Internet challenge for India

Whatever anyone may have thought about how the internet would develop and grow in India, reality has emerged with unexpected contours. In other countries, the internet will become ubiquitous. It will facilitate remote-controlled refrigerators with internet IDs, and help people ask on their cell phones for the location of the nearest Chinese restaurant. Advertising via the net will get under people's skin, become viral, with the advertiser knowing your profile before directing the message to you.

All this prompted Vinton Cerf, chief internet evangelist of Google and popularly known as a "father of the internet", to claim last year that "there is an internet in your future; resistance is futile". But India is almost nowhere in this internet-driven world. According to 2006 data, it has an internet penetration of just 3.6 per cent, when for China it was 10 per cent and South Korea 66 per cent. The same tale is told by the number of broadband subscriptions "" 188,600 for India, against 43 million for China and 4.4 million for Korea.

Things would be depressing if this was all. But there is hope in another phenomenon: the far wider presence of the mobile phone in India with the total subscriber base targeted to reach 250 million by the end of the year. In the all-round expansion of the internet, many will have their first introduction to it through the mobile phone. What is important here is that the internet is also adapting to mobility; and far greater bandwidth will be available in the future, through optic fibre as well as wireless, to access the internet.

Dr Cerf, in India last week, recalled how he had remarked some years ago to a senior Taiwanese leader that, considering the number of motherboards the country exported, it could possibly use some of them domestically! India is in a similar situation, with most of its information technology effort being exported today. The challenge (indeed, opportunity) before the country is to create wealth and remove poverty, by using information technology. There are many well-known ways in which this can be done. But needed also are new models for internet service provision, and software in Indian languages. The private sector may need some incentives to get them started.

Dr Cerf said last week that he is "excited about the spoken interaction on the net". This is a help to those who are handicapped in any of several ways. When you can access the internet through voice, and access voice data, it can play a role in bridging the literacy gap. This is feasible as "speech understanding" is an increasingly well-developed technology.

The internet can also be a great tool for political expression, for instance. Interest groups can celebrate the death of distance and organise themselves across geographies. One way in which people have cut across boundaries for a common cause, is reflected by the support that is now building up through the internet for action on global warming.

At the other end, the internet will be able to serve micro cultures, and offer opportunities to capture and secure the cultural diversity that exists in a country like India. On balance, the inexorable growth of the internet will shift power towards the individual by placing choice and volition in her hands. Some crystal-ball gazers see the danger of the digital divide, with the poor once again getting left out.

But even as that is inevitable at one level, at another, the poor will gain from e-governance initiatives, from the transparency that the internet facilitates, and the resulting democratisation of volition.