Volume 10, No. 1, April 2000
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The focus of almost all the articles in this Newsletter is on the information inequality that is being created through technological progress and diffusion of information technology. The inequality exists as much between nations as between people of the same nation. Subbaih illustrates how scientists and scholars in developing countries are affected by the information asymmetry. It is clear (as is also argued by Manuel Castells in the first article) that social development, economic growth through technological innovation and shared world development will not happen by simply relying on unfettered market forces. These forces work to the advantage of industrialised nations. Hemelink, therefore, argues for changes in policies that will promote technology transfer and direct investments to developing countries to provide Internet connectivity to a large number of people. The most immediate challenge for governments and the international community is to recognise that the use of ICTs for sustainable development will not be determined by technological progress but by political decisions. Digital advantages requires creative style of governance that are not simply inspired by vision of digital benefits but also address the serious obstacles which hinder the attainment of digital advantages. It is going to be increasingly difficult to control what people can access through the net. What is needed is to build high quality content in local languages that can act as a binding force in the face of disruptive force of new technology. The report on IIMA-World Bank ICT Workshop highlights through case studies what ICT can do for development and how some organisations in India have been able to harness this advantage. There is agreement that the key to socio-economic progress in the new millennium is in the use of ICT for education. Resources would be required for achieving high Internet penetration and competence will be needed to produce educational software and local Web content. This Newsletter has been delayed due to continuing budgetary constraints. A large amount of material has been reproduced from other sources. All of it is relevant, but one hopes that in future we will have more original pieces to publish. We invite the readers to send in contributions focusing on education.
Information Technology, Globalization and Social Development Manuel Castells Paper prepared for the UNRISD Conference on Information Technologies and Social Development, Palais des Nations, Geneva, 22-24 June, 1998. Introduction The world is in the midst of a historical transformation at the turn of the millennium. Like all major transformations in history, it is multidimensional: technological, economic, social, cultural, political, geopolitical. Yet, in the end, what is the real meaning of this extraordinary mutation for social development, for people’s lives and well being? And is there a shared meaning for everyone, or must we differentiate people in terms of their specific relationship to the process of social change? If so, what are the criteria for such a differentiation? There is a raging debate in the world on the mixed record of the information technology revolution, and of globalization -- especially when we consider their social dimensions on a planetary scale. As is always the case with a fundamental debate, it is most often framed ideologically and cast in simplistic terms. For the prophets of technology, for the true believers in the magic of the market, everything will be just fine, as long as ingenuity and competition are set free. All we need are a few regulatory fixes, to prevent corruption and to remove bureaucratic impediments in the path of our flight to hyper-modernity. For those around the world who are not ecstatic about surfing on the Internet, but who are affected by layoffs, lack of basic social services, crime, poverty and disruption of their lives, globalization is nothing more than a warmed up version of traditional capitalist ideology. In their view, information technology is a tool for renewed exploitation, destruction of jobs, environmental degradation and the invasion of privacy. Techno-elites versus neo-luddites. Of course, the real issues are not in-between, but elsewhere. Social development today is determined by the ability to establish a synergistic interaction between technological innovation and human values, leading to a new set of organizations and institutions that create positive feedback loops between productivity, flexibility, solidarity, safety, participation and accountability, in a new model of development that could be socially and environmentally sustainable. It is easy to agree on these goals, but difficult to develop the policies and strategies that could lead to them. Some of the disagreement comes, certainly, from conflicting interests, values and priorities. But a considerable source of current disarray in social and economic policies stems from the lack of a common understanding of the processes of transformation under way, of their origins and their implications. This paper aims at clarifying the meaning of this transformation, particularly focusing on the processes that are usually considered to be its triggers: the information technology revolution and the process of globalization. As we shall see, in fact, these two processes interact with others, in a very complex set of actions and reactions. But they offer a fruitful entry point to discuss the connection between the new socio-economic system and the generation of inequality and social exclusion on an unprecedented, planetary scale. Thus, after having characterized technological innovation, organizational change and globalization, I will analyze the various dimensions of inequality and social exclusion, showing the depth of our social crisis, and I will provide some hypotheses on the reasons for its accentuation in the last decade. I will conclude by proposing a redefinition of the field of social development, appropriate to tackle the issues that condition our capacity to live together in the new context of the Information Age. In proceeding along the lines of this argument, I have in mind a variety of data, from reliable sources, that make somewhat plausible the analysis presented here. IT, networking, globalization In the last quarter of this century, a new form of socio-economic organization has emerged. After the collapse of statism, in the Soviet Union and throughout the world, it is certainly a capitalist system. Indeed, for the first time in history the entire planet is capitalist, since even the few remaining command economies are surviving or developing through their linkages to global, capitalist markets. Yet this is a brand of capitalism that is at the same time very old and fundamentally new. It is old because it appeals to relentless competition in the pursuit of profit, and individual satisfaction (deferred or immediate) is its driving engine. But it is fundamentally new because it is tooled by new information and communication technologies that are at the roots of new productivity sources, of new organizational forms and of the formation of a global economy. Let us briefly examine the profile of this new world we are living in, which in fact is shared by all countries despite the diversity of their cultures and institutions. Information and communication technology as a strategic tool. Information technology is not the cause of the changes we are living through. But without new information and communication technologies none of what is changing our lives would be possible. In the 1990s the entire planet is organized around telecommunicated networks of computers at the heart of information systems and communication processes. The entire realm of human activity depends on the power of information, in a sequence of technological innovation that accelerates its pace by month. Genetic engineering, benefiting from this wealth of information processing capacity, is progressing by leaps and bounds, and is enabling us, for the first time, to unveil the secrets of living matter and to manipulate life, with extraordinary potential consequences. Software development is making possible user friendly computing, so that millions of children, when provided with adequate education, can progress in their knowledge, and in their ability to create wealth and enjoy it wisely, much faster than any previous generation. Internet – today used by about 100 million people, and doubling this number every year – is a channel of universal communication where interests and values of all sorts coexist, in a creative cacophony. Certainly, the diffusion of information and communication technology is extremely uneven. Most of Africa is being left in a technological apartheid, and the same could be said of many other regions of the world. The situation is difficult to remedy when one third of the world’s population still has to survive on the equivalent of one dollar per day. Technology per se does not solve social problems. But the availability and use of information and communication technologies are a pre-requisite for economic and social development in our world. They are the functional equivalent of electricity in the industrial era. Econometric studies show the close statistical relationship between diffusion of information technology, productivity and competitiveness for countries, regions, industries and firms (Dosi et al., 1988). They also show that an adequate level of education in general, and of technical education in particular, is essential for the design and productive use of new technologies (Foray and Freeman, 1992). But neither the sheer number of scientists and engineers nor the acquisition of advanced technology can be a factor of development by itself (neither was enough for the Soviet Union – see Castells and Kiselyvova, 1995), without an appropriate organizational environment. The crucial role of information and communication technologies in stimulating development is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows countries to leapfrog stages of economic growth by being able to modernize their production systems and increase their competitiveness faster than in the past. The most critical example is that of the Asian Pacific economies, and particularly the cases of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea. This is so despite the current financial crisis, which is unrelated to competitive performance and may be related, in fact, to the attractiveness of booming Asian economies to global capital flows. On the other hand, for those economies that are unable to adapt to the new technological system, their retardation becomes cumulative. Furthermore, the ability to move into the Information Age depends on the capacity of the whole society to be educated, and to be able to assimilate and process complex information. This starts with the education system, from the bottom up, from the primary school to the university. And it relates, as well, to the overall process of cultural development, including the level of functional literacy, the content of the media, and the diffusion of information within the population as a whole. In this regard, what is happening is that regions and firms that concentrate the most advanced production and management systems are increasingly attracting talent from around the world, while leaving aside a significant fraction of their own population whose educational level and cultural/technical skills do not fit the requirements of the new production system. A case in point is Silicon Valley, the most advanced information technology producing region in the world, which can only maintain the pace of innovation by recruiting every year thousands of engineers and scientists from India, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Israel, Russia and Western Europe, to jobs that cannot be filled by Americans because they do not have proper skills (Benner, in progress). Similarly, in Bangalore, Bombay, Seoul or Campinas, engineers and scientists concentrate in high technology hubs, connected to the ‘Silicon Valleys’ of the world, while a large share of the population in all countries remains in low-end, low-skill jobs, when they are lucky enough to be employed at all. (Carnoy, 1999). Thus there is little chance for a country, or region, to develop in the new economy without its incorporation into the technological system of the information age. Although this does not necessarily imply the need to produce information technology hardware locally, it does imply the ability to use advanced