Excerpts from an hour long
programme on Lok Sabha TV on bridging the digital divide in India, where yours
truly was invited.
Head Start
Lok Sabha TV
Nov 10, 2009
“Bridging the Digital Divide”
Panel discussion Participants- Shivanand Kanavi and
Dinesh Sharma
Host: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
Paranjoy- India
entered the new millennium with 1/3rd of the world’s computer
software engineers and 1/4th of the world’s poor. Can we bridge this
digital divide? Can IT benefit the poor and underprivileged in this country?
Let me welcome the guests.
I have here with me Shivanand Kanavi,
a theoretical physicist from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and then
studied in Boston; moved from a teaching and academic career into economic
consultancy and then to journalism and then to back to corporate sector and
currently Vice President, Special Projects at Tata Consultancy Services a
leading company of its kind in the country and author of a recently published
book Sand to Silicon. We also have Dinesh Sharma, Science Editor of Mail Today
has spent 25 years in the profession and author of the book, The Long
Revolution-the birth and growth of India’s Information Technology Industry.
Let us start the discussion on
to what extent IT has affected the life of the aam admi of this country?
Shivanand- To look at that lets first look at the basic
features that information technology has, the first thing is that information
technology has in certain areas increased human reach, human powers, we can go
into that in which way and so on later. Second thing is it has helped in cooperative
behaviours, collaborating / sharing things with others and communication so on
so forth, which all goes into co-operative, networked behaviours. The third
thing is as it creates a direct channel in a sense of communication between
various individuals there is a sort of delayering and disintermediation.
Paranjoy:
Explain what you mean by that…
Shivanand: It
is very similar to what a Bhakti movement did when it said that let there be
direct communication with God, why do we need go-betweens who can act as gatekeepers.
In every transaction in our society,
with government or with other individuals there are so many middle men. These
middle men can not only add to the cost and time for a transaction to take
place but also make life very asymmetrical and miserable for a citizen. You
have a culture in India, since several thousand years, at least going back as
far as Chanakya, where the state is supposed to do so many things. It is part
of its Rajadharma to do so many things for its citizens. Now if there are so
many middlemen in those services then a state becomes a highly oppressive instrument,
it doesn’t matter what the stated policy is. So if technology can help in
removing those middlemen and making things easier and faster for citizens, then
straight away everybody from poor to the middle class and rich will benefit, a lot
of transactions and services can be smoothened out.
Paranjoy - Shivanand has given a somewhat philosophical
answer to the question. May be you can give some examples
Dinesh: You
referred to the number of software engineers India produces and no of poor
people we have that is the digital divide. On one hand we have a generation
which is major user of all the digital devices and on the other hand we have
millions of people who have no access to them. Even before this whole concept
of digital divide and digital technology came, India did some experiments which
proved to be hugely successful; one of them was computerised railway
reservation that remains to my knowledge the largest application of information
technology, anywhere in the world till today. It’s not the question of somebody
using a computer or a mobile phone; it’s a question of how technology is
touching someone’s life. That is the technology diffusion that has taken place.
Today 17 million people travel by Indian Railways every day, so it is touching
the life of 17 million lives everyday. All three of us belong to a generation
of long queues, one train, and one window. You could not book onward journey or
return journey, you had to send telegrams. The amount of time someone spent
buying a railway ticket was almost equivalent to amount of time you travel by
the train, so the change from then to now is amazing. This process has started
in 1984 and it continued till 1999, 2005 it was connected to Internet. So it
remains to be the largest technology diffusion project of its kind till date.
Imagine 6 billion people travelling by train every year in India, so it is
touching the life of that many people.
As Shivanand said it has cut
down the cost, it has cut down the transaction time; it has cut down the intermediaries.
The other example is of course banking, it used to take 6 days or even more
than that for a local cheque to clear, 6 weeks for an outstation cheque to clear,
so all that has changed. The technology has changed the way services are offered.
Paranjoy - What
really changed in the mindset of employees who opposed the use computers in
Banks?
Shivanand -
There are several things involved in it, first of all you need the motivation
in the top leadership to actually implement a programme like this and communicate
with the employees and to all the stakeholders the benefits of this to the
banks and their customers. The employees have the stakes in the growth of the
banks, its survival, profitability etc and as well as their own personal growth.
Of course they have to assure them of job security which is the first thing you
would have to ensure. In India no project has been done successfully without
the implementer assuring the employee the jobs are safe. But then there is
something more than that, you are learning new skills. You are moving into a
different level of skills and technology and ability to do many more things
than you used to do before.
