The Threshold Theory: An Examination of the Developmental Promise of Information and Communications Technology in India

In two policy initiatives, Information Technology Action Plan (1998-99) and Information Technology for Masses (2000), the Ministry of Information Technology benchmarked 100 million Internet connections by 2008 as the goal for its ‘IT for All’ policy. This figure, pegged as the computation for universal access for a population in excess of one billion, forms the basis of the argument of this paper.

India presents a unique case among developing nations. While continuing to hug the lower rungs in most UN developmental indicators[1] India has managed to maintain a more than respectable rank in the world-wide technology race ever since Information Technology (IT) became a popular economic development buzzword. Alternating policy phases of laissez-faire and active government support coupled with an excellent training infrastructure and strong international expatriate networks have given the country a strong industry in software exports. This was facilitated and made time-efficient by the entry of Internet technology, which first penetrated major research centers, then technology corporations and technical universities and then the lives of upper class urban Indians.

A taste of rare affluence in global comparisons, after a lack luster tryst with industrialization, has created an attractive theory of an IT panacea – which holds the key to all of India’s chronic developmental problems. Egged on by remarkable growth and modernizations in several urban sectors in very short periods of time, this quick success and quick solution theory has been eagerly lapped by the Indian elite and the dominant media, as a proxy affirmation for India as a whole.

The media’s and the Indian Government’s hard-sell of an IT-savvy India has dominated the top-down development discourse. This has often been aided by the internationalization of the economic growth issue into foreign lands of expatriate riches and international demands for inexpensive communications and software technology exports. The growth potential of the sector notwithstanding, this ascendancy of the IT panacea forms a worrying study in contrast next to the uneasy reality of a majority of Indians not having access to blackboards or clean water and barely keeping over the poverty line. Is information technology a solution for development across the board? If not, then is it possibly a vehicle for the entrenchment of inequalities?

The Internet is the major communications medium of the IT-enabled economy, and one of the most significant ways in which end users find their lives changed by technology in their daily lives. The effects of the spread of the Internet among the various strata of the Indian populace – mostly the corporate and the upper and middle classes, to an extent school students, and in some cases even the village farmer - would differ vastly on account of three characteristics.

Comparative effects of differences in Location on urban and rural populations;

The difference in Education between higher educated English-speakers and middle school or lesser or uneducated non-English speakers and;

The difference in Economic Status between middle and lower income classes.

From the development perspective, the spread of IT can have two basic benefits: the primary one being the jobs created by the IT economy itself and the wealth generated by these jobs. Second, the use of IT as a welfare tool which can decrease the inequality in distribution of wealth. Policy makers studying the technological equity scrutinize how Internet Technology may be used either to reverse current levels of inequality or failing that – to prevent a severe Digital Divide.

India in the Information Society

Informationalism was a relatively unknown term ten years ago – an aberrant spelling to many. With the rise and continued growth of information networks worldwide, this new phenomenon, sometimes companion, sometimes rival, to the capitalistic economy has left an indelible mark on global political, economic and social systems, completely changing concepts of productivity, growth and competitiveness.[2] The term informationalism refers to the spread of information as the new parallel to capital in industry and the creation of an informational society, one in which information and its generation, processing and transmission become power and thus capital. The phenomenal growth of the network society has made it evident that knowledge is becoming the undisputed centerpiece of global prosperity[3] With more fluid ‘capital’ offerings, the information revolution is seen as the new consolidator to the power of the most developed nations and a new archetype for developing societies to aspire to.

The idea that the Internet embodies a technocratic belief in the progress of humans through technology[4] has at its heart a faith in the higher education system – organized or otherwise. This is certainly true of the present, where the less-educated have an exponentially lower access to the benefits than those with higher education. This idea is thus countered (or at least conjectured as having an incomplete definition of ‘humans’ and ‘progress’) by the development economist’s view that the development of higher education (and correspondingly information technology), when unaided by a parallel growth in elementary education leads to an overall detriment for the economy.

Apprehension over the development promise of new technology is often easily trashed – but the basis of this paper is that there is an essential difference between previous phases of development and the current era of informationalism. The key element is education, and the argument here is that there is a very strong exclusionary potential in the information economy where sectors like elementary education fall back (while contrastingly higher education gets stronger and better) to a point where entire generations will grow up with severely reduced scope of access to the informationalism-led development. This idea is partially fueled by research that education in India has in the past grown at higher levels while the concurrent sluggish growth in elementary education has increased inequalities in the post-independence era.[5] This indicates that putting a college within access of every major town is a catalyst for inequality given that schools in the vicinity of such colleges are clearly not at par, some not good enough to export students, some simply not present. This has inferable parallels to the technology revolution, which places countrywide wiring and technology training as at the vanguard of growth vanguard leading to the question, ‘What will the universal spread of information technologies do for the predominant majority of the Indian population – the Indian poor?’ Or, the question may be ‘What will this spread do to the Indian poor?’

However, there is no real evidence that the permeation of informationalism will culminate in a rigid class definition or a lop-sided development any different than the spread of capital-based entrepreneurship, nor is there an argument in this paper that such permeation should be checked. The doubt raised here is whether an illusory ‘IT for All’ myth has been created – if so, what are the possible consequences, and is there a possibility that ‘All’ can be redefined by geography, economy and education?

With a modernization phase that left India lagging behind most of the nations that it started at par with in 1947, there is undeniably great hope to be drawn from the information economy. Despite the generally low human development indicators, India has shown a very significant rise in comparison to other nations during the late 90s, when technological growth was highest on the national agenda. From 139^th among 174 nations in 1998 on the UNDP Human Development Index, India has risen to 124^th among 173 assessed nations in 2002. Indeed, this is a very persuasive argument in favour of Informationalism playing a role in the overall economic development rather than sectoral / net GDP improvement, further entrenching the informationalism elixir. There are shared qualities between capitalism and informationalism. Growth and rise in per-capita productivity has been directly linked to technological progress in industrial societies.[6] Technological progress, guided here by the rotation of ‘information’ capital, will spearhead growth in information societies. And although, the mark of a revolution would be its reach, and the precondition for a technological ‘revolution’ would be its characteristic pervasiveness.[7] Then do the rising human development indices signal a revolution – one which will spread in influence over all social classes. And if there isn’t a revolution so far, is one desirable? And regardless of desirability, if the influence of IT on all strata is inevitable, how can India prepare itself for it?

For India, the urban/educated and the rural/un(der)educated must be seen as distinct entities. With IT’s splashy entry into the economy, there was an expansion in jobs available – largely in the high-skilled sectors. But unlike industrialization, informationalism is not a does not support a mass labour-engine. Informationalism therefore is to be seen in a larger context as a change that permeates into the entire social and economic life. Seeking the job-creating power of informationalism studies requires an inquiry into whether there is the kind of labour force that is ready for climbing the launching pad, a labour force already equipped with the kind of skills that an information ecology will append . Ironically, the most logical choice for this class has been the underemployed urban educated in India, that suddenly found its English language skills and engineering training easily transplanted into extremely promising IT positions. For a revolution in the labour market, the urban middle-class mass needs to be replicated in economic and educational achievement in rural India – for these two factors, a nationwide lowest common denominator needs to be put in place. This means a true revolution necessitates a rural / urban poor population that has skills that can specifically benefit in an information, and perhaps place that population at reasonable par with a large portion of the general urban middle-class population in terms of opportunity. This is applicable across the board in all developing countries that have significant majorities that completely lack the opportunities, training or potential to gain the benefits of informationalism.

Paradoxically, the vast pool of underutilized intellectual resource that was an incredible asset in the entry of India into the information economy, now presents a new elite, because the India’s ‘vast pool’ of IT workers is not very vast in percentage terms within the Indian billion. Specific sectors of the India have these intellectual resources and the power dynamics of change that IT has wrought, also restrict themselves largely to those sectors.

It has been proposed that the shift to an information society can lead to middle-class economic insecurity and potential for crisis in the patriarchal state.[8] A strong case could be presented that India is both patriarchal and draws its political power primarily from its middle-classes – making it a prime candidate for potential crisis in the shift to an information society. India promises two different digital divides. An urban/semi-urban middle-class divide – a comparative disempowerment, that due to lower levels of education and economic status will be differentiated strikingly from the knowledge-empowered. The other, more phenomenal schism will rise potentially in the rural-urban digital divide, that between the Indian poor and the rest. The first digital divide is the face of urban struggle for resources and power between the technology haves and the ‘potential haves’ in an environment of high pressure on people to educate themselves in technology and find ways of incorporating it into their lives and livelihoods. The second – the urban-rural schism will simply form the new face of Indian poverty.

