientists with the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation in Chennai (Rajasekhara Pandy, K.G. Rajamohan, S. Senthilkumaran) and the Hyderabad-based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics (V. Balaji).
Language computing
From his somewhat unusual vantage point Harsh Kumar provides a succinct summary of what needs to be done in Indian language computing; while Rajeev Sangal joins Akshar Bharati and Vineet Chaitanya to address the larger task of creating Indian language digital resources.
A more global perspective of IT technology deployment is provided by Pat Hall while Annalee Saxenian suggests (with Bangalore and Taiwan in focus) why "brain drain" should now read "brain circulation".
A useful dossier for anyone looking for a bird's eye-view of down-to-earth issues in technology deployment.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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