information and communication technologies, which in turn requires an entire reorganization of society (Castells and Tyson, 1988, 1989). A similar process affects the life chances of individuals. Not everybody should be a computer programmer or a financial analyst, but only people with enough education to reprogram themselves throughout the changing trajectory of their professional lives will be able to reap the benefits of the new productivity. What about ‘the others’? It depends on social organization, the strategies of firms, and public policies. But left to market forces, there is an undeniable tendency toward a polarized social structure, between countries and within countries, as I will show below. In sum, information and communication technology is the essential tool for economic development and material well being in our age; it conditions power, knowledge and creativity; it is, for the time being, unevenly distributed within countries and between countries; and it requires, for the full realization of its developmental value, an inter-related system of flexible organizations and information-oriented institutions. In a nutshell, cultural and educational development conditions technological development, which conditions economic development, which conditions social development, and this stimulates cultural and educational development once more. This can be a virtuous circle of development or a downward spiral of underdevelopment. And the direction of the process will not be decided by technology but by society, through its conflictive dynamics. Globalization There is so much ideology surrounding this notion, and its implications, that it is essential to characterize globalization precisely, and then determine its extent and evolution in empirical terms (see Hirst and Thompson, 1996). Although globalization is multidimensional, it can be better understood starting with its economic dimension. A global economy is an economy whose core activities work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale. Thus capital markets are interconnected world wide, so that savings and investment in all countries, even if most of them are not globally invested, depend for their performance on the evolution and behavior of global financial markets. In the early 1990s multinational corporations employed directly ‘only’ about 70 million workers, but these workers produced one-third of the world’s total private output, and the global value of their sales in 1992 was US$ 5,500 billion, which is 25 per cent more than the total value of world trade in that year (Bailey et al., 1993). Therefore multinational corporations, in manufacturing, services, and finance, with their ancillary networks of small and medium businesses, constitute the core of the world economy. Furthermore, the highest tier of science and technology, the one that shapes and commands overall technological development, is concentrated in a few dozen research centers and milieus of innovation around the globe, overwhelmingly in the United States, Western Europe and Japan. Russian, Indian and Chinese engineers, usually of very high quality, when they reach a certain level of scientific development, can only pursue their research by linking up with these centers. Thus highly skilled labor is also increasingly globalized, with talent being hired around the globe when firms and governments need the talent, and are ready to pay for it. At the same time, the overwhelming proportion of jobs, and thus of people, are not global. In fact, they are local and regional. But their fate, their jobs and their living standards ultimately depend on the globalized sector of the national economy, or on the direct connection of their economic units to global networks of capital, production and trade. This global economy is historically new, for the simple reason that only in the last two decades have we produced the technological infrastructure required for it to function as a unit on a planetary scale: telecommunications, information systems, microelectronics-based manufacturing and processing, information-based air transportation, container cargo transport, high speed trains, and international business services located around the world. However, if the new global economy reaches out to encompass the entire planet -- if all people and all territories are affected by its workings -- not every place, or every person, is directly included in it. In fact, most people and most lands are excluded, switched off, either as producers, or consumers, or both. The flexibility of this global economy allows the overall system to link up everything that is valuable according to dominant values and interests, while disconnecting everything that is not valuable, or becomes devalued. It is this simultaneous capacity to include and exclude people, territories and activities, that characterizes the new global economy as constituted in the information age. Similar processes of selective, segmented globalization characterize other critical instrumental dimensions of our society, including the media, science, culture and information at large. Globalization and liberalization do not eliminate the nation state, but they fundamentally redefine its role and affect its operation. Central banks (including the new European Central Bank) cannot really control the trends of global flows in financial markets. And these markets are not always shaped by economic rules, but by information turbulence of various origins. National governments, in order to maintain some capacity to manage global flows of capital and information, band together, creating or adapting supranational institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, NAFTA, or other regional cooperation agencies), to which they surrender much of their sovereignty. So they survive, but under a new form of state that links supranational institutions, national states, regional and local governments, and even NGOs, in a network of interaction and shared decision making that becomes the prevalent political form of the information age: the network state. In sum, globalization is a new historical reality -- not simply the one invented by neo-liberal ideology to convince citizens to surrender to markets, but also the one inscribed in processes of capitalist restructuring, innovation and competition, and enacted through the powerful medium of new information and communication technologies. Networking No major historical transformation has taken place in technology, or in the economy, without an inter-related organizational transformation. The large factory, dedicated to mass production, was as critical to the constitution of the industrial age as the development and diffusion of new sources of energy. In the information age, the critical organizational form is networking. A network is simply a set of inter-connected nodes. It may have a hierarchy, but it has no center. Relationships between nodes are asymmetrical, but they are all necessary for the functioning of the network -- for the circulation of money, information, technology, images, goods, services, or people throughout the network. The most critical distinction in this organizational logic is to be or not to be -- in the network. Be in the network, and you can share and, over time, increase your chances. Be out of the network, or become switched off, and your chances vanish since everything that counts is organized around a world wide web of interacting networks. Networks are the appropriate organization for the relentless adaptation and the extreme flexibility that is required by an interconnected, global economy -- by changing economic demand and constantly innovating technology, and by the multiple strategies (individual, cultural, political) deployed by various actors, which create an unstable social system at an increasing level of complexity. To be sure, networks have always existed in human organization. But only now have they become the most powerful form for organizing instrumentality, rather than expressiveness. The reason is fundamentally technological. The strength of networks is their flexibility, their decentralizing capacity, their variable geometry, adapting to new tasks and demands without destroying their basic organizational rules or changing their overarching goals. Nevertheless, their fundamental weakness, throughout history, has been the difficulty of coordination towards a common objective, towards a focused purpose, that requires concentration of resources in space and time within large organizations, like armies, bureaucracies, large factories and vertically organized corporations. With new information and communication technology, the network is, at the same time, centralized and decentralized. It can be coordinated without a center. Instead of instructions, we have interactions. Much higher levels of complexity can be handled without major disruption. It does not follow, however, that large corporations are being replaced by small and medium businesses, or that multinationals are obsolete. We observe, in fact, the opposite: there is merger mania around the world. Bigger appears to be increasingly beautiful, as Citicorp marries Traveler Insurance, Bank of America leaves its heart in San Francisco but moves its money to North Carolina, Daimler Benz swallows Chrysler, Volkswagen upgrades itself to Rolls Royce status, and American banks digest Asian banks and financial corporations, in a historical revenge of the West against the high-growth areas of the Pacific. But the concentration of capital goes hand in hand with the decentralization of organization. Large multinational corporations function internally as decentralized networks, whose elements are given considerable autonomy. Each element of these networks is usually a part of other networks, some of them formed by ancillary small and medium businesses; other networks link up with other large corporations, around specific projects and tasks, with specific time and spatial frames. Yes, ultimately all this complexity boils down to the need to assure a profit. But how, and for whom? Once CEOs have served themselves, lavishly, there is still most of the capital to be distributed among increasing numbers of shareholders. Earnings do not remain in the firm (whether dedicated primarily to manufacturing, finance, or services): they are invested in the global casino of inter-related financial markets, whose fate is ultimately determined by a series of factors. Only some of those factors have to do with economic fundamentals. Because of this level of unpredictability and complexity, the networks in which all firms, large or small, are anchored, move along, readapt, form and reform, in an endless variation. Firms and organizations that do not follow the networking logic (be it in business, in media, or in politics) are wiped out by competition, since they are not equipped to handle the new model of management. So, ultimately, networks -- all networks -- come out ahead by restructuring, even if they change their composition, their membership, and even their tasks. The problem is that people, and territories, whose livelihood and fate depend on their positioning in these networks, cannot adapt so easily. Capital gets disinvested, software engineers migrate, tourists find another fashionable spot, and global media close down in a downgraded region. Networks readapt, bypass the area (or some people), and reform elsewhere, or with someone else. But the human matter on which the network was living cannot so easily mutate. It becomes trapped, or downgraded, or wasted. The other side of the Information Age: Inequality, poverty, misery and social exclusion To analyze current trends of poverty and inequality in the world, we need to establish some conceptual clarity by distinguishing, first, between relationships of consumption and relationships of production; and then by differentiating four specific processes in both sets of relationships. Relationships of consumption refer to the appropriation by people of the product of their work. Here, we must differentiate between inequality, polarization, poverty and misery. Inequality refers to the unequal appropriation of wealth (income and assets) by individuals or social groups. Polarization is a specific process of inequality that occurs when both the top and the bottom of a scale of wealth distribution grow faster than the middle. Poverty is an institutionally defined norm establishing the level of income that a society considers necessary to live according to an accepted standard. Misery, or extreme poverty, is an institutionally defined level that establishes