Proposing an ‘IT for All’ policy and to some extent implementing a number of programs at the rural level, the has been the Government of India’s plan of action for incorporating the disempowered into the information society. Whether these programs can actually reach significant numbers within the lowest two income brackets – comprising well over half of India’s population is very difficult to assess, but geographical and educational infrastructure give us a reasonably good idea of the blocks en route. This paper argues that the programs and the thought behind the programs do not serve their purpose, if they exist in a working capacity at all, and that a clear population threshold is being created, and that this threshold is reflected in the dividing line between those that the universal Internet access in India will reach, and those that it won’t.

The City

The development of California’s Silicon Valley and the much-touted Indian Silicon Valley in Bangalore raises another interesting theoretical point. What will the information society do to the Indian city? Bangalore may well dethrone Mumbai as the commercial capital of India, but this would be inconsequential, compared to an alternative possibility. We ask – why Bangalore? Or why any city at all? The example of the universal development of the Silicon Valley in creating one continuous suburbia[9] interspersed with technology parks indicates that the concept of traditional metropolises as centers of economic growth is not completely congruous with the information society. Capital investment in real estate chosen locationally is being made redundant to the working of firms in the information society, and the horrific example of Detroit as the ‘death of a city’ may not be an isolated instance relating specifically to the demise of one particular industry.[10]

This may well mirror in India – just as mills moved to outskirts, entire corporate offices may see little sense in running large operations from inner cities. Hi-tech centers in Bangalore and Mumbai, which exist in extremely high-cost urban centers thus run on the exact opposite model of what an information and network based firm could function best in. Locating in urban areas due to the lack of progressive facilities in rural areas is ironic, since a self-confessed goal of these urban industries is to facilitate expanded universal access. Thus with the goal achieved and universal development in place, the economies of locating in urban hubs will largely be obsolete. Judging from past research this question about the future of the city centers probably holds its worst consequences for the largely immobile urban poor, possibly faced by an exponential loss of urban blue collar work as industries and economies to shift out of cities.[11] But can the information society bring about the death of the metropolis in India, or will its peculiar developmental conditions simply extend the geographic realms of urban sprawls?

An information society in the right infrastructure would have has the potential to change the character of Indian urbanity, migration and empowerment by giving a larger proportion of the Indian population access to development. There is a Utopian school of thought, that the Internet revolution will resolve the problems of social inequality and poverty.[12] William Mitchell, another theorist with similar, though subtler prognostications believes that it is not necessary to first remedy social inequalities – a line of thought akin with the Indian state’s faith in technology. Mitchell is of the belief that there is no necessary dependence on any factor of a leveled starting point: development can come without the initial minimum educational equity.[13] The key to development will be what reactions to policies and new technologies will be, especially in the cities.[14] And yet, this is exactly where India poses such a complex problem – not only is the city not the center of its society, but that minimum educational equity is non-existent, making a comparison to industrialized societies uneven.

Perhaps then, there is more cause for cynicism. It has been argued powerfully that evidence showing poor communities to have significantly benefited from major technological change is very weak and extremely slow.[15]. It is difficult to present a reasonable argument that students in rural Indian schools will have, in the short-medium run, the same potential for inclusion into information society as those from poor urban schools. This, even if the two sets of schooling situations show similar economic characteristics – both in terms of mean income of parents (which is a reasonable possibility) and in terms of per student expenditure undertaken by the school (which is highly unlikely considering the dismally low per-student expenditure in rural areas).

One of the promises of informationalism is development aided by the death of distance, but how far is distance in India measured purely in terms of miles? With industrialized nations – a key factor is that the spread of IT into the rural space is aided by the universality of education. India, on the other hand, has its best-educated almost completely clustered in cities, and concentration of people and resources is so centralized in a few urban hubs, that moving any facilities outside of those vicinities is equivalent to building new cities. The apparent absurdity of IT firms locating in high rents hubs of Bombay and Bangalore is only theoretical – in reality, it makes a lot of sense.

The Internet user benchmark for 2008 in the ‘IT for All’ program was defined as 100 million. Given this view of ‘the city’ in India, this figure can be analyzed as more than just a rounded number indicating infrastructure capacity. [16] Using demographic data on the percentage of Indians with economic buying power in excess of US$2500 per annum juxtaposed alongside the percentage of Indians with school education or above sets a threshold of between 90 and 145 million Indians as the Indian upper and middle classes.[17] It becomes vital to investigate who these users will be, geographically, and how this 90-145 million elite will interact with the remaining non-users (assuming such a class is created) and therefore inspect where exactly the digital divide is drawn? In this paper, the suggestion is that the divide will be at the 100-million-connection threshold – and the number that so many Internet connections can service, separating them from the remainder of the technology-disempowered Indian billion.

Implementing IT for all in villages: an examination of issues of relevance and context

Since the late 1990s, as it became clearer that the Internet would play a large role, governments and international agencies started exploring ways in which it could be made accessible and relevant to underprivileged populations. The United Nations (UN) set up a pilot model for Internet access in developing nations in March 1999 in rural Egypt.[18] This model provides a cost-free introduction to communication technology to rural people, focusing on arousing curiosity among the youth and cultivating a new generation of users. A group of workers set up a browsing center, sent out word and then introduced surfing to clients. Following this, computers were left open for anyone to gain skills or experiment with. Besides being a basic introduction to IT, the UN project also aimed to use the Internet as a skill-enhancing and therefore job-prospect improving mechanism.[19] This model, commonly used in pilot projects all over the world (both by the UN and by other nations, including India) to examine employment and ‘connection-making’ abilities of the Internet, has one major caveat on the employment front (we will look at the connection-making, e-governance and information generating activities later in this paper). It considers the Internet to be a solution for underemployability as opposed to outright unemployment, or more specifically - unemployability in skilled sectors. This suggests that access to learning through the Internet will help enhance skills that would lead to employment for those with difficulties in getting jobs. It therefore implies that jobs are not present at a certain current level of education but may be found at a slightly higher level of education. The ‘slightly higher’ in this case mark the difference in attainment between one person with access to and use of the Internet and one without.

Placing this in an Indian context, there are broadly three classes of potential rural users that might find their way to these booths. First those with some university education, but more than high-school. Second, those with a high school degree (Class 10, in this case), third – those users with primary schooling or lower. Assuming the availability of, if necessary, a mediator between the user and the computer, each of the three would find different relevance to the Internet. This model of using the Internet for opportunities is clearly relevant to those with college education, and perhaps in a limited fashion to those with some secondary schooling. But there is practically no direct use of the Internet for the third category, or of comparable technologies.[20]

Data on literacy and educational attainments in India show that the average user would overwhelmingly have less than a basic school degree. Based on the density of colleges in India, the numbers of college degree holders are likely to be rare enough in the village to make any program for that group in villages economically unviable. The data on the number of possible high-school graduates in villages is also likely to be very low.[21]

Possibility that the rural user is…	Percentage possibility
	General	Male	Female
…X (high-school)	6.9	10.1	3.4
…Y (college)	1.2	1.9	0.4
…Z (<high school)	91.9	88.0	96.2

Table: 1 Gender-wise calculation of possible users at rural Internet center by level of education

(Computed from the average national rural literacy rates, C2-A Census of India 1991)[22]

This data indicates that use of the Internet with any language or literacy proficiency would cut out an overwhelming majority. Furthermore, these figures are averages for the entire rural population – which itself is highly diverse. Demographics will be even more unfavourable in smaller villages or in villages in the Hindi belt (from Rajasthan in the West to Bihar in the East) that house the bulk of Indian rural residents.[23]

This simply suggests that providing Internet connectivity for development is not only divided in approach by urbanization, but also across cultures by the level of human development in each country. An Internet kiosk, as is cannot be seen as a harbinger of technology-led development to the rural masses in India.

