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Wired Up Hillbillies

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DQI Bureau
New Update

India’s ebullient and dynamic minister for IT, Pramod Mahajan, will be

remembered for many achievements, but none as significant as bringing the

prestigious MIT Media Labs—Asia to India. Amidst all the hype and hoopla

created by the software exports industry and the ups and downs of the Indian

economy, here is one entity, which has made a quiet beginning and is doing

pioneering work in enabling IT to reach out to the heartland of India.

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I had the privilege of attending an outstanding session titled ‘Digital

Village—Towards a Sustainable Future’ at the recent conference sponsored by

Media Lab Asia and the UN ICT Task Force in New Delhi. At this gathering, Ashok

Khosla, the leader of the path breaking Development Alternatives made a very

valid point that the Internet is "possibly the only technology of the last

5000 years that could bridge the digital divide". In his enlightening

exposition on the activities of his group in places as remote as Bhatinda and

Bundelkhand, Khosla brought home the point that IT would be really worthwhile,

not if they helped half a dozen American Investment Banks to make a few million

dollars more of profit, but if a few hundred underprivileged children had access

to education.

“IT would be

really worthwhile if just 100 underprivileged children get better access to

education and information”
 

Ganesh

Natarajan

And for the skeptics and naysayers who are abound in our country, Subbiah

Arunachalam of the Swaminathan Research Foundation presented a compelling case

study of the real successes achieved in a clutch of villages in the Union

Territory of Pondicherry. The establishment of ‘knowledge centres’ in each

village has enabled online access to commodity prices, government entitlement

schemes and even real time prediction of wave heights for fishermen in coastal

areas. In a particularly evocative statement, he talked about elderly women

grasping the intricacies of keyboard navigation in a language (Tamil) that

contains many more alphabets than the traditional keyboard encompasses. ct.

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The success of some of these pilots was echoed by Chandrasekhar, the man who

made Andhra the front runner in e-governance during his tenure as state IT

secretary and is now the joint secretary in the Ministry of IT. Speaking at a

round table on e-governance organized during the CII Annual Meeting at New

Delhi, he talked of the success of Maharashtra’s Warana Village project, the

Karnataka BHOOMI software and the Andhra e-Seva initiative and appealed to

industry to participate wholeheartedly in making India truly IT enabled.

A national effort at e-governance could be a daunting task since it will need

in excess of 40,000 crore even without considering the computerization needs of

the defense, railways and public sector undertakings. As Chandrasekhar pointed

out, the strategy would need to include but not be limited to government to

business and government to citizen initiatives in addition to government to

government interdepartmental efficiency improvement.

The only route to success is to work towards an integrated state and national

strategy by delivering and publicizing many little successes on the journey and

to ensure that the bureaucracy as well as the politicians stay committed to the

wired society mission.

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The ‘must do’ applications in this national endeavor must include

healthcare and education in addition to the provision of government access and

information services. It is only when the rural poor of this country are able to

see the benefits of tele-medicine and distance learning for the present

existence and future dreams of their children that any e-governance or wired

village initiative will truly have a lasting impact on society.

And finally, one of the unforgettable vignettes of the Media Lab Conference

is that of a response given by Arunachalam to a query on scalability of the

digital village experiments. He reminded all of us that achieving anything

worthwhile needs patience.

What the country really needs is more successful projects and pilots that can

demonstrate real value before we start telling the world about the

transformation. Is there a message in this for all of us as we move up the value

chain towards solutions rather than bodies?

The author is chairman of the Maharashtra Council of the CII and deputy

chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies

BY Ganesh Natarajan



He can be reached at ganesh@dqindia.com

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