the lowest material standard of living, making survival problematic. There is increasing inequality between countries in the world at large, while intra-country inequality offers a mixed record, with some countries improving their condition (e.g., India, the Asian Pacific, Spain), while others have fallen into greater inequality (US,UK, Mexico, Brazil). Polarization is on the rise everywhere. At a global level, the ratio of income for the top 20 per cent of the population to the income of the bottom 20 per cent jumped from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 78 to 1 in 1994. And the personal assets of 385 billionaires in the world are now higher than the annual income of countries representing 45 per cent of the population of the planet. The evolution of poverty is complex. Modernization has contributed to reducing the proportion of poor people in some very large countries, including China, India and Brazil. Still, the proportion of the poor is growing in most countries. And the number of people living in poverty has significantly increased everywhere. Furthermore extreme poverty, or misery -- usually defined as the proportion of people who are below 50 per cent of the poverty line -- is the lot of the fastest growing segment of the poor population in almost every country (see sources cited by Castells, 1998, pp. 75-82, and UNDP, 1997). As for relationships of production, they refer to the ways and means through which people provide for their livelihood. Here I will not go into a full fledged analysis of all relationships of production existing in our society, but I will focus on the four conditions that seem to be decisive in affecting relationships of consumption. The first process, characterizing the information age as a result of its networking form of organization, is the growing individualization of labor: I refer to the process by which labor’s contribution to production is defined specifically for each individual, with little reference to collective bargaining or regulated conditions. If the industrial era consisted, in terms of the labor process, of taking a population of peasants and craftsmen and bringing them into socialized conditions of labor, the information age is exactly the reversal. It is the de-socialization of labor and the increasing flexibility and individualization of labor performance. This is not necessarily either good or bad. Flexibility of labor can allow people to organize their lives better, or not. But it does transform the social relationship between capital and labor, between management and workers, and among workers themselves. And it has strong implications for political action. A second characteristic of current relationships of production is over-exploitation: I mean the imposition of unfavorable norms of compensation or labor conditions on certain categories of workers because of their vulnerability to discrimination (e.g., immigrants, women, youth, minorities). Women, in particular, have been massively incorporated into paid work, but in many cases at miserable wages (see data in Castells, 1996, chapter 4, and 1997, chapter 4). A third characteristic is social exclusion, that is the process by which certain individuals or groups are barred from access to social positions that would entitle them to provide for themselves adequately, in an autonomous way, within the context of prevailing institutions and values. Usually, in informational capitalism, such a position is associated with the possibility of access to relatively regular, paid labor for at least one member of a stable household; or with the right to receive sufficient long term benefits from a non-stigmatizing welfare system. There is currently an extraordinary increase in numbers of people who find themselves in situations of social exclusion in practically all countries of the world, with the exception of the Scandinavian democracies (for sources, see Castells, 1998, chapter 2). Finally, there is a fourth significant type of relationship of production that is relevant to current trends of social underdevelopment: what I call perverse integration. This refers to the labor process in the criminal economy -- in other words, to income-generating activities that are normatively declared to be a crime by the state. As a significant number of people are being excluded from access to regular jobs, they are moving onto this shop floor of crime. One could say that some have little choice. People who are not needed in the information age do not vanish: they are there. And in fact, they are increasingly there, because -- with the exception of Russia -- many populations now have an increasing life expectancy. (For more on the explosion of the criminal economy throughout the world -- and, accordingly, a boom in its employment capacity -- see Castells, 1998, chapter 3.) Links between informational capitalism and the growing social crisis These, however, are simply observations of a growing social crisis (and not exempt from controversy concerning the selection and interpretation of data). What does the analysis mean? What is the relation of these trends, if any, to the structure and dynamics of informational, global capitalism? First, the extreme social unevenness of the process is linked to the flexibility and global reach of informational capitalism. If everything, and everyone, who can be a source of value can be easily connected -- and as soon as he/she/it ceases to be so, can be easily disconnected (because of individualization and extreme mobility of resources) -- then the global system of production is populated simultaneously by extremely valuable and productive individuals and groups, and by people (or places) who are not, or are not any longer considered valuable, even if they are still physically there. Because of the dynamism and competitiveness of the dominant system, most previous forms of production become de-structured, and ultimately phased out, or transformed into subdued tributaries of the highly integrated, dynamic, globalized system. Second, education, information, science, and technology become critical as sources of value creation (and reward) in the informational economy. While formal education has increased throughout the world, the quality of education becomes essential. Most public schools, both in developing countries and in the United States, are simply not up to the task of producing the new, informational labor force. But even in countries with a decent educational system, the overall cultural and technological environment that is required to exercise informational skills does not mirror the dynamism of the system. So lack of education, and lack of informational infrastructure, lead most of the world to be dependent on the performance of a few globalized segments of their economies, increasingly vulnerable to the whirlwind of global financial flows. Third, as new technologies, new production systems, and the organization of international trade eliminate traditional agriculture (still employing two-thirds of the people in the world in this end of millennium), a rural exodus of gigantic dimensions is being propelled – particularly in Asia. Rural people are destined to be painfully absorbed into the informal economy of overcrowded megacities on the edge of ecological catastrophe. Fourth, since states are bypassed by global flows, disciplined by the enforcers of these flows (such as the IMF), or limited by the supranational institutions they have initiated to survive somehow in the midst of globalization, welfare states come under attack, regulations break down, and the social contract, wherever it has existed, is fundamentally challenged. New technologies do not induce unemployment, as has been repeatedly demonstrated by empirical research (Carnoy, 1999). Indeed, at the world level there is a massive creation of jobs but, in most cases, under conditions of over-exploitation: the most telling development is the employment of about 250 million children at the time work is supposedly ending. But there is unemployment in Western Europe when firms facing tight labor rules, high wages, and generous social benefits refuse to create jobs. Those firms have the possibility of automating, subcontracting, and/or investing elsewhere, while still selling goods and services in the European market. Thus, under current conditions, markets overwhelm regulations and worker protection through relying on the increased mobility of resources made possible in the new technological environment. This is why together with affluence and prosperity for a significant minority (about 1/3 of the people in advanced countries, and probably about 1/5 in the world at large, who have substantially improved their living standards in the last 10 years), there is the formation of a fourth world, characterized by social exclusion. The fourth world This world is composed of people, and territories, that have lost value for the dominant interests in informational capitalism. Some of them because they offer little contribution as either producers or consumers. Others because they are uneducated or functionally illiterate. Others because they become sick or mentally unfit. Others because they could not afford the rent, became homeless, and were devoured by life in the streets. Others who, unable to cope with life, became drug addicts or drunks. Others because, in order to survive, they sold their bodies and their souls, and went on to be prostitutes of every possible desire. Others because they entered the criminal economy, were caught, and became inhabitants of the growing planet of the criminal justice system (almost 3% of adult males in the United States). Others because they had an incident with a cop, or a boss, or some authority, and got onto the wrong track. And places, entire places become stigmatized, confined by police, bypassed by networks of communication and investment. Thus, while valuable people and places have been globally connected, devalued locales become disconnected, and people from all countries and cultures are socially excluded by the tens of millions. This fourth world of social exclusion, beyond poverty, exists everywhere, albeit in different proportions -- from the South Bronx to Mantes-la-Jolie, from Kamagasaki to Meseta de Orcasitas, and from the favelas of Rio to the shanties of Jakarta. And there is, as I have tried to show, a systemic relationship between the rise of informational, global capitalism, under current historical conditions, and the extraordinary growth of social exclusion and human despair. Redefining social development in the Information Age For millennia, social development was tantamount to social survival: the daily goal of people, with the exception of a tiny ruling minority, was to get by, make a family, and steal a few moments of joy out of the harshness of the human condition. This is still the lot of many. Yet over the last two centuries, with the advent of the industrial age, social development came to involve the goal of improving people’s livelihood. Capital accumulation and investment, technological development geared towards material production, and massive inputs of labor and natural resources were the generators of wealth, both under capitalism and under statism. Social struggles and political reform – or revolution – took care of diffusing the harvest of productivity within society at large, albeit with the shortcomings of a world divided between North and South, and organized in class societies that tended to reproduce themselves. There is something new in the Information Age. It can be empirically argued that at the source of productivity and competitiveness (that jointly determine the generation of wealth and its differential appropriation by economic units), there is the capacity to generate new knowledge and to process relevant information efficiently. To be sure, information and knowledge have always been essential factors in power and production. Yet it is only when new information and communication technologies empower humankind with the ability incessantly to feed knowledge back into knowledge, experience into experience, that there is, at the same time, unprecedented productivity potential, and an especially close link between the activity of the mind, on the one hand, and material production, be it of goods or services, on the other. The old school of thought centered around the notion of human capital is fully vindicated. To invest in education is a productive investment. An educated labor force is a source of productivity. But to be educated means nothing if labor does not enjoy good health, decent housing, psychological