There is a constant grappling with ways in which IT can be made directly relevant to the disempowered masses in India. Setting aside derived benefits, there is a desire to see a participatory benefit, where the end user, whether rural or urban poor, is tangibly gaining – and in a lot of cases, such pilot projects use the Internet as the stellar example. It is not surprising then that during Bill Clinton’s 2000 visit to India, a Rajasthan village with an Internet connection was picked as the showcase. That project (discussed at length later in the paper) failed to continue in the path it started, just as several other Internet trials in various parts of the country, with different age and linguistic groups fell flat after media-touted beginnings. A developmental paradigm of seeing the Internet as a ‘value addition’ to a population with an assumed base competency, and to promote that as an objective of Internet access in the minds of the Indian populace writes off most of India from the Internet revolution without explicitly saying so. To add value, there must be perceived value to begin with. Perceived value in rural India is a completely subjective question – an Internet connection as is under the circumstances serves the purposes only of those with a certain degree of educational attainment with an interest in furthering their skills.[24] A ‘highest numbers possible’ access goal is purely cosmetic.[25]

The Role of Language in a Net Savvy India

Andhra Pradesh State Chief Minister (CM) N. Chandrababu Naidu, seen as one of the pioneers of the technology revolution in India, announced at an Internet Technologies conference in April 2000[26] that India had the second largest pool of English-speaking manpower in the world. This coincided with NASSCOM’s projections that India would have 100 million Internet users by 2008 and Minister of Information Technology (MIT) Information Technology Action Plan (Operation Knowledge).[27] Naidu’s statement has an unusual connection to the 100 million figure. The issues of potential Internet users in India and of potential English speakers in India may seem completely unrelated, but some uncanny relations can be drawn. Who are these 100 million connections servicing (assuming these can be provided)? What class of the Indian society do they come from and what language(s) do they speak?

The development discourse in general includes the growth of literacy in the same terms as the growth of Internet users – but are the two related. Does the average literate person, or even reasonably read person, assuming middle-school as a basic standard, qualify for Internet usage? India’s large and growing size of Internet users,[28] has ironically led to no Indian-language content growth on the Web.[29] There may be e-zines and a number of entertainment and localized information sites, but there is no focus on access to services for the regional-languages. This lack of Indian languages indicates a general belief that numbers aren’t enough for profitable translation of services into most Indian languages.[30] In comparison, out of a total global population of 5.1 million users from Finland, there will be 3.5 million with access in Finnish language by 2003.[31] Even the lowest speculations for Indians with Internet access, not counting the significantly large expatriate Indian population, assess several times that number of net-connected Indians, the most optimistic estimate 50 million with access by the 2003.[32]

This lack of pressing demand for Indian languages suggests that pertinent rates of literacy and exclusive fluency in these languages (whether Hindi, Telugu or Bangla) within the net-enabled communities is currently low. More importantly, there is a very credible suggestion herein that the increase in written fluency in scattered regional languages is somehow connected to a universal bilingual rise in English. The onus therefore is not on providing the Internet in regional languages (as it is in China, for instance) but instead on setting the knowledge of English as criterion for membership into the Internet club in India.

The projected figure of 100 million connections can then be seen as a linguistic threshold – the farthest the Internet can stretch at a high rate of rise in India, given the tangent of its spread over the past 5 years. The number of Indians who can read or write English with a degree of fluency, falls well within the projected figure of Indians to whom 100 million Internet connections can provide access, assuming the basic high-school degree as the threshold for English-speaking.[33] About 90.2 million Indians had a basic degree of high school and above in 1991.[34] Assuming an unchanged ratio of high-school attainment and above at 25.1 percent, from the total of 566.7 million literates in India in the recently released figures from the 2001 census,[35] an approximate of at least 142.2 million can be assumed to have basic school degree or above. A more precise figure cannot be computed without census results on high-school attainment, but the figure can safely be expected to rise over the 1991 25.1 percent attainment level for schooling.

And yet, there seems no recognition of the ‘English’ paradox in any of the official literature. Neither the NASSCOM reports, nor the Policy Papers of the Ministry of Information & Technology or even the Ministry of Education’s Policy Paper for 2000 deal in detail with the inapplicability of Internet content to non-users of English. Two of the above three have no Indian-language versions of their Internet websites.[36]

This issue opens up an apparent paradox of a seemingly well-developed market for several goods and a highly proficient work force, despite the otherwise ominous state of affairs within the education system. A surprising fact offers an explanation - India has a very high percentage of people going on from high school to college – proportionately six times that of China.[37] And yet, the net output of college graduates is much more comparable, and the net productivity of the Indian work force is significantly lower. Reason quite simply that a fraction of total number of Chinese students that make it past high school do so in India. And yet, investment in higher education as contrasted with primary schooling is continuingly high in India, and interest in it is growing very fast – especially in the euphoria of gaining through an information society. Subsequently, the already empowered English-speaking high-school graduate has a good probability of going on to higher educational achievements – further portending a sharp divide.

Taking education as the key qualifier then, the Indian literacy and language proficiency conditions imply that the 100 million mark would mark the saturation threshold, after which there would no longer be justifiable demand in the immediate present. As an economic generalization, it could be said that the marginal benefit of Internet connection # 100,00,001’ would be negative in the time period defined for the IT for all.

The additional investment in telecommunications infrastructure would thereafter be nominal and relational only to the growth in population of the younger generations. This threshold implies that those left out of ever making gainful direct use of the Internet today are likely never to make any direct use of it. This is a shocking fact – that the human development of the country is so low that even if everyone were able to access the Internet in their homes, not more than 100 million connections would be of any real use.

The real reach of the Internet has been a pivotal factor in the thought behind the threshold theory. A hypothetical parallel can be drawn with a society struggling to spread the art of walking among its citizens. In comparison to the Internet situation in India, it would seem as if the society were endeavoring for the universal provision of roller-blades to everyone who has learned to walk. And thereafter keep up apace the rate of roller-blade provision with the rate at which its citizens learned to walk. So while a majority struggles with the basic ability to walk, the onus is on maximizing speed for those who have that ability.

So the effective definition of a threshold by government policy will ensure that most political effort will be directed only towards the already-educated Indian.

This is where the empowerment debate begins.

‘IT for All’ and the pace of elementary education development in India

The channels of delivery in spreading the Internet outside Indian cities will be a determining factor in what sections of rural populations find themselves empowered by a broader communications network.[38] Introduction of Internet technology into district offices has been started by the central government, but no universal plan has been implemented on exactly how village Internet will be provided. A likely and pilot-tested approach is of information centers, set up as kiosks, in villages.

In the village space, the two important points of convergence to be considered are markets and schools.[39] Despite enrollment statistics, schools remain the most powerful points of access into the lives of the rural and urban poor. Since the school would be a far more malleable means where the state would be in control of ensuring the dissemination of technological knowledge, the education system becomes the most pivotal point from which technology can effectively permeate the entire social fabric.

But would there be demand for Internet in village schools in the foreseeable future? This is difficult to answer – past experience has shown that schooling as a desirable stepping stone has not appealed at all to the poorest, whereas those in the lower middle classes have quickly bought into and invested in schooling and personal technology training. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that there will be significant geographical inconsistencies regarding the extent to which clusters will buy into and benefit from the Internet. This is not as much a factor of geographical inequities of wealth, as it is an outcome of the quality and quantity of education provided to the disadvantaged Indian.

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Even as Information Technology is presented as India’s admission claim to the global information society, education will remain one of the greatest failures of the Indian state. Bringing the two together is an interesting study in ironies. The weakness of the education sector has stood firm in its frozen feudality, with the death of the traditional economic argument for underdevelopment[40] giving way to an idea that there are social factors contributing to poor educational attainment in India, factors perhaps more powerful than economical actors.

A study of the primary education data figures for India shows that over 50 percent of school children dropout before the completion of the equivalent of Eighth Grade.[41] Reasons are seen to vary from state to state and by gender.[42] A commonly found reason is that the parents feel the children have ‘nothing to gain’[43] from being at school – against the comparative gain of additional hands to contribute to family resources. Literacy rates for the lowest Per Capita Expenditure quintile of Indian society (below the poverty line) is surprisingly greater than the literacy rates of the second-lowest quintile, which is above the poverty line.[44] This indicates that poverty plays a lesser role than other demand factors – where the quality and availability of education does not provide a convincing hardsell. Poverty if anything, provides a convenient answer for the government – because once the causes for non-enrollment and subsequently child labour are blamed on the poverty rather than the poor education system, there is a virtual absolution of responsibility, whereby neither the Department of Labour, nor the Department of Education are directly responsible for what appears to be a systemic failure.[45] The poverty itself distracts one from the fact that education has surprisingly gone down on the list of priorities – the real per capita expenditure on education instead of increasing or even remaining stable, has reduced since the 1970s.

Compounding the problem is the extremely difficult task of getting good teachers[46] in villages, high absenteeism of teachers.[47] and the traditional lack of an effective monitoring system within the villages where the schools are located.[48] Paradoxically, the growth of an information society in India, aided by a very poor branding for the teaching profession, itself creates a vicious circle by offering exponentially better opportunities in urban hubs for the educated elite.

