By Neelesh Misra/AP
Despite being one of the world’s poorest countries, India has become a global power in producing talented technologists who are highly valued from Silicon Valley to Singapore.
“Information technology has transformed our international image from being a land of elephants and snake charmers to a land of competent engineers,” said Azim Premji, head of the info-tech giant Wipro and one of India’s wealthiest men.
Now, India is beginning to deploy its rich tech resources to improve life in the countryside.
“In five years, it could transform the country,” said Premji, bridging the huge digital divide between the technology-capable and the illiterate poor, many of whom have never even seen a computer.
The information revolution is exposing villagers to a world of previously inaccessible knowledge — and beginning to stymie endemic petty corruption.
In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, fiber-optic cables now connect central government offices with district ones. The plan is to connect to all villages, even those without roads, hospitals or schools. The Internet can now be used for registering land transactions, making driver license applications and filing complaints against government officials.
In the neighboring state of Karnataka, where software hub Bangalore is located, 17 million land records, most of them decades old, have been put on the Internet to facilitate easy, corruption-free transfers.
“With a stroke of the pen, the village accountant can create or destroy land ownership,” said Rajiv Chawla, a bureaucrat who heads the project. “With help from computers, we are trying to shut him out.”
The state is also using computers to make information available on agricultural prices, pension plans, criminal laws and online transactions involving silk, an important local industry.
Several states are using Very Small Aperture Terminals, or VSATs, linked to satellites to reach vast numbers of people who live in areas where there are no telephones. And both the government and private ventures have set up Internet kiosks that offer a range of services.
“Traditional devices like PCs might not be a solution. We need places where communities can access the Internet,” said Clarence Chandran, the India-born chief operating officer of Nortel Networks, the Canadian telecommunications giant.
Illiterate farmers in Madhya Pradesh state who never even had access to telephones are transforming their lives after being hooked up to the Internet, where they can bypass the middlemen who they claim often cheat them on purchases and sales.
In the state’s Dhar region, for example, poor villagers formerly were obliged to travel long distances by bullock carts or bicycles to government granaries to determine crop prices. More trips were required just to find out when grain buyers were making purchases.
Now, they have all this information on the Internet.
Leveraging the ’Net, villagers can get details of competitive prices in nearby districts to be able to sell at the highest rates, along with local news and weather reports and details of government programs they never knew about before.
Fishermen, who still go to sea in primitive, poorly equipped boats, are guided to their catch in western and southern India by an Indian Space Research Organization project. Satellites identify warmer sea temperatures around reserves of phytoplankton, the primary fish food.
“The fishermen have increased their gains by three to four times,” said S. Krishnamurthy, spokesman for the space research organization.
In the Himalayan state of Sikkim, awestruck women from yak-herding tribes are getting computer training at small centers in the mountains. Officials hope the training will help them get jobs and become independent within their families and community.
In the southern coastal state of Kerala, India’s most literate state, village women work in small offices typing out government documents in English on computers for the rupee equivalent of 22 cents per page.
In Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state, poor village women step into video e-mail booths to send shy messages about family problems to their husbands working in faraway cities. The husbands receive the messages by paying a small sum of money in similar booths.
“India leads the world in actual, on-the-ground projects,” said Kenneth Keniston, director of projects in science, technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But Keniston also cautioned against over-hyping the Indian information technology, or IT, revolution, which has seen thousands of Indian software professionals make an important impact in the United States, Europe and Asia. Several countries have eased visa regulations and are competing to secure Indian engineers.
“The first lesson is that a flowering IT industry is not equivalent to IT for the common man,” Keniston said. “The reality on the ground is very limited and there is a danger. The blind enthusiasm for using IT as a way of meeting all needs of people is misguided.”
India has 300 million people living below minimum subsistence levels — the largest concentration of poor people in the world. An average Indian citizen earns the equivalent of about $450 a year. Half of the nation’s children are malnourished and more than 40 percent of the citizens are illiterate. The country is the global hub for diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and polio.
According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies, which represents Indian IT companies, India’s one billion people own only 4.3 million personal computers and 26 million fixed phones. Internet subscribers are estimated at fewer than one million.
At the same time, India has the second largest English-speaking scientific and technical manpower resource in the world after the United States. Each year, 115,000 engineers graduate from Indian engineering colleges, and management institutes produce 40,000 graduates.
While about 50,000 grads leave to work abroad each year, many are now opting to stay home or return home from the West because salaries in India’s information technology sector have soared in the last few years.
Many Indians who have become millionaires riding the U.S. information technology boom now help Indian-run startup companies and make frequent trips to their native country to help young entrepreneurs.
“Those who have a desire and a dream, follow it now,” said Prakash Bhalerao, a U.S.-based venture capitalist who has funded 40 companies, nine of them in Bangalore. “This is the time.” |