stability, cultural fulfillment -- in other words, a multidimensional improvement in the quality of life. Thus welfare states, minus their bureaucratic underpinnings, should be sources of productivity, and not simply burdens on the budget. Yet the interaction between economic growth and social development in the information age is still more complex. It is the entire social organization that becomes productive or, on the contrary, an obstacle for innovation, and thus for productivity growth. Personal freedom (and therefore liberty in its fullest sense) is a pre-requisite for entrepreneurialism. Social solidarity is critical for stability and thus for predictability in investment. Family safety is essential for the willingness to take risks. Trust in one’s fellow citizens, and in the institutions of governance, is the foundation for socializing ingenuity in a given space and time, thus making it possible for others to enjoy the fruits of such ingenuity. In a word (and continuing along the seamless circle of change to which reference was made at the outset of this paper), social development leads to cultural development, which leads to innovation, which leads to economic development, which fosters institutional stability and trust; and this underlies a new, synergistic model that integrates economic growth and the enhancement of quality of life. Without social development, without institutional stability, there may still be a diffusion of economic development around the world, but it will be based upon a cost-lowering formula, rather than a productivity-enhancing model. Furthermore, both spirals (the high road to informational productivity, and the low road to economic competitiveness through cost cutting) are cumulative and contagious. If firms, and countries, compete on the basis of worsening the conditions of work, and concentrating as much as possible of the productivity bonanza in a few hands, they will kill incentives for most workers to invest their own mental capital in a collective undertaking, they will slow down the learning curve, and they will restrict both purchasing power and the drive towards innovation. Silicon Valley will still thrive on the basis of innovation, and it will still attract a substantial share of brain power in the field of information technology from around the world. But the proportion of Silicon Valley’s techno-elite in relation to the population at large -- even the educated population -- will become so ridiculously small in comparison to its share of power and wealth, that this will be socially unsustainable. Some people’s dream of a shrinking planet, made up of a highly productive, very affluent, avid consumer minority, floating on a cloud over low-skilled generic labor and ignoring the black holes into which devalued people and locales are doomed to sink, is simply untenable. The disassociation between economic growth and social development in the information age is not only morally wrong, but also impossible to sustain. The reintegration of social development and economic growth through technological innovation, informational management, and shared world development will not be accomplished by simply relying on unfettered market forces. Neither will it be born only out of the individual efforts of states, engaging in defensive strategies. It will require massive technological upgrading of countries, firms, and households around the world -- a strategy of the highest interest for everyone, including business, and particularly for high technology companies. (An appropriate use of the Internet is in fact the most important feature in such an upgrading.) It will take a dramatic investment in overhauling the educational system everywhere, through cooperation between national and local governments, international institutions and lending agencies, international and local business, and families ready to make sacrifices for a tangible improvement of their children’s future. It will require the establishment of a world wide network of science and technology, in which the most advanced universities will be willing to share knowledge and expertise for the common good. It must aim at reversing, slowly but surely, the marginalization of entire countries, or cities or neighborhoods, so that the human potential that is being wasted -- and particularly that of children -- can be reinvested. All people must become valued producers and consumers, and they must be recognized as human beings in fora other than the thirty second commercials of international organizations. All this is
feasible. We have the technical know how, the technology to do it, and the
economic and institutional strategies to implement it. The obstacles, of
course, are political. In part, they are related to very narrow business
strategies. But if we know what we want, why we want it, and how to do it,
we have the basic groundwork from which to try to convince business and
governments. I tend to think that it is in the interest of the most
enlightened business groups to support the high road of informational
development, linking up productivity, quality of life, and investment in
technology and education, world wide. And if there is a strong pressure of
public opinion in the world in favor of this shared development strategy,
with its potentially positive payoff in environmental conservation,
governments may join, ultimately, or, else be ousted by their citizens. Sources for empirical data referred in the paper. Bailey, Paul et
alter, eds. (1993) “Multinationals and employment: the global economy in
the 1990s”, Geneva: ILO. Information and Communication Technology for Rural Development: Case Studies from India Subhash Bhatnagar The IIM and the World Bank had organized a workshop in March to present case studies of various applications of information and communication technology that have made a difference in the delivery of services or products in rural areas. The coordinators intended to draw lessons from experiences in using ICT for rural development by bringing together administrators who have piloted and implemented projects in various sectors in rural areas. The cases presented in the workshop illustrated both the opportunities and challenges in the diffusion of ICT within India and for other developing countries. The workshop also discussed strategies that can be adopted by state governments in diffusing ICT applications and generating employment in different sectors in rural areas. The workshop was
inaugurated by Mr. Jaynarayan Vyas, Minister for Narmada and Major
Irrigation Projects in Gujarat Government. In his speech Mr. Vyas
identified the need for strengthening the planning and monitoring
processes in developmental programs. He opined that IT could play a
significant role in providing accurate and timely information to
understand the inter-linkages across several developmental activities. He
suggested that IT use can be considered successful only if there is
a direct benefit to the citizen. Information technology should be
introduced in rural areas in a manner that villagers are able to
comprehend not only technical aspects but also how they can exploit its
potential to the maximum for their advancement. As shrewd buyers and
sellers, poor rural people could best judge the actions taken by
government and the private sector to introduce ICT applications in
making things better, and in enabling them to solve their own problems
cheaply, yet reliably. Subash Bhatnagar, CMC Professor of IT at IIMA and joint coordinator of the workshop, highlighted the need for evaluation and monitoring indicators to determine the effectiveness of the ICT applications presented during the course of the workshop, including user demand, manageable risk, impact on the ‘common man’, sustainability, and the costs and economic viability of the applications. He suggested a way of classifying ICT applications as those that: provided decision support to public administrators for improving planning and monitoring of developmental programs; improved services to citizens and brought in transparency; and empowered citizens through access to information and knowledge. In choosing to implement each type of application there were some specific concerns that needed to be addressed. He identified some and suggested that the workshop discussions focus on identifying these factors. The presentations that were made in four sessions and two panel discussions on the two days of the workshop are summarized below. Mr. Rupak Charavarty, Sector Planning and Systems Manager, National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), demonstrated IT-based machines used at milk collection centers, and explained how this cheap and credible technology was being used in cooperatives to measure butterfat content of milk, test the quality of milk, and promptly make payment to the farmers. It has resulted in the removal of incentives to cut the milk by adding water, reduced time for payments from 10 days to less than five minutes, and instilled confidence in farmers in the cooperative set up. All of these factors have helped the milk market to expand. He noted that use of this technology was one of several ways in which the NDDB has dealt with problems of adverse selection and corruption. Maj. Ramakrishnan of CMC Ltd. discussed preliminary results of a 6-month pilot project that installed a Computerized Universal Postal System and a Centralized Accounting and Reporting System in three post offices in Andhra Pradesh. The technology is designed for rural environments, and has embedded components to avoid failure of components like floppy drives. The systems handle a multitude of functions within a postal office, reduce errors and waiting time, and provide transparent transactions. Prof. Anil Gupta of the IIM stressed that sustainable development programs must reduce information asymmetries and transaction costs. He discussed how ICT could help empower the knowledge rich but economically poor people. He illustrated this through the ‘Honey-Bee’ knowledge network used to augment grassroots inventors and overcome language, literacy and localism barriers. A large number of grass root inventions have been identified and documented as short multimedia presentations. Future plans include creating a data base of such innovations and making them accessible via a wide area network. There was a discussion on ‘kiosks’ in rural areas to provide information on local ecological knowledge, indigenous knowledge, ways to contact and know about local experts, availability of local varieties of crops, trees, fruits and vegetables. Mr. Raj Gupta, Regional Director of Inmarsat, spoke of the high costs of provisioning telephones for individuals in villages, and the need for public accessibility. He explained the DoT-Inmarsat pilot project that involved installation of village public telephones in rural areas including the hilly terrain of Jammu and Kashmir and the north-east. He also discussed the call pattern analysis, costs and benefits of the project. He proposed a framework through which appropriate communication technologies can be selected for providing telephony services in rural areas. The recently launched Warana Wired Village Project covering 70 villages around the river Warana in Maharashtra was described by Dr. N. Vijayaditya, Deputy Director of the National Informatics Centre. The existing cooperative structure has been used in concert with state of the art infrastructure (notably high speed VSATs) to allow Internet access to existing cooperative societies. The project aims to provide agricultural, medical, and education information to villagers by establishing networked ‘facilitation booths’ in the villages. He mentioned that it was too early to measure results of the project. The use of one way video, two way audio teleconferencing interactive networks for education and training was discussed by Mr. B.S. Bhatia, Director, DECU, Indian Space Research Organisation. The major applications of the network in rural development were for training extension staff from various departments of the state governments. In addition, a large number of women, Panchayati Raj elected officials, primary school teachers, and child development workers spread over large distances were trained. Preliminary results were provided of the Jhabua Development Communications Project, in which 150 direct reception TV sets were installed in villages in a predominantly tribal district of Madhya Pradesh. An application of
this technology for auxiliary nurse midwifes in Rajasthan using hand-held
computers was demonstrated. Mr. M. Naresh Kumar Reddy, Senior Project