Even the better rural schools, hundreds of thousands in number, commonly do not have basic facilities as electricity and running water (In 1991 just 18.7 per cent Indian villages had access to electricity and safe drinking water).[49] It is the lack of outrage that seems most surprising. It isn’t true that there is no interest in education whatsoever, but just that it is so poorly sold in the rural space, that the lack of it’s delivery does not lead to any the kind of political upheaval one might expect.[50] There is more of an ideological recognition - a preference for the usefulness of education than a pressured political demand, under the threat of potential civil unrest from a powerful political agent.

This is an extremely insidious enemy to fight – on one hand there is, everyone who knows about the Internet, or might in the reasonable future be a user make up the core socio-political demand articulators, and therefore benefit from a universal access policy. On another hand, there are those that are outside of this realm (and who universal access would be intended to, on paper, to benefit) – the poorest and least educated to the extent that their severe disempowerment has not for decades managed to create the kind of political agitation that should logically follow, who in turn have no demand articulation for any of that basic infrastructure and development needed for them to be Internet-capable.

With all the demand factors are on one side, Internet development will happen at the rapid pace chalked out for it egged on by a powerful market demand. In contrast, even basic development for the poorer sections is largely entirely left up to the benevolence of political agents.

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A study by The World Bank[51] showed India to have among the worst inequalities in education attainment – far lower than most other nations with greater income inequalities than India. In contrast, studies on consumption figures would not show equally drastic inequalities.[52] The development key, therefore, lies in dealing with education inequality rather than income, whether in assessing urban issues of Digital Divide or rural access to telecommunications.

Major universities (and a number of schools) in India now offer Internet access to students, and the growth of higher education institutes with international affiliations has further strengthened notions of globalization as an important dynamic in educational development. Consequently, long-term plans of incorporating Internet and communications access into schools all over India, specially in lesser developed rural regions, has become fashionable in political speeches.

Due to power and telecommunications infrastructure, what this means in implementation is difficult to estimate, though chances are that plans of such Internet provision, like the greater ‘IT for All’ plan, relate mainly to Internet connectivity in the absolute largest village schools. On one hand, it could be argued that the entry of Internet technologies into village schools is a first step, towards greater incorporation of the rural population in general. Yet, on another hand, it could be argued that only the most well-placed from largest villages can actually engage these technologies. Plus, the correspondingly slow rate of investment in schooling facilities in the smaller villages could be argued as being yet another tool for expanding inequalities – for another elite-group formation.

This also brings in the concept of using technology a tool for enhanced and improved education. The possibilities are encouraging – technology can theoretically spread basic and advanced education across urban and economic borders. There are also cases of good cognitive response among illiterates to computer-based teaching[53] (which also to some extent familiarizes illiterates and the less-educated to computer technology and has highly beneficial long-term demonstration effects for the generation succeeding first-round recipients of this kind of instruction), but these experiments have been localized, and focused largely on the adult population, and their dependence on infrastructure cripples their reach phenomenally.

While using technology as a tool is beneficial at several levels, assuming it as an means to greater educational access is a dangerous course to take. And at the theoretical level any relation between the two can is more likely to be negative for rural elementary education in India – the issue really isn’t what the Internet can do for the village school, but what the lack of basic infrastructure development in an age of rapidly expanding Internet and Communications technology can do to the village school. Preparing rural India to become an active participant in the information society is not going to be a primary task of information technology itself.

And given the knowledge that large sections of Indians do not send their children to school due to its apparent futility, it is also useful to examine what those sections that do invest in education school see as their key motivations. This, quite often, is mobility, often migration to urban areas[54] or even abroad.[55]

The notion of educating a child to send him to the city is rampant in India.[56] Attitudes relating to what kind of jobs are socially acceptable after a certain degree of education can also influence demand. Consequently, a policy in education would also entail that migratory tendencies be kept in mind, and that these be monitored closely.[57] Therefore, the education or development as brought to the semi-urban and village levels would need to be self-sustaining to the effect that it is useful to the client in his or her current location – the reaping of the benefits of the Internet have to be at the level of the village and should not require migration to the nearest town where there is a greater need or spread of technology.

*

There are thus several trends that make the transition to an unplanned urbanization very strong. There is a very limited conception of ‘college towns’ in India, and the concentration of new higher-educational institutions in India is almost entirely in the existing urban and peri-urban areas, cementing this lop-sided development that concentrates the entire development paradigm in the urban space. The Internet needs to be understood in the village space as a communications empowerment tool rather than as a direct educational experience or as an immediate job-prospect enhancer. There is no comprehensive study that suggests that the Internet will (or even should) enable movement from traditional occupations towards others that require higher levels of attainment in India.[58]

If the Internet and computers are to be socially relevant then the demand has to come from parents to reach children, even at high-school levels where children may be old enough to have demands and preferences of their own. If indeed parents are by and large sold on the idea of the Internet, and if this is actually made reasonably accessible in interior regions, the interest in better education of children can be expected to rise. This has been seen in cities where the independent computer courses offering Internet training for children has mushroomed and risen in number phenomenally over the past five years. It must be kept in mind though that the bend towards technology is certainly not new to India, in fact, it has been one of the greatest segregational ironies of Indian society.[59] The difference now is perhaps the accelerated speed at which more sections of the student population, previously left-out will be incorporated, willingly or unwillingly into this information society.

Schools have introduced Internet classes for children, most recently the National Curriculum Framework for School Education has included IT education for children in its secondary school curriculum, lending official sanction to this phenomenon. Yet, the demonstration effect of education and modernity has not even been strong enough to promote basic education in villages through mobilized demand. By that standard, it could be very difficult to present a case for trickle-down effect in demand for Internet access. The entire information outreach and political bargaining system of India therefore makes Internet education a paradox, where the demand cannot and does not come from the target population. This is an uncanny reflection of the previously stated demand inconsistencies for rural primary education in general. Thus rural populations aren’t being introduced to technology and its benefits through their local networks, schools or even entertainment media. Consequently, the arbitrary placing of kiosks throughout rural India as a means of reaching the ‘IT for All’ goal is an implementation of a top-down transference of demand, which serves only a surface geographic purpose.

And even this, if accepted as a reasonable course of action, might have very limited real implementation potential. The idea of introducing computers and Internet education in a standardized form universally into the public school sector is not only ambitious[60] it is clearly financially non-feasible if the government were to attempt to finance it in urban and rural areas.[61] Even where partly feasible, the issue returns 360 degree to that of Internet content. The Internet speaks English. A computer terminal would therefore need a translator.[62] Everything points at the primary education system.

Village kiosks and other approaches to implementing Internet technology in India’s rural space

Encumbered by a plethora of far more pressing development predicaments, the relevance of an argument over the digital divide threat in India is often called into question as being of secondary importance. Developing nations are generally seen as more prone to developmental blocks rising out of inequality because of the severe economic and educational gaps between the rich and the poor.[63] Yet, the issue of marginalization in the present is more relevant in developed nations, because in developing nations the lack of resources creates a condition wherein entire populations are already severely marginalized, with the Internet access only accentuating the gap. In India, almost half the population remains completely untouched by modernization due to infrastructural, educational and health scarcities. There is no particular or additional disempowerment to rural Indians – a two-thirds majority of who send their children to schools with one or two-teachers.

The ‘IT for All’ attempts to deal with the Digital Divide issue by providing a product (the Internet and Telecommunications) within the access of all, as a means of some development, in this case, as discussed earlier – through kiosks. Assuming that at the initial stage there is no demand established, the Internet kiosks are likely be provided free of charge or subsidized for a stipulated period by the government at village focal points, possibly markets or village meeting places. These may not necessarily be within the direct access of the entire rural population but may nevertheless provide a demonstration effect of bringing knowledge of new technology, and possibly through a go-between, provide a number of e-governance services.

Given that English content may not be within reasonable means, there is then a question of content relevance. Is it possible to make present Internet content relevant to Indian villagers? If so, how is it done? If it is done, how does the extent and manner in which it is done change the idea of an informational Internet? Outside of the school Internet, experiments have been conducted setting up kiosks in villages or in city slums.[64] Among implemented projects, various trends are seen – in feasibility, scalability and effectiveness. One clear trend in effectiveness (defined as the success of a project in its defined objectives) has been in the case of planning scales – projects have been largely successful when planned over small areas.

