A window of opportunity

A window of opportunity
Pratik Kanjilal

DECEMBER 12: The term `information superpo-wer' is being bandied about with increasing frequency. Every one of a series of IT trade shows -- international gigs which are also held in Las Vegas and London -- seems to reiterate that India is on the verge of becoming an IT superpower. Now, the IT venture capital fund launched by the Prime Minister has heightened expectations even further. The trouble is that we are almost there, but no one seems to be sure yet what precisely an information superpower is, or how it acts the part.

When definition fails, analogies are often of use. Let's try some out. An economic superpower is a market of high economic value where everyone has a share in the benefits of economic activity. A military superpower is one which can project its force beyond its borders and, equally importantly, protect all of its people all of the time.

By analogy, an IT superpower ought to be one whose products and services have a global reach, and where the fruits of the IT industry percolatedownwards through society. Is India really on the way to being an IT superpower, then? It's hateful to wear black to the festivities, but the answer is no. We may do phenomenally well on the corporate front, but the revolution will bypass the vast majority of our population, leaving us a nation far more divided than we were.

But what's all this about Chandrababu Naidu dotcomming his government, th-en? Unfortunately, the wiring of the Andhra Pradesh government is only a first step. Government may be as digitally tr-ansparent as we please, but the majority of the people will still not have access to it because they do not have access to the technology. In fact, most of them are denied the most basic technology: the ability to read and write. Today, Naidu provides buses to farmers taking their produce to market. The day they can get the market prices in real time before they set out, we could say a revolution was really on.

Though the present government at the Centre has done more for information technologythan any of its predecessors -- with the exception of the Rajiv Gandhi ministry, which first talked of the need for IT -- it is missing the bus to the main ch-ance. Bangalore isn't exactly Silicon Valley, no matter how nationalistic we may be, and our national IT objectives cannot be the same as those of a developed economy.

In the West, IT offe-red new ways to do business and make money. These opportunities are available to Indian entrepreneurs as well, and they shall surely pr-osper. But perhaps the government should ha-ve issues other than the bottomline in mind.

In India -- and most developing countries -- information technology opens a window in the social space that is far more valuable than any business opportunity. If it wants to fund IT, the government should consider backing India's development agenda as well, and encourage private enterprise to participate in it.

The biggest fallacy of the late nineties is that the Internet is an elite medium. It was initially true because of the highcapital investment and access costs involved. These have fallen over time, and will fall much faster now that Indian Internet service pr-oviders have been allowed to bypass the government gateway's pricing bottleneck.

Meanwhile, other access options have become available. Internet over digital wireless is a cheap and reliable platform for distributing the social services that never reach small-town and rural India. Alcatel Espace's Worldspace project, for instance, is intended primarily for delivering radio entertainment programming, but the corporation is according pretty high weightage to the possibilities of the Int-ernet feed that its tran-sponders also carry -- at lower cost than terrestrial radio broadcasting. Worldspace is already a phenomenon in Africa, the region it launched from, and it intends to cover most of the third world countries, including India.

Distance education and telemedicine are obvious first priorities for such an initiative. Earlier, the National Informatics Centre networkinterconnected medical institutes in the South, but there was no attempt to extend the network into the rural areas, where expert medical help is needed most. The government has also promoted an educational portal with the assistance of Anna University, Chennai. Unfortunately, the priority is technical education, not school education.

In both cases, the decision not to extend was probably taken on the assumption that users would fall victim to the unreliable rural phone network. But digital wireless removes that obstacle, and it should be possible to give rural schoolchildren city-quality education and their families the best healthcare advice in the country. This can be delivered at a fraction of the cost of setting up real schools and clinics of comparable quality.

The possibilities of community Inter-net have also been neglected. This is an option that could be a teaching and telemedicine client, a communications tool and an employment generator. The Gujral government had once toyed with the notion ofemploying educated rural youth as data entry operators for foreign corporates who outsource their database creation but, like most initiatives in social communications, nothing came of it.

The groundbreaking work, unfortunately, is being done in the US, far from the region where it will be most useful. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is running a trial in Puerto Rico on a cheap Internet hub suitable for villages, which will require almost no servicing.

While the government is doing a good job of facilitating business in the IT sector, it is failing in its second responsibility: ensuring that available resources are used for public welfare. The point is that none of these resources are futuristic. They are already deployed and merely need to be tapped into. And with the liberalisation of the Internet sector, they will be far che-aper than any traditional option.

If India fails to give sufficient attention to the social uses of information technology, it will find that it is actually wideningthe class gap. In fact, a new gap will be created: that between information haves and have-nots. And the `information superpower' will be discovered to be a nation within a nation, a small fraction of the population who have made good in info-business, but who have absolutely no sta-ke in the future of the country.