Manager, CMC Ltd. said health care workers were burdened by demanding
data-collection and paperwork responsibilities, which effected the quality
of their work and their ability to provide primary health care services to
the people they serve. This particular application substituted
manual registers with client data stored on hand-held computers
accessible through a variety of icons, with the intent to lessen the
paperwork burden and improve data accuracy, would empower the village
health care worker to provide timely care and information. Though
this application was started as a pilot project, it is expected to
further develop in other states. AP’s Information Infrastructure plans, particularly the AP State Wide Area Network (APSWAN), was discussed by Srivatsa Krishna, Executive Director, AP Technology Services Ltd. This network would link the state government’s Secretariat with 23 District Headquarters, serving as the backbone for ‘multi-services’ (voice, video, and data) that would be used for improved co-ordination between state headquarters and district offices in managing various regulatory, developmental, and hazard mitigation programs of the state government. Mandals will be served by this two-way communication, and electronic commerce applications will be developed. He described the AP Value Added Network Services project which hopes to deliver a variety of public services through a large network of information kiosks. Later in the day, he also presented results of an application of ICT for the urban poor in accident and trauma services in New Delhi. The application logged in requests for free ambulatory services and provided information support for despatching mobile ambulances to reach the pick up site in a reasonable service time. One of AP’s major IT projects was to introduce a transparent system of property valuation which is easily accessible to citizens, called the Computer-aided Administration of Registration Department (CARD). This was discussed in the paper by Mr. J. Satyanarayana, Commissioner and Inspector General of Registration and Stamps, Government of Andhra Pradesh. The difficulties faced in implementing this project, spread over 200 locations in the state, requiring extensive re-engineering of a conventional system within a conservative and traditional government department, provides many useful lessons in managing complex computerization projects designed to benefit ‘the common man’. Entreprenuership in electronics and information technology maintenance, repair, and user training was discussed by Mr. Santosh Choubey, Director of the All India Society for Electronics and Computer Technology (AISECT). Nearly two-thirds of the 633 centers located in rural areas are providing direct employment to technicians and trainers. These centers are emerging as multipurpose focal points for training, data processing, desk top publishing, screen printing, medical electronics, communications, and community libraries. Their cost structure and self-financing arrangements were discussed. The scope for
adapting and using ICT to enhance functional capacity and improve
employment potential of disabled people was demonstrated by Mr. Bhushan
Punani, Executive Director of the Blind People’s Association. This
center provides computer training and special education using computer
aided devices to the blind and visually impaired. Despite the potential of
this technology, it has not been used widely in India due to cost and
language barriers coupled with unsuccessful attempts of the government to
develop speech synthesizers, Braille Embossers, and a talking computer. Mr. Krishna S. Vatsa, Deputy Secretary to the Government of Maharashtra, discussed implementation of a GIS based Disaster Management Information System (DMIS). The DMIS was designed to ensure better resource mobilization, faster decision-making, cost reduction, and effective use of common information that in principal should be shared among departments. The data communication network and the data provided in the central database would be available for a number of purposes besides disaster management. In a panel discussion on state strategies and implementation challenges, the ambitious agendas for the IT sector outlined by the National IT Task Force and various state governments, and its role in promoting ICT awareness, investments, and developing human resources and institutional capacities was discussed by Mr. Raja Mitra, economist, World Bank. He made a comparison of the strategies adopted by the governments of AP, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal. Mr. Ranjan Dwivedi spoke about the challenges in computerizing rural police stations on the basis of his experience in UP. Mr. Sahu spoke about the status of ICT use in Tripura and how the technology had failed to create an impact. A panel chaired by the coordinators underlined the key ideas brought out in the workshop, which are to be included along with the papers in a subsequent joint World Bank-IIM publication. The variables that apparently seemed to determine the success of the projects were for whom, what bundle of services (multipurpose), and how well they were managed. A detailed understanding of the work environment of end users, needs of the beneficiaries and specific benefits proposed to be delivered leads to well-planned and executed projects, as illustrated in the Health Care, CARD, NDDB, and Honey Bee projects. In terms of income and employment generation, and improving skills, rural ICT centers must be multipurpose in order to be economically viable. The empirical record revealed that all the projects took longer than envisaged. They required adjustment to underlying, unfavorable implementation conditions that usually left out both incentives for performance and quantitative and qualitative outcome measures. The role of public private partnership was exemplified in the successful diffusion of the ICT application in 600 milk societies through the effort of a few private companies. In other projects like CARD, training was completely outsourced to a private company and the future plans at WARANA, as also for APVANS include a significant role for the private sector. The panelist representing IT vendors recognized the potential market in electronic governance and the tremendous challenges in implementing large government projects. The workshop was considered successful on many different criteria. It attracted a large number of senior participants from different stake holders from many parts of India. The 60 participants at the workshop included representatives of State Governments, software, hardware, and telecommunications firms, NGOs, academic institutions, and bilateral and multilateral agencies that have funded projects for rural development. The discussion from the floor was lively and nearly twenty participants other than the speakers shared their views on different occasions. The workshop received wide coverage in the media. Several English and local language papers carried a write up of the workshop. The authors received useful feedback which will be used in revising the papers. The workshop proceedings are being published as a book. The Digital Advance: Will ICT Make a Difference to the People Who Have Never Made a Phone Call? Dr. Cees Hamelink Digital Information-Communication Technologies (ICTs) promise the world a ‘new civilization’, an ‘information revolution’ or a ‘knowledge society’. Once ICTs have realized worldwide access to information for all, new social values will evolve, new social relations will develop, the ‘zero sum society’ comes to a definite end. According to the digital utopists, ICTs will create more productivity and improve chances for employment. They will upgrade the quality of work in many occupations and offer myriad opportunities for small-scale, independent and decentralized forms of production. Poor countries that are still in the agricultural age can now leap-frog into a post-industrial society, bypassing all the trouble of the industrial revolution. The utopists also predict that ICTs will strongly reinforce current processes of democratization in many countries. The increased access to information flows will undermine official censorship and empower movements in civil society. And they disagree with those who worry about scenarios of worldwide cultural homogenization; they see the emergence of new and creative lifestyles, vastly extended opportunities for different cultures to meet and understand each other. They foresee the
creation of new virtual communities that easily cross all the traditional
borderlines of age, gender, race and religion. And it is obviously true
that ICTs can perform tasks that are indeed essential to democratic and
sustainable social development. They can provide low-cost, high speed,
worldwide interactive communications among large numbers of people,
unprecedented access to information sources, alternative channels for
information provision that counter the commercial news channels, and can
support networking, lobbying and mobilizing. There is also an environmental advantage in such developments. As the World Commission on Environment and Development noted in its report, Our Common Future, decentralization of industry reduces levels of pollution and other negative impacts on the local environment. Another important digital advantage is the relative ease with which new public spaces can be created in cyberspace. Through digital networks, new global communities are being established. Increasingly, organizations in developing countries are integrated into these webs of horizontal, non-hierarchical exchange that have already proved themselves able to counter censorship and disinformation. Members of ecological movements and women’s organizations, human rights activists, senior citizens and many other groups have made impressive use of digital technology. The growing ICT demand in developing countries finds expression in long waiting-lists for telephone connections, growing use of cellular systems and expanding numbers of Internet users. To meet this demand, consideration of ICTs is increasingly becoming an integral part of national development agendas. In fact, there is currently a phone frenzy in the developing world. The planned increase in telephone lines within the Third World for the next five years will require some $200 billion in investments. This is expected to be achieved largely through a massive inflow of foreign capital. And to encourage the latter, countries are deregulating and opening their markets for equipment manufacturers and service providers. The realization of the digital advantage that ICTs can offer requires, however, that some serious problems are addressed. Access to the digital advantage requires access to electricity. A serious problem is that in many rural areas energy is unavailable or very limited in supply. In many urban areas, the provision of electricity is highly unreliable. With an expanding use of ICTs, energy requirements will only increase and will require planning and budgeting for electrification and such alternative energy sources such as solar power. The extent of telecommunication grids is very limited in most of the developing countries. There are 1 billion telephones in the world and the 48 least developed countries have some 1.5 million of them. Some 15 per cent of the world’s population has access to over 70 per cent of the world’s telephone lines. More than 50 per cent of the world’s people have never made a phone call. The costs of providing adequate telecom infrastructures are considerable and cannot be met by national budgets alone. Is the international community ready to provide the massive investments needed for the expansion of networks in developing countries? By way of illustration, it would take some $12 billion to get 50 per cent of the Philippine population on the Internet. To increase teledensity from 0.46 lines per 100 inhabitants to 1 per 100 in Sub-Saharan Africa would require an investment of some $8 billion. Investments are also needed for the digital upgrading of most of the analog, copper-wired networks in developing countries. In response to the challenge of the info-telecom gap, many public and private donor institutions — including the World Bank, the International Telecommunication Union, the Teledesic Corporation, AT&T, Siemens, Alcatel, and the United States Agency for International Development — have designed initiatives to provide telecom connections to Third World counties. Apart from the question of whether there will be sufficient funding for all these plans, they also raise the critical issue of the appropriateness of the technologies