Paranjoy - Dinesh
do you agree with Shivanand?
Dinesh -
In any new technology project or introduction of new concept we do need a champion
at the top be it political leadership, be it a champion within an organisation,
so certainly agree with him. Again go back to the railways why there was
opposition in banking and why there was no opposition in Railways , the reason
behind this is the decision to computerise banking operations was taken at a
certain level and it was implemented in
that way. The process of Railways computerisation started with the involvement
of the employees, because the process itself was so complex. For example, there
were 200 categories of tickets and umpteen numbers of coaches and one had to
understand that. The company given the project was CMC. They had to sit and
spend time to understand from Railways clerks for hours and days together, and
make them a partner in the whole process.
Paranjoy - Shivanand, let us talk about the experiences of
say computerisation of land records in some of the southern states like
Karnataka, where I understand it has been done very well.
Shivanand -
I am not that familiar with this project though I know some of the features of
it, probably Dinesh can talk about it in detail. But I can tell you little bit
about another project that is currently sweeping India and has created a safety
net by the government for rural poor; that is NREGS. The whole question on
rural development programmes and poverty alleviation programmes has been like
what is the leakage through corruption? Does it reach the right people and have
any productive assets been created?
Paranjoy -
How has computerisation helped in National Rural Employment Guaranty Programme?
Shivanand - One
example is NREGS in Andhra Pradesh. One more general point I want to make is:
in these kinds of software projects, there is no a software package which is available,
a readymade solution in answer to XYZ requirements. Human beings, procedures,
and legacy issues all these need to be dealt with. It’s not even just automating
what exists. What exists can be highly anachronistic, because we have as legacy
essentially colonial state machinery; its procedures, rules and so on designed
in the 19th century! So it may not be desirable to automate it. So
you need to do what is called re-engineering. It would mean the deep
involvement of the administration at all levels, at the Panchayat level or the
Mandal Panchayat level; who is going to enter the data; how he is going to
evaluate a project; how he would evaluate the progress in the project and how will
he differentiate between say digging in soft soil and a rocky area, when the
two are very different. All these nitty-gritties have to be configured into
your system. So it has to be a co-developed system. It’s not something which a
software company has readymade. For example, Dinesh discussed how the railways
were involved in the computerisation. There were so many complexities. At the
end of the day, once you do a successful project in India you can do anything
anywhere in the world!
Paranjoy:
Let me raise another issue. Even if there are some success stories why are we
not able to replicate that success elsewhere?
Dinesh - A
few years back a survey was done on all kinds of ICT or eGovernanace projects
that are going on in the country. At that time the count was 300 or so and they
were in different pockets, like Bhoomi in the whole of Karnataka, Friends in
Kerala, others in AP, Tamil Nadu and North. It was found in that survey only
15% of them have been successful in their objective, 35% partially failed. So
that was the kind of assessment of these projects. The problem is for any
eGovernanace or citizen interface government project to succeed, we need three
things: First willingness to reform, because you are bringing a new system,
there is no point in computerising existing forms and putting them on the web,
that is not e-governance, that is not going to solve the problem and it might
even complicate it. So there should be willingness to reform the existing
system without that e-governance cannot succeed. Second is availability of
technology, you might need to develop software, you need to have a hardware
particularly designed for that project and so on for example, in Bhoomi they
tried Bio-metric technology for first time on such a large scale since many cannot
enter a password. The data, Land records should be available only to certain
people and their bio metric data was needed. This technology was specially
developed for Bhoomi project. So the availability of hardware, software and
technology is needed to execute these projects.
Paranjoy - What
is preventing us from scaling up such successful projects? Why are others not
repeating it? Is it lack of political will or resources?
Shivanand - As
far as resources are concerned I don’t think that is a constraint now, especially
with the kind of 8%-9% growth we have been seeing, the Government should have
enough resources to implement large projects. But as you said even though it is
a cliché that ‘political will is required’ it definitely plays a major role in
government projects and especially when the project deals with systems where
there is scope for corruption. For example, in Andhra Pradesh there was
government tendering and procurement, when that was IT enabled; put on the web
with no complicated tendering process; e-auction, reverse auction etc then there
was a serious campaign in certain sections of the media against it and against
the political leadership. So things can get politicised immediately because
there are vested interest involved
Paranjoy -
So media was acting on behalf of those vested interests?
Shivanand -
Some sections yes. As you know in many areas media houses are controlled by Politians.