The Government of India unveiled it’s ‘IT for Masses’ program in May 2000. In the state of Kerala, a joint project of the IT department, Kerala State Library Council and Kallara Panchayat plans information centers in libraries, word-processing facilities and counseling / guidance for citizens.[65] More ambitious is the Maharashtra State’s plan of Internet Community centers, called Cyber Dhabas[66] in association with WorldTel and Reliance Infocom. Similar projects are in the pipeline for the Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. These are not to be welfare projects. The aim of Reliance Infocom, which will lay the fiber optic lines for this project is to start an efficient backbone for a network of Internet access throughout India. This project will bring Internet to Indian villages, but functions clearly as a commercial infrastructure endeavor.

The Cyber Dhabas are to function like Public Call Offices (PCO). These are to provide a variety of services including health-care information, crop prices, public distribution and grievance redressal.[67] The Madhya Pradesh government’s ‘State Policy & Initiatives on Information Technology’ works on projects to bring the Internet to the people. An ambitious project undertaken by the government here has been the ‘Computer Access for Farmers of Madhya Pradesh’ project (initiated May 1999).[68] This not only addresses some of the major concerns of farmers but also acts as a social justice mechanism, whereby local level grievances and administrative matters can be handled via a manned Internet connection.[69] Interestingly, the state government encouraged a bulk of the funding for this project from the Gram Panchayats (local level administration). In doing this, the government solicited concern from the clients for technology at the rural level, a case far preferable, rather than a self-propelled government initiative aimed at disinterested and skeptical farmers.

Yet, in their current forms, these projects do not present any significant possibility of bringing the Internet to the lowest classes of rural India.[70] The closest these projects get to reaching the rural poor is connecting the small-farmer. The farm labor class, or indeed, practically all of the ‘below poverty line’ India is excluded. Most of the services provided by the government Internet (such as land deeds), are of little or no consequence to the landless. Even in the more successful projects, like in Madhya Pradesh, there is no currently implemented mechanism that undertakes the huge task of ensuring that everyone within the coverage space of a kiosk or information center is explained the technologies, given demonstrations and convinced of the benefits it may hold for them. Consequently, the internal regeneration of demand is stagnant among the majority population, instead localized only to those sections that were already in the fringes of technology.

*

Within the given framework of what can or cannot be done, there are some examples to learn from. Some projects did well within their mandates, though open to contest, have contributed in some small form to selective empowerment. In contrast, a number of projects have generally failed. The overall policy of the Madhya Pradesh government has been moderately effective – but some specific projects have shown remarkable success. Significant among these has been the Stockholm Challenge IT Award Winner for 2000 Gyandoot Soochnalaya, a scheme tested in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh.

With a network of manned information centers throughout the Dhar district, Gyandoot lays emphasis on using the Internet to bring peoples’ concerns to the government. Pivotal here has been the attempt to eliminate the crop middleman and the patwari, the land rights surveyor – saving time, effort and a lot of money for villagers who otherwise deal with them for sales or land surveys. What this did was appeal to the social condition of the village resident; its success, however, was due to the logistics.[71] A large part of the project was the endeavour of building demand and ‘selling the idea’ of Internet information centers. This included a very extensive marketing system to popularize the project – encompassing audio-visual campaigns in villages, pamphlets, specially convened Gyansabhas (village information meetings), scholarship schemes, visits from schoolchildren from across the district to the information centers, giving demonstrations and hands-on training and a variety of contests for individual kiosks and their operators to perform excel within the network.

Gyandoot worked on issues such as circumventing dealing with government officials for obtaining caste certificates and land deeds. (Similar projects in cities operate, these reduce the interaction between citizens and municipal officers) Dealing with government officials in India is universally recognized as a demanding proposition. Interestingly, the success of Gyandoot suggests that addressing a complaint or an official request to a computer seems more comforting because of the impersonality and apparent incorruptibility of online access of information.

Contrasted against this is the failure of the Rajasthan e-governance project. RajNidhi, a project to cover villages across Rajasthan, was set up in early 2000, with its first center fully functional by March 2000 in Nayla, Rajasthan. This was timed exactly with US President Bill Clinton’s visit to India.[72] The day after Clinton left, the telephone connection provided for Internet access was removed. The center is currently unattended and the computers have been locked away. The fact that the Nayla kiosk was just window dressing for Clinton, as opposed to a serious Internet endeavour does not make it a bad example at all. Nyala is certainly not the only time that the media build-up of a rural Internet project has shadowed, often consciously, the achievements of the actual project. (This opens a Pandora’s box on the role of the media in marketing rural infotech centers as showcases of the depth of India’s IT revolution.)

The problem in Nayla was not simply one of motivation: it was probably clear even to the locals who saw their village vacuumed to perfection, that the an important American’s visit was the driving idea behind the project. Nevertheless, this was basically public money spent on rural development. If villagers in this case were educated about the medium, the demand would have generated from below. When the center shut down, there was no protest about it reported, nor has the Rajasthan state assembly opposition raised a motion of dissent against the neglect of the RajNidhi project at the rural level. Technically, the project is underway and purports to bring Internet access to every village in Rajasthan. In point of fact, the sole browsing center has shut down.[73] The project started as a state government effort, it ended as a state government failure. The people never got involved., unlike at Dhar where the ‘people’ not only knew about it, but contributed and demanded the computers. There was quite simply, no demand.

Comparison between Gyandoot and RajNidhi

Gyandoot Project (Madhya Pradesh)	RajNidhi (Rajasthan)
Similarities
Rural district Very Low Education Dist. (34.4 percent literacy 1991) Very Low development (Least-developed category in Census ’91)	Largely Rural state Very Low Education State (38.6 percent 1991) Low Development State
Dissimilarities
Small-area concentration (Initial phase planned only for Dhar) Initiated with some participation from villagers Responsibility / control at district level Exclusive project, operates on its own, though is connected to the larger state access project	State-wide area coverage (at least on paper, RajNidhi was meant for the entire state, not just Nayla district) Initiated and installed by state Project controlled centrally from state Includes entire state initiative – incl. placing kiosks at markets & hubs, state-wide intranet

The district collector in Dhar has been very closely connected with the project since decision-making powers have been largely delegated in planning terms down to the districts. With the RajNidhi project, there has been no delegation from the state secretariat down to districts, the decision-making chain therefore remains very high. The performance of Gyandoot suggests that RajNidhi in its current constitution can perform better in principal if ground level planning and implementation is handed down to the district level and involves the people it intends to benefit. The participatory nature of Gyandoot is encouraging, and while the current infrastructure may not support a great deal of trickle-down benefits, the model is a foresighted approach to long-term development. That being said, a closer examination of the Indian economy can give us an idea of what it would take, in the long-run, to make the telecommunications affordable.

An economic threshold theory: back full circle to the 100-million-user argument

‘…not even considered worth the trouble of exploitation; they will become inconsequential, of no interest to the developing globalized economy.’

Fernando Henrique Cardoso (on the ‘disempowered’ in the Information Society)

India is commonly compared to China, even from within the economy, and the question commonly asked is ‘If they can do it, why can’t we?’ Technically, with greater experience with entrepreneurship and more of a market economy in place, India would seem to be better placed to take off. But looking at human development statistics, it seems clear that the failure in achieving what Nehruvian socialism set out to has probably been India’s greatest hurdle.

World Bank, in the World Development Report on Poverty and Development, 2000-2001 stated that the first decade of the 21^st century had the potential for, ‘extraordinary risks of marginalization of large numbers of people, increasing inequalities, and social explosions.’[74] The underlying theme of ‘IT for All’ is a sense of greater social equity, not necessarily one of market development. And yet, the two are innately tied, and just as the lack of market development was possibly the greatest failure of primary education, the same stumbling block still exists, and will manifest itself through assessments of economic feasibility and sustainability of telecommunications projects.

Can the Government of India actually hook up every school and every village on the Internet by 2008? Tele-density in 2000 was in the region of 2.7 per 100 persons, and is at about 4.4 in mid-2002. Rural tele-density in 2000 stood at 0.4 per 100 persons, and is approximated at 0.93 per 100 persons in 2002 [75] – a figure that includes all the rural areas – ranging from the 15,000 resident villages to the 500 resident villages. Majority of the villages with phones are either those larger in size or those near urban centers, connected through Village Panchayat Telephones. Official estimates in 2000 place the number of connected villages at 58 percent,[76] though the figure does not show a clear picture on rural telephony. 376,000 of India's 660,000 villages had telephones as on Jan 1, 2001, though it had been reported that outdated technology and equipment plagued 211,000 of them.[77] Conventional technology makes it very capital-heavy to connect the ‘last mile’ in reaching a village, maintenance is also expensive and low returns make it economically non-feasible, considering the extremely low traffic expectation. The National Telecommunications Policy 1999 aims for a rural tele-density of 4.0 for 2010. Privatization, once seen as a possible solution to low rural tele-density, but heavy initial investment requirements and revenue-sharing burdens ensured that private companies went cherry picking in the urban telecom sector, guided by a need to consolidate good markets as quickly as possible. Markets need to be good, or at least reasonably attractive to communications investment – the ‘IT for All’ is in an unusual contradiction between creating the demand, or simply forcing the supply. .