transferred and the capacity of the recipient countries to master them. Throughout the past decades, the prevailing international policies on transfer of technology have erected formidable obstacles to the reduction of North-South gaps. And there is no indication that the current restrictive business practices, the constraints on the ownership of knowledge, and the rules on intellectual property rights that are adverse to developing country interests are radically changing, nor are the relations between the ICT-rich and ICT-poor countries. When energy and telecom infrastructures are in place, there are still the costs of actual usage of ICTs to address. In order to meet these expenses, taxation and subsidization strategies are needed that allow individuals and institutions to access digital networks. The effective operation of ICTs also requires a whole range of skills and adequate mechanisms for training in these skills. Technical skills are needed for the maintenance of hardware, the modification of software and the manufacture of electronic goods. Managerial skills are essential to the operation of networks, information systems and databases. Information skills are crucial to the processing of all the information made available through the ICTs. This needs planning and funding of extensive educational programmes. It also needs to be realized that national efforts to attain the digital benefits are part of a global environment. Scope and direction of national ICT-strategies are strongly influenced by the emerging global system of governance for the information-communication sector. The bottom line of this system proposes that the deployment of ICTs should predominantly be a matter of market relations. Global policy making addresses primarily the removal of all obstacles that might stand in the way of the unhindered operation of the major ICT investors on markets around the world. A landmark in deregulatory policies is the World Trade Organization’s telecom agreement of early 1997. The agreement requires signatory countries (68 countries that represent 98 per cent of the $600 billion telecom trade) to liberalize their markets to foreign competition. The agreement has seriously compromised the chances for universal network access as national policies may be considered anti-competitive if Governments intervene in the market to guarantee universal service. In the present system of global governance, the interests of industrial countries and transnational corporations are usually better served than the prospects for developing countries. A more adequate representation of all the parties affected by global governance needs to be attained if ICT advantages are to be equitably shared. The most immediate challenge for national governments and the international community is the insight that the use of ICTs for sustainable development will not be determined by technological developments, but by political decisions. The realization of the digital advantage requires creative styles of governance that are not merely inspired by visions of digital benefits, but also address the serious obstacles which hinder attaining the digital advantage. For national governments and the international community, this implies the design of policies that leave the realization of ICT-potential not exclusively to market interests, a substantial allocation of public funding for the costs of accessing and using ICTs, and a massive effort in human resource training for the mastery of ICT-related skills. It would seem appropriate — in the context of the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — to emphasize that the deployment of ICTs should be primarily guided by respect for such universal standards as human security, autonomy and equality. The most perplexing question ICT strategists may face is whether such people-centered ideals can be achieved in a global order that is increasingly directed by market-centered realities. A New Web-to-Email Gateway Helps Low-Bandwidth Users Katherine Morrow In Africa, Internet users pay an average of US $60 per month for 5 hours of dial-up access (Jensen, December, 1998). With existing infrastructure (slow modems, bad phone connections), it can take those same users up to half an hour to load a single page of information from the World Wide Web (Africa Recovery, December 1998). In January, Bellanet launched a Web-to-Email gateway for Internet users who are prevented from surfing the Web by technological or institutional barriers. In its first week of operation the gateway server sent out 14,816 Web pages by email to users who have no practical way of accessing the Web. Web-to-Email is an automated service which will fetch a document from the Web and send it back to the user in an email message. About 15 servers worldwide currently offer Web-to-Email free of charge. These servers, including one run by IDRC's Unganisha Project, are frequently overloaded with requests, leading to long waits and frequent crashes. Bellanet's Web-to-Email server will help to ease the pressure. The server runs on the Linux operating system using www4mail software. To use the service, send an email message to www4mail@web.bellanet.org. Leave the subject line blank, and in the body of the message, type the URL (a Web address beginning with http://) of the document you wish to retrieve. You will receive the document by return email. This is an example of a leading edge application that is geared to the needs of Internet users at the lower end of the technology scale. Bellanet is always looking for innovations that allow people to overcome technological and cost barriers, in order to close the information gap between rich and poor. For more information, contact Michael Roberts, Senior Technical Officer, Bellanet. email: mroberts@bellanet.org Are Developing Countries on the Brink of a Digital Abyss? Venkatesh
Hariharan TimesComputing This article outlines five powerful trends that can be harnessed by developing countries. In themselves, each of these trends are insignificant, but together, they are like five fingers that pack a punch when transformed into a fist. As these trends unfold over the next five to ten years, nations that are smart and wise enough will harness them to create a powerful impetus for development. So the following is a picture of what can be, given sufficient political foresight and leadership. These trends also represent an enormous market opportunity. Information technology is a revolution, but only for 10 percent or even less of the world's population who have ever used a computer. Inspite of the fact that less than 10 percent of the world's population has ever used a computer, the IT industry is worth a trillion dollars, maybe more, every year. If these technologies effectively address the other 90 percent of the digital age, the computer industry could be in for the most explosive growth phase in its history. The first and the most immediately visible trend is the rapidly falling price of PCs. For $500 (Rs.21,250), I can walk across to my neighborhood Microcenter store and pick up a PC that's far superior to my old Pentium 133 on which I spent close to $1,800 (Rs. 80,000) over a period of four years. By the end of 1999, some analysts expect this to fall to a low of $200-300 (Rs.8,500-12,750). At these price points, the number of users who can afford a computer increases dramatically. That one trend alone is enough to exponentially increase the size of the PC market, but the story doesn't end there. A new generation of computing devices, like 3Com's Palm Pilot and Microsoft's Windows CE based handhelds are now emerging. These devices have more limited capabilities than the PC but are available at much lower price points. For instance, there are labs at MIT which are working on information appliances that will cost a mere $25 (Rs.1,062) and allow you to surf the Internet. For developing countries of the world, where the average per-capita income is a meagre $277 (Rs.11,772) this is a very encouraging development. Once people have these computing devices, what can they do with it? The value of any computing device multiplies a thousandfold if you can connect it to the Internet to access information. That's where the ‘Internet in the sky’ Teledesic project and other satellite telephony projects, wireless and cellular technologies will change the landscape. As the price of telephony comes down, it will be possible to connect a village in the middle of a desert in Rajasthan or a village on top of the Himalayas to the rest of the world at an affordable cost. For example, Grameen Telecom in Bangladesh is using cellular telephones to wire up around 2000 villages by the end of 1999. And the interesting thing that's been seen time and again is that the moment you connect villagers through information and communications technologies, the first thing they do is call up the markets to check the prices of their produce. In Chile and Mexico and the Philippines, farmers have been able to improve their profitability by around 15 percent because they could access the latest prices in the world markets. That, in itself, is an incredibly empowering tool. Another great leveler for developing countries could be Internet telephony. Today, if I have to send an e-mail to Boston or to Bombay, it makes absolutely no difference to me because the cost of both are the same. But if I have to make a phone call to Bombay, as compared to making a phone call within Boston, I have to think several times because a call to Bombay costs me 60 cents a minute. I recently logged onto Microsoft's NetMeeting which is distributed free with Internet Explorer. NetMeeting allows an user to speak or even see other Internet users who have a microphone or a camera attached to their computer over the Internet. I ended up speaking to a guy in France who had been using NetMeeting for two months for--of all things--selling refrigerators to South Africa. He said that he communicated with his customers in South Africa over the Internet because phone calls to South Africa were too expensive for a small businessman like him. That's an example of a business that could just not exist without the Internet. And even as we speak, people are racing to wire up the world with high bandwidth fibre-optics over which voice would be just another form of data which can be sent as we send e-mails today--without worrying about geographies. Making cheap telephony available to the masses can throw open the doors for economic development but unfortunately Internet telephony is banned in India. Speech technology is another advancement that holds out great hope, when one considers the fact that between 30-40 percent of India's population is illiterate. The great thing is that even the $500 PCs of today are good enough to handle speech technology. The last trend is the growth of the open source movement, which allows users to freely copy and modify software programs. Since most software programs are developed in the US, when their cost is converted from dollars to rupees or takas or any other currency in the developing world, they are usually unaffordable. Open source software like the Linux operating system (which competes with Microsoft Windows and others) does away with that problem because it is free. It's no wonder that the government of Mexico decided to use Linux in 140,000 elementary and middle-school computer labs. Wired magazine estimated that the Mexican government would have saved $124 million by avoiding proprietary software. The $200 PC, new communications technologies, Internet telephony, speech technology and open source software are all coming together in a powerful combination. But will the politicians and policy makers in developing countries use them to punch the hell out of persistent poverty? Information Poverty: India's New Challenge Venkatesh