So there were serious allegations and slander and all kinds of things going on.
But in the face of all this resistance, when the government went ahead, there
was advancement. Another important thing is the transparency that Information Technology
has brought in, which has prevented excuses like, “we cannot locate the file”
etc.
Dinesh - One
point I wanted to add on why it succeeds in one place and not in another. It depends
a lot on the capacity of the administrative machinery to manage and absorb the
change. The states which have very good administration, I would put most of the
southern states in the category, are also leaders in the good deployment of e-governance
Paranjoy - Vested
interests has also become a cliché. Who are these vested interests? How can
they be eliminated?
Dinesh - Vested
interests can vary from project to project. Suppose a municipal body like BMC or
MCD wants to put up a list of illegal constructions in Delhi or in any other
city location wise, which is a simple transparency measure that any municipal
body can take. But no municipal authority has been able to do that because of vested
interests of councillors, MLAs or politicians or even big industries. So there are
wasted interests depending on project to project
Shivanand -
I will give you another example: the very simple case of garbage collection in Mumbai.
The population in Mumbai produces thousands of tons of garbage everyday now
there are close to 2000 garbage trucks which are involved in it and a lot of
them belong to private contractors. Despite all these systems you find garbage
lying in all kinds of places and citizen complaints. So when it was
investigated it was found that there are many contractors who never did those
trips but collected money from Municipal Corporation. So how are you going to
track these trucks. There was a solution which was implemented using GPS
system- Geographical Positioning System. That can really track the truck, which
route it has taken, how much time it has taken, how many times it has gone
around etc.
Dinesh - The
same technology was also proposed to FCI – Food Corporation of India trucks
which supply food grains to the pubic distribution system. When trucks go out
of FCI godowns, you can simply track them with GPS, however it was never allowed
to work!
Paranjoy –It
is easier to pay bills, book tickets on the Internet etc., however technology is
still impacting a very small number of people. Is that correct?
Shivanand -
Yes, but at the same time the numbers of beneficiaries is increasing and it is
increasing at a very healthy rate, I would say. Even though India has had computers
and software engineers for more than 50 years, it is only in the last 10 to 15
years that widespread adoption of this technology is happening in our society, particularly
with respect to government, markets, financial services sector, in banking
sector etc. So today we have what Gunnar Myrdal once called ‘the revolution of rising
expectations’. We can’t even imagine today the earlier situation! For example, before
computerised stock trading came into the picture back in 1994, how were the
stock exchanges operating? There were cases of fraud, there was no transparency
but today we want higher and higher transparency, and all kinds of mechanisms
to prevent frauds, bring in as many new people as investors and brokers, make
it easier, make it more accessible to even small towns and so on so forth
through VSAT and satellite technology, otherwise a few brokers used to control
entire stock trading and all this has happened in less than 15 years
Paranjoy – We
have 3 computers per hundred population and US has one out of two. There is
such a low level of Internet penetration. Don’t you think Dinesh the use of
technology has not benefited common man as it should have? There is a clear
digital divide.
Dinesh -
When we talk of digital technology let’s not get fixated with computers; the
concept of personal computers cannot be applied to India. Here computer is not
personal that is why the whole concept of kiosks came in, where you don’t need
to own a computer but still you can get benefitted by a service that is being offered
through internet or a use of computer. I don’t think we need to replicate the
western model of one computer per child. Let’s move away from that. Because we
have 450 million mobile phones today and the power of at least 100 million of
them is as good or much better than your computer. So what we need are
applications that run on these mobile phones. It’s not just for voice or
texting but we need more and more applications on mobile rather than getting fixated
with computers.
Paranjoy -
Can we expedite the process of IT usage?
Dinesh -
We have moved very slowly, there are many projects which are moving very
slowly. Everything is not what we would like it to be but compare that to what
has happened in NREGS where they are issuing smart cards, money is getting
transferred to their account etc. The difference is that many projects have to
deal with legacy systems and procedures which we have been working from past
100 years. It’s very difficult to change the legacy system. It involves both
the mindset and processes involved. For example you need a signature, an emblem
etc. all that can be solved. Technology has a solution for everything and you
can get as good a birth certificate as you would normally get as a handwritten certificate.
But it’s a question of how do you change a mindset and how do you change those
legacy processes in the system, that is the biggest challenge
Paranjoy – Where
have been successful in coping with the past, the legacy Shivanand?