The peril of a gleeful ride towards Internet access for everyone in India is also quantifiable economically, showing more or less a similar threshold for affordability of Internet. Approximately 9 percent of Indian households boast income exceeding an annual $2500 – the disposable income to invest in communications according to the Ashok Jhunjhunwala’s TeNeT group study[78] pegged at 7 percent of income shows potential for Internet access for a over 30 percent Indians.

Household Income (yearly)	`% of households	Affordable Expenditure on Communications* (yearly)
> $5000	1.6%	> $350
$2500 - $5000	6.3%	$175- $350
$1000 - $2500	23.3 %	$ 70 - $175
$ 500 - $1000	31.8%	$ 35 - $ 70

Table: 2 Percentage of Indian households that can afford certain yearly expense on communications (Jhunjhunwala, 2000)

Jhunjhunwala assumes that the 7 percent disposable income, affordable as a telecommunications expenditure to the top two earning brackets would be affordable in the same proportion down the line to lower income brackets. Even if a 7 percent communications expenditure were not considered too high at lower levels where spending is more need-oriented, the statistics deny the most important facet of connectivity – capital expenditure. This is both user end (in case of the Internet, computers) and provider end (telecommunications lines) – and in rural areas, for instance, the cost factor is phenomenally high and per-line costs of between $500 and $800 for last-mile rollout create a further disincentive for wiring village homes or community centers that are unlikely to have the kind of call traffic that can support these costs. Using the current price levels of telephone and Internet usage, it is clear that only that 8.9 percent of the population, or less can actually afford telecommunications today, and perhaps with the fall of per-line costs to $300, an additional the market may be extended to 30 percent of all Indian households. The current figures calculated over the net population growth, this curiously returns us to a number very close to the expanded number that 100 million Internet connections would service over the next ten years. The Internet, then returns to being the estate of the top 8.9 percent of population that can afford a minimum yearly expenditure of $175 on communications.

Further weakening the demand side is the fact that the benefits presumed to accrue to villagers through Internet access via information do not require Internet access at all - dependable market prices of agricultural products, healthcare information and political issues can all be addressed far easier using radios and telephone information lines rather than[79] introducing a complicated technology that has otherwise no perceptible benefits given the profile of the average rural Indian. The most unnerving factor is that the rate of increase in technology is possibly far faster than the rate of educational development. While in ideal circumstances, one would expect comparable rate of computerization in urban and non-urban areas, ironically, even the rate of increase in computer centers in urban schools is faster than the rate of increase in schools in rural India. There are computerized / net-linked schools on one hand and no schools whatsoever or one-teacher institutions on another. This is economic support for the argument offered earlier on educational grounds – the ‘IT for all’ policy will first provide for the entire affluent class, and thereafter stabilize at rates of development to provide access to communications to the rest of the population.

Using technology as a showcase for things to come is the best one can aspire to among the Indian poor. Denied the demand-led support infrastructure, and the inability of villages to pay for Internet services, the entire cost burden for lakhs of Indian villages would fall on the state, which has, at least in the past, dealt with this problem through extensive cross-subsidising?[80] From historical experience, this lends a possibility of the wholesale rusting of government-sponsored equipment if 'IT for All' policy were to simply dump computers in the laps of villages like it did in Nayla, quite akin to handing out roller blades when no flat roads exist.

Conclusion

It is then a state responsibility to develop alternatives to the current geographical structure that creates immense inequity between urban and rural spaces. This extends from a rapid and urgent investment into primary education to developing new semi-urban hubs, to break away from the current state of economic imbalance that concentrates almost all non-agricultural opportunity in one or two major urban agglomerations in every Indian state. Developing hubs in a core-periphery model may be a good start. The Madhya Pradesh government had its basics right in its attempt to create a functional network for farmers, but this is not implementable all the way into the village of >1000 population. Consequently, micro-projects like Gyandoot do not attempt to set up shop at the smallest villages possible, instead create economic hubs at market places, bus stations and meeting points of selected larger villages. Developing hubs is then not a companion to grassroots development, but can be an indirect route to it, coupled with a strong education system. It might mean a slower path to telecommunications entering the smallest villages, but such entry would be accompanied by the demand for these services, and thus a localized support structure. Technology does not take productive effect immediately - cultures, institutions, business and other factors of a society need to undergo significant chances before that. The suggestion here is not that the same world available through the Internet should not be made available, just that the entry point be such that the medium be made convincing first.

Finally, there is the issue of social networks. It has yet to be studied what percentage of India would naturally object to using the Internet, though similar studies in the US have shown a high degree of resistance from people themselves to technology.[81] It can be reasonably assumed that the socialization of the Internet will be a far more difficult among Indian adults.[82] On the brighter side though, evidence that people who themselves resist using technology would pass on that resistance to their younger generations is very weak. It is the schools that will either make the Indian workforce a technologically proficient one, or retard its development for another generation.

The lack of interest in educating the masses has been a feature of the short-sightedness of the Indian state and industry. As it becomes clearer that a strong basic education structure is not just an element of basic social justice, but also one indispensable to the new Indian economy – the backbone of the information society. Technology can not replace the relevance of schools, the lack of a reasonable minimum education will negate the turn the perceived benefits of technology, retard the growth of markets and further perpetuate inequality, perhaps for a generation, perhaps for more.[83]

The age of telecommunications offers opportunities of change far faster than any comparable period of the past. The information society is not a remedy for a failed tryst with human development in industrial settings. Nor is the information society a formula for growth comparative to other nations despite staggering internal inequalities. The technology threshold in India is very real, and if ignored, its consequences may be fairly minimal for the overall boom in the Indian technology market, or the overall growth of its economy. But from within, its growth as a nation is possibly at its most precarious ever.

---

[1] Website: UNDP, http://www.undp.org/, accessed September 29, 2002. UNDP Human Development report has rated India in the 124 (from 173assessed nations) including in its most recent publication in 2002.

[2] Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture: Volume 1.). (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) p. 19

[3] Sachs, Jeffrey, ‘Helping the World's Poorest’, Economist, Vol 352 No 8132 Aug 14, 1999.

[4] Castells, Manuel, The Internet Galaxy. Reflections on Internet, Business, and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)

[5] Dreze, Jean, Amartya Sen eds., Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 14

[6] Solow, Robert, ‘Technical change and the aggregate production function’, Review of Economics and Statistics, No. 39 August 1957

[7] Kranzberg, Melvin and Pursell, Carroll Jr., Technology in Western Civilization, Vol. II. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)

[8] Castells, Manuel, ‘The Informational City is a Dual City: Can it Be Reversed?’ in High Technology and Low-Income Communities: prospects for the positive use of advanced information technology edited by Donald A. Schon, Bish Sanyal, William J. Mitchell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)

[9] Referring to the Greater San Francisco Bay area from San Francisco in the north to Palo Alto in the West Bay, San Jose and the Silicon Valley in the South and up around the bay to Berkeley-Oakland in the North-East.

[10] Hall, Peter, ‘Changing Geographies: Technology and Income’, in High Technology and Low-Income Communities: prospects for the positive use of advanced information technology edited by Donald A. Schon, Bish Sanyal, William J. Mitchell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)

[11] Wolpert, Julian. ‘Center Cities as Havens and Traps for Low-Income Communities: The Potential Impact of Advanced Information Technology’ in High Technology and Low-Income Communities: prospects for the positive use of advanced information technology edited by Donald A. Schon, Bish Sanyal, William J. Mitchell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)

[12] Negroponte, Nicholas, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)

[13] Schon, Donald A. Bish Sanyal, William J. Mitchell, eds., High Technology and Low-Income Communities: prospects for the positive use of advanced information technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) p. 7

[14] Mitchell, William J., City of Bits: space, place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995)

[15] Marx, Leo 'Information technology in historical perspective' in High Technology and Low-Income Communities: prospects for the positive use of advanced information technology edited by Donald A. Schon, Bish Sanyal, William J. Mitchell. In his essay, Leo Marx has argued that technological changes such as the railroad, electricity and automotive technology did not have significant beneficial effects on the poorest in the past, using this historical perspective to assess the potential effects of the current Information Technology revolution.

