IT TRENDS
Connecting the unconnected
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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A global conference offers timely pointers to nations like India
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GALLOPING GROWTH: The growth rate of the mobile phone sector in India is today the fastest ever.
WHEN INFOSYS Chief Executive Nandan Nilekini suggested to The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, about a year ago, that the world was increasingly becoming a level playing field, he was referring to the opportunities in the Information Technology services arena. The journalist in Friedman, morphed this remark into a catchy attention-grabbing phrase— `The World is Flat' — which became the title of his best selling book, due to appear in its second edition, next month.
In Doha, Qatar, for the last 10 days, member nations of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) the arm of the United Nations that deals with global communication issues, as well as dozens of civil society and corporate representatives, were grappling with another, more basic, if almost imperceptible flattening process: the sharing of the world's resources of basic communication, ranging from radio and television to fixed and mobile telephony as well as the Internet.
Homing in
The UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) completed its self-appointed task of identifying and delineating the challenge of communication-fuelled universal empowerment, after its two sittings in Geneva, Switzerland (2003) and Tunis, Tunisia (2005).
Now four months on, the ITU-led World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC), has homed in on the most pressing areas where Information and Communication Technology (ICT) needs to be deployed in a global manner:
One, the need to ensure that the benefits of technology reach persons with disabilities and second, the ability to harness telecommunications in situations of natural disaster and conflict.
Wake-up call
The tsunami disaster of December 2004 has served as a wake-up call to the global community to develop ICT infrastructure that can help provide both early warning as well as timely relief and response.
At Doha, delegates were told that the ITU has already set up over 20 emergency telecom centres equipped with computers and Internet, in islands of the Pacific Rim.
Indeed, there was some consolation that mechanisms put into place after the Asian tsunami to some extent, helped mitigate the scale of the tragedy during the Pakistan-Afghanistan earthquake a year later.
In the area of technology initiatives for the physically challenged, the conference must have seemed like a sharp rap on the knuckles to a relatively better-endowed nation like India, which has generally remained insensitive to its own huge population of the physically challenged in many of its much trumpeted achievements such as from bank ATMs to cyber cafes.
Have you seen single ATM in India with special features that would allow a visually challenged customer to carry a normal banking transaction? In many states of the U.S., it is mandatory for a percentage of all ATMs installed by a bank to be voice-enabled for the benefit of blind customers. While India remains an active member of the UN's IT-related programmes, it is somewhat glaring that in the ITU's `Connect the World' partnership of industries, governments and civil societies, India has not bothered to participate at government level.
Infosys was the lone Indian IT corporate player in this partnership while the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation and the Indian end of the Development Gateway foundation had the onus of ensuring that a reasonably upbeat message about India's global intentions was conveyed.
The conference was useful for India in other ways. It helped to identify where exactly the country stood in the global telecom arena. Statistics made available at Doha revealed that 13 per cent of the world's population — or 1 billion users — had access to Internet.
Gross disparity
But, the numbers hid a gross disparity. One third of the world's Internet capacity was used by Europe and the U.S. alone, while the Asia-Pacific region accounted for just 8 per cent and Africa for 2 per cent.
Today, there are more Internet users in London than the whole of Pakistan; more in Germany than the whole of Africa, and twice as many in the U.S. compared to the 42 countries in the Americas.
When it comes to telephones, the latest figures provided by ITU (till end 2004) showed 3 billion telephone connections worldwide, of which 1.8 billion were mobile phones.
Indeed, the mobile phone is generally seen as a single most important device to reduce the gap between the telecom haves and the have-nots in the fastest way possible.
The developing world already accounts for 58 percent of the world's installed phone capacities, and when it comes to broadband, 97 per cent of the actions seem to be in the Asia-Pacific region.
India's Internet usage of 50 million or 5 per cent of its population, and its galloping phone penetration (currently around 125 million, or 12.5 per cent of its population) places it in a camp of its own — nowhere as well-equipped as the developed world, but far better off than dozens of developing nations.
In fact, the growth rate (90 per cent per annum) of the mobile phone sector in India, is today the fastest in the world, faster even than China, though that nation represents half on the entire Asian mobile market.
Underpinning initiatives
For India, this is both a challenge and an opportunity: the challenge to sharply accelerate the pace at which individual Indian states are e-nabling their own technologically unfranchised lakhs in the rural hinterland while putting in place, sound disaster-prevention mechanisms for the future.
The opportunity is something of a bonus: It lies in the inevitable techno-commercial floodgates that will be opened when a post-Doha world gets its ICT-for-all act together. Did some one say it is a flat world? We are rather good at walking swiftly, rewardingly, across terrain, flattened by history and happenstance.
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