Shivanand -
Any large system, affecting a lot of people, employees as well as citizens is a
real life exercise in change management, for example take the State Bank of India.
I mentioned that because SBI is probably the largest bank in the world, in
terms of number of branches--with its associate banks it has close to 14000 branches
where as the largest banking group in the world is Citi Bank and Citi Bank has
all over the world less than 3000 branches! So when you need to connect
branches for anytime banking and anywhere banking and not just going to a
particular branch and opening those ledgers, then you need to create a single central
database and connect all the branches to it, all the ATMs to it and so on so
forth. One could be in Ladakh, or backwaters of Kerala on a boat etc but one
should be able to access one’s account. Dinesh already mentioned the Railway Passenger
reservation system, see now what is happening in India Post.
Paranjoy - Would
you like to talk about telemedicine, Dinesh?
Dinesh -
when we talk about the application of digital technology that’s where we can
bridge the digital divide like you have a combination of internet put it with
satellite technology and some add on hardware on both the side specifically
developed for that project and then you can have a very nice telemedicine project.
Kerala has been successful; again they all are in pilot scale. There by you are
able to solve a problem of connecting a specialist as well as doctors in rural
areas. Not only in consulting but even follow-up. For example, somebody comes
to AIIMs for surgery he needs to follow it up after 15 days to 2 weeks or 3
weeks he has to make 3-4 visits to AIIMS only for that, so surgery can be done
at AIIMS but the follow up can be done where the person is through
telemedicine. Telemedicine has undergone a whole lot of change now you have video
conferencing facilities, you can connect anybody to anybody. We need slight
changes in systems and we can work on that. This has been demonstrated already.
For example, in Rajasthan in Indira Gandhi Canal area, where malaria is on the
rise, where there are very few testing labs. So samples have to travel from
once place to another and it takes 2-3 days. Now there is a technology where
you can do the diagnosis there itself and convey the results or an x-ray can be
taken and sent through a mobile phone the images can be transferred to
radiologists in the city. So these all are simple applications but we need to
work on that. Again hospitals are legacy systems, how do you change them? That
is the biggest challenge. You cannot have telemedicine centre working on its
own it has to be integrated with existing healthcare system
Paranjoy – Shivanand
do you want to add to that?
Shivanand:
Yes. I want to add another aspect of healthcare i.e. healthcare management and
not just telemedicine based consultation. How do you network the hospitals, how
do you create a database of patients? A positive example in this regards is the
Arogya Shree scheme in AP. Literally millions of people below poverty line are covered
by it. A person who has a serious medical problem goes to a nearby project centre
and shows his card and through the IT system they can find out which hospital is
the best to deal with this and where beds are available etc. They are just
using a keyboard and mouse to do this. Instead of running from pillar to post,
paying the bill and trying to recover it through reimbursement, all this is
just a cashless transaction. So that’s a success. So I think using IT to make
efficient public health is also important.
Paranjoy -
How can information technology help the poor from our society?
Shivanand -
With all this technology we are still trying to provide services and include in
the economic growth about 200 to 300 million of our population. IT is helping
in including these by breaking the silos and letting services flow from
government to citizens as well as creating some cooperative networks amongst
these 200 to 300 million people. This is a huge challenge, because 300 million
is entire population of United States!
Technology will not address on
its own how the rest, 700 or 800 million people can be added to this inclusive
growth. That’s why you see a chunky growth, certain sectors would advance fast
despite the fact that the roads are bad etc. Telecom is a classic example, nobody
envisaged 10-15 years back that 500 million mobile phones would be there in
India and today we have them and all kinds of people are using them. If the 450
to 500 million figure is correct, then nearly half the population has mobile
phones and that is obviously an advance in technology application despite bad
roads, and education and the whole social sector being poor. Including 700-800
million people is a much deeper question, which has to do with the structure of
our economy, I don’t think information technology can address that. IT can help
in managing certain things for eg- I remember a well-known politician asking in
2001, “Yeh IT, YT kya hai?” He said if there is drought how IT is going to
bring rain. The answer is, IT can help you in drought management and relief
management, it cannot bring rains, it cannot fundamentally improve agriculture
in that sense. After all, IT is information technology so it can give you
information.