[16] The Government of India, Ministry of Information Technology, in its policy paper released by the ‘Working Group on Information Technology for Masses’ states in its summary that it targets 100 million internet lines by the year 2008. At that point, the population of India should be in the region of 1129 million people.

[17] Website: Census of India, http://www.censusindia.net/, accessed August 31, 2002. Based on census figures, exact explanations of computations seen later in this paper where these figures are discussed extensively.

[18] The test phase comprised three Internet centers in Sharkeya, Egypt.

[19] Mona Afifi, a policy specialist at the Information Technologies for Development Programme at UNDP said at an interview with CNN online, June 6, 2000 about the community center at Zagazig, Egypt, ‘People who are educated but have no work can now get training that will enhance their chances in the job market.’ The statement implies the unavailability of jobs at a certain level, wherefore such centers offer a step up from one level of attainment. Yet, it unassumingly touches upon the central problem of difficulty in employability in developing nations.

[20] The Internet is used here as access to the world wide web through a computer or a comparable electronic device.

[21] Website: Census of India, http://www.censusindia.net/, accessed September 29, 2002. In 1991, less than 20 percent of Indian rural population is located in villages of higher than 5000 residents. Only about 7 percent of the total population is in villages with more than 10,000 residents. The total rural population with educational attainment of higher secondary and over was 18.2 percent, with the all India figure for college graduation among rural populations being 2.7 percent. (Source of data: Table C-2 and C-2A, Census of India 1991, Part IV -Social and Cultural Tables) There has been an approximate 13 per cent increase in literacy in India since 1991 according to the 2001 census. This might change the given figures, but keeps the overall proportions very similar.

[22] Ibid. The figures for Y include illiterates as well as all those with less than a basic school degree. The computation is on the basis of 1991 rural district literacy rates (Gen: 44.2, F: 30.6, M: 57.0) adjusted with the attainment rates of rural literates – reaching college, passing basic school degree or quitting prior to that. (Table C-2 and C-2A Census of India 1991, Part IV -Social and Cultural Table) This data was NOT available for 2001 at the time of writing, but the net change in basic literacy for all India was noted at 13 per cent. Without the exact figures for educational attainment, it is not possible, except through absolute speculation, to adjust the computed figures for 1991.

[23] Ibid. 88.1 percent of Indian rural population lives in villages of less than 5000 residents (Table A3 Census of India 1991, Part II A (i) General Population Tables). High schools and Colleges are rarely situated in villages of such small sizes, often requiring students to travel to neighboring villages for schooling.

[24] Ibid. 36.9 percent of the Indian urban literates and 25.1 percent of the total Indian literates have above High school degrees (Table C-2 and C-2A Census of India 1991, Part IV -Social and Cultural Table)

[25] The projection of the 100 million connections has been given with ‘Internet for all’ by 2008. The term ‘access’ refers to how many people actually ‘have access’ to the Internet – technically, therefore, if one worked in a building which had Internet access, the person would be said to have access. Similarly, if 7 percent of an individual’s monthly income (seen as the amount one is willing to spend on communications – discussed later in this paper) is in excess of the monthly charges for Internet access AND if there is a cyber café in the vicinity of the individual’s place of residence, he or she would be said to have Internet access. This disregards completely whether or not the individual actually uses the Internet.

[26] The Seminar, ‘Get connected---an Indo-British Initiative’ was held at New Delhi, April 8, 2000. Chandrababu Naidu’s statement was recorded in a bureau report in The Hindustan Times, 09/04/2000, New Delhi Edition.

[27] From a speech on IT goals in India delivered by K.C. Pant, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission at the meeting with The Ind-US Entrepreneurs (TIE), November 10, 1999 at Silicon Valley, U.S.A.

[28] Website: 123 India, http://www.123india.com/ accessed August 4, 2001. An Indian Market Research Bureau IMRB survey, which only counts core users -- those who use the Internet at least once a week for 30 minutes and for more than just sending an e-mail -- says there are 2.2 million Internet users in India. Other surveys include Gartner (India) – 3.1 Million and NASSCOM – 4.8 million. ‘Number of internet users in India is anybody's guess,’ 123india.com Dec 10 2000

[29] This can be related to the Indian education system in general - where university education is almost entirely in the English language. It would be impossible to find a holder of a master's degree in Telugu who had no knowledge of English. Yet, importantly, a major portion of the Indian population is literate in regional languages yet non-college-educated, uneasy or unqualified in English.

[30] Upon being asked, a content developer from Hungama.com, one of the largest Indian Internet ventures stated, ‘It is not worthwhile making a big investment with Hindi on the Internet, most people who are that good with Hindi can read and write English already.’

[31] Website: Global Reach, http://www.glreach.com/globstats/index.php3/, accessed September 10, 2002. Global Reach Statistics on Internet usership worldwide

[32] Website: NASSCOM, http://www.nasscom.org/resourcecentre.asp/, accessed September 13, 2002.

[33] By class 10, students in India, even in regional school have at least some exposure to English and basic competency skills. It could be argued that several high-school graduates have only surface competency in English – which would tend to lessen the numbers computed here, but that is balanced by the number of dropouts from English-medium schools. However, both numbers are very small – as the dropout rate in English-language schools is very low. Another implicit assumption is that everyone without schooling has no English-reading-skills.

[34] Website: Census of India, http://www.censusindia.net/, accessed September 10, 2002. Computed from Table C-2 and C-2A Census of India 1991, Part IV -Social and Cultural Table

[35] Ibid, As per the data on literacy in the ‘Provisional Population Totals’ released by the office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner of India. More precise figures are expected to be released later this year. Page URL: http://www.censusindia.net/results/statedata.html/, accessed September 10, 2002.

[36] This phenomenon also has ominous future consequences on the opportunities for regional-language school graduates, despite the long-time prevalence of English as a lingua franca, the dimensions of exclusion seem increasingly greater in the years to come.

[37] Dreze, Jean, Amartya Sen eds., Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 14

[38] This study is superficial to the extent that it does not take into effect the problems of social dynamics within the rural space. Issues such as caste, economic status, political empowerment are not taken into consideration, even though these could potentially have effects on the usage of an Internet kiosk set up in a village. This is a weakness that provides a more detailed subject for another paper.

[39] Wells could be a very important point of convergence for women since they are less prominent in markets.

[40] Sen, Amartya, Jean Dreze, The Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze omnibus: comprising poverty and famines, hunger and public action, India: economic development and social opportunity. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999) Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze showed through a comparative study with China, which made a bulk of its stunning literacy and educational development in the pre-1979 period, that the correlation between economic growth and educational achievement does not necessarily have a cause-effect relationship whereby local-area economic growth is necessary to sustain a good education system throughout the state, especially in lesser developed areas.

[41] Website: Department of Education, Government of India, http://www.education.nic.in/htmlweb/edusta.htm#a9, accessed July 10, 2001. Education Statistics (1997-98), Sub-table XXX (Dropout rates at Primary and Middle stages)

[42] Jaireth, Sushma. ‘Dropout Girls in India - A Case Study’, NCERT paper presented at 9th World Congress of Comparative Education 1996 Sydney, Australia – is an interesting study on this topic.

[43] Website: Children Data Bank, of the Institute of Psychological and Educational Research, http://www.childrendatabank.com/india/education/education.html/, accessed September 15, 2002. 38 percent of Indian children do not make it past Class 5.

[44] Dreze, Jean, Amartya Sen, op cit, Ref 29, p. 81

[45] Sinha, Shanta, ‘Child Labour and Education Policy in India’, CSD Papers, Series 1 (Center for Sustainable Development, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie 1995)

[46] Another point worth adding here is that teaching is very low on the social esteem ladder. Despite being white collar workers teachers earn less than urban blue collar workers. Additionally, there is a growing urban association of teaching with female workers – teachers are overwhelmingly housewives who take up teaching out of an interest in staying occupied, thus the incentive to excel is limited. An interesting prestige aside is that even in the marriage markets, teachers have among the lowest draw, in dowry terms, among all white collar workers.

