Have IT, will develop

Ever since India developed a recognisable capability in information technology, a debate has been raging in the development community "� among those who worry about growth, reducing poverty and helping the poor.

They are asking whether information and communication technology (ICT) can be a tool for development or whether it will become yet another dimension of the divide between the poor and others.

Technology has a logic of its own and it is increasingly becoming clear that ICT will go down in history as one of the great enablers, like electricity.

So the question posed is changing somewhat. It is no longer whether ICT can aid the goals of development but how it can be made to. To find a way to harness ICT for development, conferences and workshops are sprouting all over the world, led by multilateral agencies and universities which have traditionally been at the forefront of both technological and social science research in ICT.

Such gatherings or travelling think tanks inevitably beat a path to Bangalore, which has in the new year hosted two such events. The first, in January, was the international workshop on ICT, sponsored by the United Nations, the World Bank, Carnegie Mellon University and others, as a follow up to the world summit on the information society. It sought to identify areas where research could be conducted to find ways of using ICT for sustainable development.

The second, held earlier last month, was a 'field visit,'a preparatory leg of the Shanghai poverty conference due later this year. The conference will eventually be able, through such field visits around the globe, to identify a set of successful individual initiatives in reducing poverty and generate ideas on how to scale up those successes. The particular focus of the Bangalore field visit was to look at examples of "empowerment through IT."

Interestingly, even a major pillar of the Indian IT initiative like Nandan Nilekani, managing director of Infosys, is aware of the limitations of IT having a direct impact on development or on reducing poverty.

He told the field visit team from various countries that even if you assume that the 150,000 IT professionals in Bangalore have a multiplier effect, help generate jobs seven times that number, that also does not make a substantial dent on poverty. He is also keenly aware that you cannot wait for and expect the positive effects of IT growth to "trickle down" to have an impact on development.

On the other hand, he is witness to and is a personal example of those within the IT fraternity who want to make an impact on society around them by using their capabilities. He feels they are "groping" to find solutions which can leverage IT for development.

The prevalence of the desire among IT professionals to do something is highlighted by Richard Newton, dean of engineering at the University of California in Berkeley. He suggested, to the global ICT workshop, the setting up an "international engineering peace corps" for young professionals to work together. Many of them are "passionate" about their domain, he confirms.

ICT has today emerged as a powerful tool for development because after being inwardly focused (remaining within the world of technologists) for 25 years, it has now come out in the open and is likely to remain outwardly focused for the next 50 years. It is the price performance of the technology which is bringing it within the reach of the poor.

Between this clear potential and actual delivery lie the many demonstrated pilot applications. For their replication and dissemination it is necessary to form communities of practice through interaction among technologists, industry, government, domain experts, and local community-based organisations. It is from these applications that successful business models will emerge.

Newton feels that infrastructure is the key issue before ICT. Deploy it, and part of the technical job will be done. The existing network technology is cheap enough for rural deployment. What is needed is to reduce the cost of devices by a factor of magnitude, chips that are optimised for developing economies and task-specific devices.

Also needed is software offering handwriting and speech recognition, iconic user interfaces and task-specific devices. A key requirement in deployment is the village base station which now costs $ 750 but can be made to cost $ 500 by 2010.

The infrastructure has to be open, standard based and support users with low literacy and shared and intermittent usage. It should be as easy to access this network as throwing an electrical switch.

To work towards this there has to be a public, private, university and NGO partnership which will become an active global R&D community. This could work through a global technology forum, have its own world class publication and evolve an R&D road map.

Thomas Kalil, also from Berkeley and former IT adviser to Bill Clinton, put together a long list of research ideas that the international workshop identified and which posed some of the most pertinent questions on using ICT for development.

If ICT is to help the poor, one key area where it must effectively deliver is education. How can it be used to take education to the poor more effectively and cheaply? From this follows the question: under what circumstances can ICT cost-effectively improve upon classroom-based instruction?

The "anytime, anywhere" nature of online learning provides real value in individual cases like adult learners, who can then access it at their convenience, even though the actual education imparted may not be any better than classroom instruction.

ICT has to be used to improve what happens in the classroom also. One way of doing this is using it to train the teacher, allowing her to upgrade her skills far more affordably than would have been possible.

There are two clear Indian initiatives in this area. At the apex is the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) which through its Edusat satellite is set to impart a quantum jump to the facilities for distance learning.

At the grassroots is the Premji Foundation which is working extensively to develop teaching aids that can be distributed and used through the compact disk and personal computer in order to make learning more interesting. But the question is, when does such work migrate from the charitable to the business sphere?

If ICT can be used to improve governance, it will strike a blow for poverty reduction as lack of development is increasingly perceived as a consequence not so much of inadequate capital (that was the dominant theme in the fifties and sixties) but poor governance.

To begin to provide e-governance, governments have to first go in for extensive automation of back-end operations. But even if you do, how do you get around the problem of low levels of internet access among the poor who predominate?

Naturally you have to be selective, so those e-governance services which are so compelling that they will help drive demand for ICT have to be identified.

A good place to begin is trying to select those e-governance applications which have the biggest potential to reduce corruption and increase trust and accountability.

The Bhoomi project of Karnataka represents a show piece in this regard and the Shanghai field visit made getting to know it its number one agenda.

Over several years the Karnataka government has computerised 20 million land records, critically affecting the lives of nearly seven million farmers in the state. Not only has it made obtaining a certified extract of the records an extremely easy and quick task, costing all of Rs 15, the scope for official corruption and delay has been greatly reduced.

It is a boon to farmers in more ways than one. Not only does it quicken the process of being able to get bank loans by pledging their land, but the process of mutation, changing ownership records required through succession which earlier could take years, has also been greatly quickened.

The government's next move is to initiate private franchising of the land record terminals so that they can be installed in very village (now they are at the 170 taluka towns). These terminals will be able to offer a host of other services, like selling highly useful cropping data to fertiliser companies, thus making themselves viable.

The ability of ICT to help the poor will be greatly enhanced once there are viable business models to serve them profitably by using ICT. The first step is to develop a system of community internet kiosks which will offer a plethora of services for a fee, thus both helping the individual user and the kiosk owner who is able to earn a livelihood.

A pioneering role is being played in this field by n-Logue, one of the companies spawned out of the intellectual efforts of the Madras IIT teachers who form the TeNet group. The commercial viability of this model is currently being tested in Tamil Nadu's Madurai district and Karnataka's Mandya district.

Franchising has already worked with the Grameen Phone project in Bangladesh. Another key business experiment is the e-choupal, conceived by ITC, to provide a supply chain that links farmers to the mainstream of national commerce.

To make sure that the poor take to ICT of their own volition, service providers will have to select those which directly raise their income. Himachal apple growers and fishermen working off the coast of peninsula India have already made extensive well known use of the cellular phone to discover the price of their produce.

Naturally, selling mobile phone services to these groups is not a difficult task. It should be equally easy to sell e-learning services that offer vocational skills which can be directly linked to the users' desire to earn more in the future.

E-commerce that reduces logistical costs in servicing the rural market and thereby expands the market should also be easy for organised business to adopt in its own interest, helping the poor in the process.

Experts keep repeating that ICT is not a panacea. It is a part of the overall problem of tackling poverty. To deliver it you need training, changes in work practices and economic reform.

Above all else, how do you use the tool of ICT in a situation where the quality and reliability of the power supply is questionable? Finally, how do you reduce "planned obsolescence"? Big business will have to change its ethos so that new models and versions are not issued compulsively and support for the earlier ones stopped as a marketing strategy.