Hariharan Will information technology end up creating the equivalent of India's deeply divisive caste system in the 21st century? In the heyday of India's pernicious caste system, the Gayatri mantra was considered as the path to nirvana. The catch was that only the Brahmins knew the mantra they would not impart it to any other caste. Salvation was thus a monopoly of those who were lucky enough to be born into the right caste. Out here in Boston, the manner in which talk of computers and the Internet segues into every conversation, it is easy to believe that the whole world is close to attaining some form of digital nirvana. But when I go onto a popular search engine like Altavista and do a reality check, the facts are shocking. On Altavista, I can search the Internet even in Estonian, a language spoken by 1.4 million people while Hindi which is spoken by around 400 million people is not even listed there. And don't even dare to ask about the other 17 official Indian languages or any one of the innumerable dialects spoken by around 700 million Indians. (Here, I am assuming that around one fourth of Indians use Hindi as a second language.) The Altavista example is a perfect illustration of the vast schism between the urbanised, westernised, English speaking middle class of India and the rural, Indian language speaking parts where the vast majority of Indians live. Because most of information technology, and software in particular, was developed in the English speaking world, all of us who know English and use computers have become, unwittingly, the brahmins of the digital world. At this point, it would be worthwhile to stop for a moment of self-introspection. How did it happen that the national language of an aspiring ‘software superpower’ finds no place at all on one of Internet's most popular search engines while a country, whose population is smaller than that of Mumbai's is listed prominently? The answer is a sad tale of how science and technology in India often delivers very little benefits for the common man. The fact is that all the necessary conditions for an infotech revolution that truly touched the masses have existed in India for decades. Academic and research establishments have been working on Indian language scripts for the computer for several years. We were one of the first countries to climb onto the Internet bandwagon when the Education and Research Network was started in 1986. Yet, for reasons that I would like to understand better, they were unable to champion the use on a much larger scale. But, why is this an issue worth making a hullabaloo about? Because it is an issue that affects the other 95 percent of India that does not speak English. This means that theoretically, out of India's population of 966.7 million, around 918 million Indians cannot use a PC because popular operating systems are not available in any of the official Indian languages. Add all the other issues like low purchasing power, poor PC penetration and telephone density and the minuscule number of Internet users and its easy to see why these 918 million Indians are going to be the outcasts of the digital age. Not that India is alone in the world. For the 5.5 billion people who live on planet Earth, there is an installed base of around 360 million PCs, which gives us a rate of 65 PCs for every thousand people. However, these figures are heavily skewed towards the developed countries of the world. In the US, this figure is as high as 450 per thousand while in India, it is an abysmally low 1.1 per thousand. The number of computers in most African countries is lesser than those in India. And even if computers became cheap enough, there are innumerable obstacles to be overcome before they are all connected to the Internet. More than two-thirds of the world has never made a phone call. Microsoft's Windows operating system is available only in around 30 of the 6,000 languages that exist in the world. So, what PCs and the Internet do is democratize that thin, elite layer of the world that is fluent in English... a global digerati that is westernized and at home anywhere in the English-speaking world. They are the brahmins of the new world order. That would have been acceptable in a world where the information technology was the preserve of the tiny band of nerds but not any longer. The Internet has rapidly evolved into a media that encompasses commerce, information and entertainment. In Japan, for example, information related activities are a large component of the overall economy and local sources estimate their contribution to be 41 percent of economic output! The world's IT industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world and the annual trade in computer products and services is a whopping $600 billion. (So, just imagine the magnitude of the market if even one percent of the other 99 percent of the digital age could be brought into the infotech revolution.) It is estimated that revenue generated by the interactive information industry could well reach $3.5 trillion worldwide by the year 2001. Exclusion from this world will therefore create a new class of untouchables; those who live in what can be called ‘information poverty’. So will information technology end up creating the equivalent of India's deeply divisive caste system in the 21st century? Unless drastic measures are taken, the ominous answer is ‘Yes’. If the so called ‘swadeshi’ BJP government wants to do something serious about making India an IT superpower, it should immediately smash heads together and hammer out a widely accepted standard for computing in Indian languages. It must also aggressively lobby with Microsoft to ensure that Microsoft delivers Windows 2000 in all/some of the 18 official languages in India. After all, how can a country that does not even have an operating system in its national language become a software superpower? Or rescue its population from ‘information poverty’? Information Technology: What Does it Mean for Scientists and Scholars in the Developing World A. Subbaih Information is key to the growth of knowledge, and dissemination of information is crucial for scientific enterprise. In pre-independent India, when scientists of the caliber of C.V. Raman, Meghnad Saha, J.C. Bose and S.N. Bose made their first-rate contributions to knowledge, the main vehicle for transmission of knowledge was the scholarly journal, and there were far fewer journals then than now. Scientists around the world were almost at the same level as far as accessing information was concerned. True, most journals were published in Europe and Raman and his Indian colleagues received the journal issues a few months later than their European colleagues – the time it took for the boat to cross the seas. Today there is a tremendous proliferation of journals and many of them, especially those published by commercial firms, are out of reach for libraries even in the West. It is heartening to know that the Association of Special Libraries in the United States is collaborating with like-minded societies to publish less expensive quality journals to save scientists from being held to ransom by greedy private publishers. The best academic science library in India, the one at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, receives only 1,562 serials, including the ones received gratis and on exchange. In contrast, in the United States and possibly Europe, many university libraries subscribe to upwards of 40,000 serials. Thanks to the rising value of the US dollar and pound sterling on international currency markets and dramatic increases in subscription prices of journals and databases, libraries in India and other developing countries have been forced to reduce the number of journals and secondary services they receive. Can I call myself a scientist? The situation in Africa is particularly bad. A Nigerian professor once told Seun Ogunseitan, the dynamic journalist turned information provider: “When you call some of us scientists, we laugh at ourselves. We know we can no longer make contributions to science. I do not know what my colleagues in Kenya or London have found, for example. So I cannot carry out an experiment and believe I am on the path to an original contribution to the sciences. If I have been giving generations of students the same notes for the past ten years, I should not call myself a scientist”. Ogunseitan continued, “Many people in our universities are not sure what is the state of science. Scientists often have to rely on what they are told, for example, by newspapers, by friends or by Time magazine. How can such people ever become authoritative and confident scientists?”. On top of this, many primary journals and secondary services have now gone electronic. Current awareness services such as Current Contents Connect, abstracting services such as SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts) and multi-disciplinary citation indexes such as the Web of Science are available on the Web, at a fee that most university and research laboratory libraries in developing countries cannot afford. An increasing number of primary journals are becoming accessible through password control on the Web. These include such all-time favorites as Nature, Science, and British Medical Journal. The house of Elsevier has made almost all its journals available through the Science Direct service. High Wire Press of Stanford University is hosting a long list of quality journals. Physicists have gone one step further; they circulate preprints through the Los Alamos e-Print archive long before they appear in print in refereed journals. This service, unlike subscribed journals, is absolutely free to anyone who can access it. Free it may be, but in reality most developing country scientists are excluded. To access information in cyber space, one first needs access to the corresponding electronic technology. Often, technology diffuses rather slowly, and even today most scientists and scholars in developing countries do not have access to the new information and communication technologies. As a result, the performance of researchers can be (and is) affected, not because they are poor physicists or chemists but because they are not connected to electronic information networks. Accessing information through CD-ROMs offers capabilit The Have-Nots and The Know-Nots Most developing countries, especially those with large populations, do not have the necessary infrastructure (computer terminals, networks, communication channels, bandwidth, etc.) to contribute as equal partners in the worldwide enterprise of knowledge production and dissemination. According to Bruce Girard, former director of Latin America’s community radio Pulsar, 95% of all computers in the world are in the developed nations; ten developed nations accounting for only 20% of the world’s population have three quarters of the world’s telephone lines. Teledensity in India is about 1.8 lines per 100 persons. Till 1994 it was less than one per hundred persons. In contrast, however, teledensity in the United states and Canada is more than 60 per 100 inhabitants. To make matters worse, most of India’s telephones are concentrated in metropolitan cities. Many scientists do not have a telephone on their desks. Those who have often cannot make calls outside their towns, let alone overseas. Many universities do not have email or Internet facilities. Some do have 1.2 or 2.4 kbps (kilobytes per second) connections. With such low bandwidths and poor terrestrial telephone connections, one can at best send and receive email messages but cannot surf the net or do on-line searches on the Internet. The simple truth is that the information superhighway is not bringing the fruits of cyber space to all. Not yet. The Indian universities have been talking about automating and computerising their libraries and have established an organization called the INFLIBNET but the progresss has been very slow. There are far too many people in the developing world who have not been touched by the information and communication revolutions. Take for example the Los Alamos e-Print archive for physics. Physicists at a few institutions in India – the Indian Institute of Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Institute of Mathematical Sciences are using this facility. But many physicists in leading universities such as the University of Delhi and University of Madras do not have access to Internet or email. In contrast, virtually every physicist in North America and the UK, will have high bandwidth access to the Internet. The relative disadvantage of developing country scientists becomes obvious. A growing number of journals, especially in the fields of science, technology and medicine, now receive and review manuscripts by email, and some journals are available only in electronic form. Editors of such international journals will naturally be reluctant to use referees from developing countries, even if they are extraordinarily competent in their fields, simply because it may be extremely difficult to reach them electronically. Nor for that matter will developing country scientists be able to publish their work in these electronic journals. The Knowledge Gap is Widening While the communication revolution is perceived as a liberating influence, what is most likely to happen is that in many developing countries (including India, I am afraid) scientists and scholars will be among the last to be reached