Dinesh -
I feel the growth we have achieved here is lop-sided. We have been talking
about 450 million mobile phones but that could be in just 2-3 metros and other
developed areas. So I would still say this growth is lop sided, there are
several hundred villages in India without a village telephone at all. So there
is a certain obligation. We have the Universal Service Obligation fund, which
has been created which not been spent, so government is still to do its part
since money is coming from private operators so the growth is lop-sided whether
its mobile telephony, whether its services reaching out to the people for eg-
Bhoomi is useless for landless labour, what record it’s going to find? Of
course IT has touched lives of several millions of people but still there are
lot of people which are not included in this. So we need to look at innovative approaches,
innovative applications of different forms technology which are available. One
example I gave was of healthcare sector if there is phone with village level
worker she can collate all the data and data can travel faster to nearest
healthcare centre and health care can reach the village. There are several
applications like that. For example, you don’t need to send your soil for
testing in agriculture centre in district, there are sensors which you can put
in the soil which don’t cost much and data can be transported through the
mobile phone. Then you can know how much fertilizer you should apply, there are
applications like that which are not very costly
Paranjoy - Would
internet on mobile or 3G impact lives of people?
Shivanand -
I think yes. Broadband is going to provide rich content to reach people and in no
way landlines or cables are going to provide that. The broadband has to come
wirelessly. So any new development, whether it is 3G whether it is WiMax or 4G,
all these new technologies are coming. Whichever proves affordable and
replicable on large scale is going to make a big difference.
Another example which I wanted
to give you is a technology application that can include many more people who
are not yet in this 300 million. It is a technology for literacy, which was
developed with a lot of inputs from linguists, psychologists and computer
scientists. It is called a Computer Based Functional Literacy module. It uses
discarded computers. It does not need high powered computers and within 40
hours it can teach an adult illiterate enough to help their children in
homework, people who could not read and write have been able to read news
papers and help their children in home work. The thing is to replicate it and the
estimate is that within next 5 years we could make entire India functionally
literate
Dinesh -
People say that when we don’t have electricity in villages how people are going
to use computers so there are paddle powered computers. Innovations exist!
Paranjoy – Shivanand
in your book Sand to Silicon you have written about Amar Bose, Sam Pitroda,
Arun Netravali and literally dozens of eminent Indian technologists who have
contributed so much towards the growth of digital technology all over the
world. Do we see brain gain happening instead of brain drain with the diaspora?
Shivanand - I
think it’s bound to happen and it has already happened in the last 15-20 years
and there has been a great amount of interaction between Indians who are abroad
and Indians working in India especially regarding digital technology or
information technology. Fundamentally, these are not the days of Thomas Alva
Edison or Graham Bell, where one guy would sit in a lab and who could develop a
technology. Now any new technology goes through networks of thousands of people
all over the world so you can’t even call it Indian technology or American technology
or Chinese technology. People have to collaborate and that is the reason that
you have so many companies where their front end is in Silicon Valley with their
R&D being done in India and similarly there are Indian companies which are
making use of the research being done elsewhere whether it is pharma industry
or digital technology industry, information technology industry. These changes
in the world have led a kind of circulation of ideas and what Tom Friedman called
the Flat world, at least in this field.
Paranjoy – We
live in a highly unequal world so are we seeing the world really becoming flat?
Or was Mr Thomas Friedman engaging in hyperbole, to put it mildly.
Dinesh -
Mr. Friedman was looking at the way the technology has flattened the delivery
of services like you buy a MacDonald’s burger in Los Angles and the back office
processing taking place in Egypt or somewhere else. In that sense he gave the
idiom of the world is getting flat.
Paranjoy: But
are we becoming a nation of cyber coolies with body shopping or knowledge
workers? Of course I am using exaggerated expressions.
Dinesh: There
is no doubt that we have good base of knowledge workers and all the large
corporations including big companies like TCS who themselves are a MNC, are
seeking knowledge workers wherever they are. Companies and people would go
wherever there is a comparative advantage in terms of talent which has become a
very important resource and in that sense the world has become flat. We have an
advantage of numbers and we have to see how we can add that to our economic
growth
Shivanand - In
the world of knowledge, in the world of technology, I think the world has
become flat and not in other aspects. If you are comparing farmers in Tanjavoor
and farmers in California or in Canada then it is not flat. However the point I
am making is Satyen Bose had to write a letter to Einstein and wait for months
together for a reply when he had worked out a new statistics for photons and that
is not necessary in today’s world.
Paranjoy: Now
it can be done in a fraction of a second through email. I get your point. We
have run of time. Thanks Shivanand and Dinesh for coming to our studios and
sharing your views. The consensus is IT has changed in some ways the lives of
ordinary Indians but surely it can do very much more. Thank you very much.
