TECHNOLOGY-INDIA: CYBER COOLIES BRIDGE DIGITAL DIVIDE
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
NEW DELHI - When Deepak Jagdish, a young Indian student of computer science, explained to Bill Gates last month the complex navigation and processing system of new software, which mimics the echo location system used by bats, to assist visually challenged individuals move about safely, the founder of Microsoft remarked: ''I have never seen something like this''.
Jagdish and his fellow students from the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar (in western India), have developed computer software that could help blind people, 'see' the environment and the objects around them, spatially. The software controls ultrasonic impulses received by proximity sensors that have a minimum range of five metres. The signals are translated into audible frequencies and conveyed to visually impaired users through headphones.
The team of students working on the ‘Sonique' or ‘Dhwani' software were participating in an annual event organised by Microsoft that was held this year in Agra in July. Gates, who attended, remarked that the "most inspiring" part was interacting with young people like Jagdish who could help India bridge the digital divide and enable the country to "realise its potential to become a creator of intellectual capital''.
At the other end of the subcontinent in southern India, hundreds of thousands of young men and women have made their city, Bangalore, a name to reckon with in information technology (IT). No longer are they derogatorily described as "cyber coolies" doing low-end work for a pittance but are being called "knowledge workers" who ensure that computer software exports continue to grow at 30 percent a year -- such exports are expected to comprise more than a third of the country's total exports in two years.
India is often characterised as a country of contradictions exemplified by the fact that the country entered the new millennium with nearly one-third of the world's computer software engineers and a quarter of the world's undernourished. While there are 12 phones and 10 TV sets for every 100 Indians, the total number of people with personal computers in the country is less than two percent in a population of over a billion.
According to one estimate, the IT sector could rise from one percent of India's gross domestic product to 10 percent by 2008. At the same time, the benefits of IT have reached only a minuscule portion of the country's population resulting in a yawning digital divide. Although the number of internet users is growing by 40-50 percent a year, the total number of Indians who have accessed the worldwide-web at any one point of time is probably less than five percent of the total population.
The number of mobile telephones in India has doubled over the last two years and crossed the 100 million mark in July. The government has projected that this figure could exceed 250 million over the next two years. Whereas mobiles, long-distance and international phone calls in India were among the most expensive in the world until as recently as 1994, phone call rates are currently the lowest in the world.
But here too the digital divide is evident. Against more than four phones for every ten citizens in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, there are entire provinces in eastern and central India -- Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Assam -- where there are less than two phones for every 100 residents. Also, the distribution of phones is heavily skewed in favour of urban areas.
"The most important change taking place is that the computer software industry in India has begun looking inwards," says Kapil Dev Singh, country manager, IDC (India), which is the local affiliate of the international market research organization International Data Group (earlier known as International Data Corporation). He told IPS in an interview that as more and more Indian companies compete (END)
