IT for e-powerment?
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Before Information Technology can address the so-called digital divide, there is another divide to be overcome: between those who develop high tools and those who know how best to deploy them. Anand Parthasarathy reports from Bangalo re, where a global workshop last week tried to bridge this basic gap.
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Different routes to empowerment : Tunisian women's action group shares experiences at the U. N. Conference on Information Society : while an adult training at the Malappuram Akshaya Kendra learns to send email.
IT WAS Pongal day in South India, Sankranthi in the North and as Nitin Desai, former Under Secretary General at the United Nations informed delegates from 25 countries at the Bangalore Workshop on Information and Communication for Sustainable Development — this was the time when one flew kites. Representative from the sponsoring agencies: the (US) National Science Foundation (NSF), the World Bank, the UN's Division for Sustainable Development, the Indian Institute of Science, the National Institute for Advanced Studies, were joined by a galaxy of renowned scientists, economists and social workers. Between them they brought awesome experience in solving complex global problems.
Now they had come together to address another problem: learning which among the plethora of high tech tools and techniques at their disposal would be most meaningful in improving the quality of life of the world's four billion people who were known tobarely eke out a living.
`The Internet' was the knee jerk answer; but how meaningful would it be in a world where only one in ten had even heard of Internet and only one in three had even made a telephone call at least once? Workshop convenor, V.S. Arunachalam, a respected name in India's Defence R&D before he became Distinguished Service Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) set a sober agenda; and Dr Desai suggested: Go fly a kite: Let bold ideas go forth... and some of them will make sense.
Richard Newton, Dean of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, had some path breaking technologies to share: `smart dust' or speck-sized self powered sensor chips consuming less than 200 micro watts of power, which could be literally sprayed over a large area to combine in a vast network that reported back on what it measured.
Or computer chips made of plastic rather than silicon, that could be printed on a plastic sheet... leading one day to the five rupee use-and throw cell phone. Or plastics-based solar panels which converted the sun's rays into usable energy at a conversion energy that was currently about a third of conventional photovoltaic cells.
All these were projects in various stages of realisation. The problem was to hit on the one or two compelling technologies that would make the most impact; that would be sustainable. What was needed was a Societal Scale Information System, Dr Newton suggested. and towards this end work had begun on a standard chip for human applications.
Raj Reddy, a father figure in Robotics at CMU, saw the challenge as 4Cs: Connectivity, Computer-access, Content and Capacity Building. And he suggested that digital road connectivity needs to be provided before the benefits of technology become pervasive. Once this was in place, Dr Reddy suggested, a citizen would willingly part with 5 per cent of his or her earning (or Rs 2.50 a day) to tap into a Connected information world.
His challenge to the IT community: create a device that is a value proposition for the average Indian (he suggests we think of her as an illiterate grandmother). It must provide entertainment (a link to TV); it must communicate cheaply (Voice over Internet Protocol and email) and it must ultimately help in wealth creation (enabling Net based commercial information). "The connectivity for this must come from the state", he said.
The presence of Kerala's IT Secretary, Aruna Sundararajan drew attention to the interesting experiment in Malappuram district, where by end January 2004, the 650 odd Akshaya e-kendras which had already helped make one member of over 6 lakh families e-literate, would all become part of a wireless network across which a host of e-services will flow.
In one panchayat, Puzhakattil, they had compiled a biodiversity map of the village and identified 600 acres that were ideal for cultivation of medicinal plants. Now the Arya Vaidya Sala (AVS) at Kotakkal and the state's agricultural department was tapping into this database to suggest the appropriate herbs to grow and sell to AVS.
Another success story the Agastya Foundation's Science and Teacher Resource Centres in Kuppam District of Andhra Pradesh — highlighted how IT helped pass rates at the 10th standard exam shoot up from 40 to 90 per cent in four years. And Hewlett Packard Labs reported that one of the most sought after tools it exhibited at the UN-sponsored Conference on the Information Society at Geneva last month was an electronic form filler it had developed in Bangalore for Indian languages, where the Tamil or Kannada text, hand entered, is recognized and machine rendered.
For other developing nations, what Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz characterised as the `Indian Miracle' was a useful case study in harnessing ICT. India's pattern of success in harnessing her IT skills was sustainable because it was a `home-grown' solution he suggested.
Of the counties pressured by the IMF to liberalise her capital markets, only India and China resisted and they alone survived the Asian downturn.But Dr Stiglitz also had a word or caution for Indian planners: to replicate the success of Bangalore across the country, the large disparities in economic performance and social indicators including education, must be removed.
As participants groped towards a game plan to carry back with them, India's President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, suggested a hard nosed yet compassionate agenda: He cannily picked a phrase that he just heard NSF's Peter Freeman use and suggested that a good technologist today must be a `civic scientist' — with concern for society pervading his work.
And it was left to Carlos Braga of the World Bank's Information Solutions Group to bring the Bangalore workshop full circle to its kite flying exercise. Many kites were flown; many splendid ideas mooted, some came crashing down, while other seemed to soar.
But which kite would receive that electric bolt of inspiration, much like the bolt of lightning that struck Benjamin Franklin's kite? It was too early to say; but the weather seemed just right for some electric happenings in IT-enabled development.
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