by it. In India, for example, the stock market community has a network of its own with dedicated telephone lines, but a vast majority of scientists do not even have telephones on their desks. The relative disadvantage they suffer (in the matter of access to information and knowledge) will only increase. The number of institutions and individual scholars having access to email and Internet in developing countries and the rate at which this access has grown over time will support this contention. The speedy transition to electronic publishing will make it much easier for scientists and scholars in the developed countries to interact with colleagues and members of their invisible colleges. This is already reflected in the enormous increase in recent years in the percentage of papers resulting from cross-country collaboration involving authors from advanced countries (such as the G7, OECD and European Union countries). My major worry is that the low level of information and communication technologies in the developing countries would lead to the progressive exclusion of a majority of their scientists and scholars from the collective international discourse that is essential for active participation in all fields of research. Even now when much publishing takes place in print, participation by India and other developing countries in high impact journals such as Science, Cell, Journal of the American Chemical Society, is abysmally low. The already existing gulf in the levels of science and technology performed in the developed and the poorer countries will be widened further, and that could lead to increased levels of brain drain. In an earlier era, Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, a genius who had not gone through a conventional training program, was nurtured in the intellectually stimulating ambience of Cambridge University thanks to the foresight of G.H. Hardy. While such individual efforts may still help overcome obstacles on occasion, what is needed to overcome the current crisis is a far more organized and systematic program of action. Early introduction of satellite-based high-bandwidth Internet access to tertiary educational institutions and research laboratories at low cost and differential pricing for information (journal subscriptions and access to databases) to allow institutions throughout the developing world to obtain the most recent journals and most up-to-date databases are high on my agenda. Can Happen but Doesn't On both fronts, I am not happy with what is happening. For example, India can easily afford to invest in high-bandwidth Internet provision to the 100 or so cities and towns where most of the nation's research laboratories and universities are located. But this has not happened, although we go through the motions and give the impression of being serious. In the past two years there have been several initiatives. Some Indians at the Carnegie-Mellon University, have made a proposal on networking the academic and research institutions of India at a cost of a few million dollars. Several funding ideas have been considered, many committees involving eminent scientist and politicians have deliberated but there is little action on the ground. Some academics are talking about providing 2 gbps (gigabits per second) bandwidth! Some state governments, such as those in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, have entered into an agreement with WorldTel, a company managed by Mr. Sam Pitroda, who is largely responsible for making telephone services widely available to Indians, for making available public access Internet and email facilities in their states. With so many initiatives, one would expect the whole of India to be networked soon. But what is actually happening is disheartening. Different agencies in the telecom sector, which have to implement and deliver, are quarreling with one another. Indeed this is a characteristic of developing countries: it often takes far too much time for things to happen or to translate something from the realm of the possible to reality. As for differential pricing, both publishers of primary journals and database producers are reluctant to embrace such measures. In one rare exception, the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, offers Science Citation Index at 50% discount to most developing country subscribers. Even then it is perceived as too costly! Given these circumstances, I would not be surprised if very soon the gulf between the scientifically advanced nations and the others widens even further, reducing further the role of the developing countries in the enterprise of knowledge production, dissemination and utilization. Do I sound pessimistic? So did Toni Morrison. International IT Conference 1999 Colombo, 6-7 October, 1999 CINTEC, which functions under the Ministry of Science and Technology as the apex institution for promoting Information Technology (IT) in Sri Lanka, has decided to host the International IT Conference for the second successive year in Colombo. It will be followed by IT Vendor Presentations on 8 October 1999. Authors are invited to submit extended abstracts on any of the following topics. The papers should describe significant research and innovative applications related to the theme. Following topics are suggested: Data Base Technologies, Data Communications and Networking ; Multimedia and Hypermedia; Internet related technologies; Software Engineering; Social Aspects of IT; Electronic Commerce; Security, Privacy and Legal aspects; Telecommunications; Intelligent Systems; Information Systems Management; User Interface Design; Localization and Internationalization and IT Policy. Contact: IITC99, Council for Information Technology (CINTEC), No. 9 Clifford Avenue, Colombo 3, Sri Lanka Fax : 94 1 574799;EMAIL: postmast@cintec.lk http://www.cintec.lk/iitc99 Information Flows, Local Improvisations and Work Practice Cape Town, South
Africa The conference will focus on the role of information and communication, both IT and non-IT mediated, in supporting processes of socio-economic development. This will be addressed through three major themes: the nature of information flows; local improvisations; and work practices. The information flow between practitioners, researchers and policy-makers, NGOs and aid agencies in developing countries is of paramount importance to achieve results when implementing projects involving ICT. Too often, this flow is uni-directional or totally hindered, resulting in one-sided, often top-down attempts at deploying ICT for development. The literature is abound with stories of such ‘failures’. This conference instead, intends to focus on success stories, or at least guidelines for success. It has been made abundantly clear by several authors that solutions from the developed world cannot merely be implemented in the developing world with the expectation that results similar to that achieved elsewhere, would also accrue in the new context. Local adaptations or improvisations are necessary. Such improvisations are already taking place in many contexts, and we should try to understand the nature of it, and what we can learn from them for other situations. In the end, the information flows and information and communication technologies (ICTs) have to be meaningfully integrated with the work practices for them to be really useful. We have slowly realized that transformation of work practices is no trivial matter, and very often constitutes the final reason why ICT projects do not achieve their intended developmental results. Often, little respect is shown for existing work practices, and instrumental attitudes that guide implementation arrogantly expect workers to adapt to more ‘productive’ and ‘efficient’ practices. This view is limited because often in the process we tend to forget that development is all about people, and their well-being. Contributions are sought, but are not limited to, the following topics. Nature of Information Flows: Formal (computer-based) and informal information flows and their integration into decision-making processes in various developing countries contexts; Conventional systems of knowledge, showing the extent of local and indigenous knowledge in developing countries which should be integrated with or complemented by new sources of knowledge;. Spread and access issues related to information flows, clarifying the magnitude of the task to provide access to information to people in developing countries, including the issues related to actual meaningful use of such information. Information flows in particular application areas such as health, education, rural development, urban planning, etc. For example, how will telemedicine be practiced, and more fundamentally, what is the scope for tele-education in developing countries? Local Improvisations: Processes of local adaptation in particular contexts: By now we hopefully understand that one cannot simply implement what has worked in the developed world and expect to see the same results; How are these local adaptations planned and achieved? Interaction of the local with the global: Nobody intends for the developing countries to maintain a splendid isolation from the developed world. Yet they cannot simply conform to global standards; How should or can Infrastructure and local support: What pre-requisite infrastructure is required for certain ICT interventions, and what local support is required? The social, technical and cultural networks within which such initiatives can be initiated, maintaid and strengthened; Local structures - enabling and constraining influences: These local structures are there, and cannot just be wished away. How does one utilize their enabling influences and overcome the constraints they represent to new ICT initiatives for development? Work Practices: Traditions of Work: Contributions which describe traditional work practices and how they will have to be transformed, or why they would not be transformable are invited. Transformation of work practices - challenges and opportunities: Based on the traditions of work in developing countries, one has to examine the opportunities but also recognize the hurdles that will have to be overcome. How will this be supported? Role of NGOs, International Organizations and researchers, in transforming work: One cannot expect developing countries to just achieve all these difficult and often painful adaptations on their own. How can local and international organizations assist with this process? An abstract of 500 words to be submitted by 31 August 1999. Final papers to be received by 28 Feb. 2000. IIMA’s Training Programmes in Information Technology The following programmes will be conducted by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, during the next year. Directory Enabled
Network Management For enquiries:
Manager (MDA), IIM, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad 380 015, India. Phone:
79-6467825, Fax: 79-6423352, email: mdp@mdplan.iimahd.ernet.in Can information technology help ‘reinvent’ government? It can, but only if it is correctly managed. This book provides a new model for management of ‘information age reform’, based on a review of international experience. It offers practical guidance, analytical insights and detailed case studies. It will therefore be of value to practitioners, students, educators and researchers in both public administration and information systems. This book begins with a review of government reinvention and the contribution of information and information technology to that reinvention. The rapid spread of information age reform is charted. Ineffective approaches to reform used by many public managers are described, and contrasted with the effective, integrated approach used by a small minority. A model is developed to explain why information age reform initiatives succeed or fail. From this, a set of practical techniques for successful information age reform is identified, based on international best practice. These management insights are supplemented by more than a dozen in-depth case studies, drawn from the US, the UK, mainland Europe and developing countries. The studies cover all aspects of reform: efficiency, decentralisation, resource and performance management, ‘marketisation’, accountability and democratisation. An educator’s guide is provided for those wishing to use the cases as the basis of individual or group training. The Book has been
edited by Richard Heeks and published by Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane,
London, EC4P 4EE and, Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
in 1999. (ISBN No. 0-415-19037-1). |