[47] This can largely be attributed to the fact that government jobs are very difficult to lose, therefore very well insulated. Also, government job appointments are often politically motivated, especially related to job ‘disbursements’ by incumbents. It is widely believed in India that lower level government jobs often are impossible to land without political connections or bribes. Rudolph & Rudolph (1972)

[48] Rudolph, Lloyd, Susan Rudolph, Education and Politics in India: Studies in Organization, Society and Policy, (Cambridge MA: Harvard Press, 1972)

[49] Website: Census of India, http://www.censusindia.net/, accessed July 13, 2001. Source of data: Table H - 5, Census of India, 1991, Part VII - Tables on Houses and Household Amenities

[50] This can be perceived as the lack of local level political power related to education. Whilst it is common to see political agitation over curriculum or on a totally different plane, on offensive media representations, the same level of outrage is not seen regarding the non-provision of education. The dynamics of agitation, even if regulated in a top-down fashion, are related to what issues that can be made political causes. Both schools and at a later stage, Internet technology would ideally look to attaining the backing of those dynamics that non-provision threatens unrest.

[51] Lopez, Thomas and Wang ‘Addressing the Education Puzzle: The Distribution of Education and Economic Reform’ Policy Research Working paper (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1998) The paper also showed the speed of change to be very slow, a very marginal change over a 20 year period – the educational GINI has declined very slowly from 0.76 in 1970 to 0.69 in 1990. By contrast, Korea's educational GINI has plummeted from 0.51 to 0.22.

[52] Though this data may be misleading because of black money and high savings rates India and because of the broad base of assessment in GINI coefficients: where the entire top 20 percent of Indian population is taken into account. The gap would be a lot more drastic if the top 5 percent of the economy were considered in comparison, since the wealth is more selectively concentrated in that 5 per cent than in the top 20 per cent.

[53] Tata Consultancy Services’ National Literacy Mission is one such project.

[54] Website, UNESCO, http://www.unesco.org/courier/2000_03/uk/somm/intro.htm, India’s Barefoot College Generation, UNESCO courier (March 2000)

[55] Sahni, Urvashi, ‘Postcards from India: New workplaces and literacies’, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Vol 43 No 2, Oct 1999.

[56] The gender disempowerment quotient in the Digital Divide is another topic of study altogether. This can estimably be extremely high, especially in rural regions, where the public space is more than often restricted to the male members of the family.

[57] This also gives rise to a credible proposition that the economic structure of Indian industry does not support increased educational attainment at the rural levels where the migratory tendencies may be higher on account of the local economy being unattractive. Conversely, it can also mean that there are significant lackings in educational attainment because of parents' notions of the utility of the education, given that the child is seen as a future permanent resident of the village where there may be no support system for educated labour. Incentives obviously are terribly low to educate a child when there are no apparent advantages due to underdevelopment.

[58] Allowing opportunities for rural populations with capabilities to move towards urban areas may be one of the benefits of Internet communications, but it is certainly not the aim, nor should be perceived as such.

[59] Scherer, F.M., ‘Global growth though third world technological progress’, Issues in Science and Technology Vol 16 No 1 Fall 1999. India ranks behind only Russia and USA in the number of Science and Engineering graduates in the population. Although the Indian population is very large, the number is nevertheless hugely incongruent with the comparative literacy rates of other nations: China with far higher literacy rates and several times the number of school graduates still produces less engineers and scientists than India.

[60] Again, this is an obscure term: the municipal and government schools get their entire funding from state and central sources. However, an overwhelming majority of private schools are in fact government aided, only privately run. Consequently, if the government were to take on the initiative of connectivity to schools, it would have to essentially take on the burden of almost the entire primary and secondary schooling sector in India.

[61] The cost of one computer and Internet connection will at several rural schools be more than the entire budget of the school for the year. The cost of a computer and Internet connection will be greater than the yearly salary of an average village school teacher.

[62] Heeks, Richard, ‘Information and Communication Technologies, Poverty and Development’, IDPM Development Informatics Working Paper, No 5. (Manchester: University of Manchester, IDPM, 1999) The ‘intermediate’ as a stage in IT development is seen as one of the likelihoods in developing nations.

[63] Against this could be argued that GINI coefficients which measure inequality show India not to have extreme inequalities that nations of South America like Brazil do, but this may be misleading because the computations for GINI coefficients take into account the income quintiles, which in the case of India would include a majority of the ‘middle class.’ Instead if a computation were done on the basis of deciles or even income groups by 5 percent income increases, the differences between the lower several groups and the single highest group would be staggering.

[64] Often, these are much publicized. Two examples of such projects were the NIIT street kiosk in Kalkaji, Delhi and the TARAhaat.com project bringing the Internet to villagers. Of these, the NIIT project clearly did not threaten to offer large-scale results. TARAhaat, on the other hand, started off with interesting ideas but has stagnated. This project is discussed to greater detail later in the project.

[65] The project assumes a very high level of education and proficiency among users. Interestingly, the KSLC project defines itself as being a project for ‘lower middle classes and the poor.’

[66] An aside - it would be interesting to see a study on how the non-elite population of India has come to understand the word ‘Cyber’ in view of its sudden invasion in the Indian prefix market.

[67] Similar arrangements have been discussed by WorldTel with six more state governments in India. There is yet to be any official launch on the proposals. There was no follow-up available to the initial MOU signed between WorldTel and the Govt. of Maharashtra. The project at its most advanced stage of completion is the Tamil Nadu project – it does not provide free services, operating like a cyber café.

[68] The entire details of the policy package which includes the project providing Internet access to farmers is available online at http://www.mpgovt.nic.in/it/ITpolicy.html

[69] Despite its sparingly impressive performance so far, this project shows most promise in theoretical framework and plan for grassroots concerns.

[70] The National Institute for Agricultural Extension Management offers courses to farmers all over India on the use of technology for farming purposes. The costs involved and the format of instruction however make it clear that the direct benefits of this ‘rural development’ initiative is likely to be almost completely restricted to the most affluent farmers in the areas targeted.

[71] Chatterjee, Sumeet, ‘Digital Divide: Compelling Governments to Act’, India Abroad, November 24, 2000

[72] Clinton impressed by the fact that a illiterate village women get information on neo-natal care from the internet later stressed at a national conference on building prosperity, the need for similar community computer centers all over the Mississippi delta.

[73] Yadav, K.P.S. ‘Rural Infotech: Virtually there’, Down to Earth, Vol 9, No 18 Feb 2001.

[74] (WDR 2000-2001, Part I, Chapter 2 - http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/wdrpoverty/cont999.htm)

[75] Website: Department of Telecommunications, Government of India, http://www.dotindia.com/, accessed September 10, 2001.

[76] ‘58 pc villages have public telephones’, Business Line (The Hindu), April 8, 2000. The Department of Telecommunications states there are 3.53 lakh Village Public Telephones (VPTs), covering 58 percent of the total 6.07 lakh villages in the country. The report does not specify whether there are cases of more than one telephone in a village, thereby causing double count.

[77] Website: Rediff India, http://www.rediff.com/money/2001/jan/18reform.htm, accessed September 30, 2002, ‘660,000 villages untouched by India's economic reforms’, (January 18,2001)

[78] Jhunjhunwala, Ashok ‘Towards enabling India through Telecom and Internet connections’ in Telecommunications Reform in India, Dossani, Rafiq ed. (Westport, Conn: Quorum, 2002)

[79] Again, there is no guarantee that traditional problems like caste and religion will not creep into access issues - reasons cited for educational disempowerment such as the location of schools in areas dominated by certain castes or religions would apply just the same to the sole Internet connection of a village which would be accessible to some and inaccessible to others.

[80] As is already being done in the tariff structures of long-distance and local calling, with long distance heavily subsidizing the expenditure of keeping up local networks at points that do not promise economic viability but present the social need for connectivity nevertheless.

[81] Website: UCLA center for communication policy, http://ccp.ucla.edu/pages/StudyDescription.asp, accessed September 29, 2002, (Section: The Internet Project, Surveying the Digital Divide)

[82] Poftak, Amy, ‘Technology and Rural Education’ Technology and Learning, Vol 19 No 7 March 1999. Experiences of India are bound to be extremely different from those of the United States and other nations in the West, as is clear from published material on rural IT spread in the US – another study that supports this is Roberts, Lisa, ‘Sleepy little town turns High-Tech’ Home office Computing, Vol 19 No 1 January 2001. The common factor though can be seen as the resistance to technology, especially among the non-urban and aged populations - Wilcox, Jo Ann, ‘Technology for rural America’. Successful Farming, Vol 98 No 3 February 2000.

[83] It is interesting that the ageing of populations in several developed nations is seen as ominous to the support structure for their welfare systems. India might be victim to a different sort of pressure on its earning population. Although there is no existing welfare system, the proportion of the high-income elite to the low-skilled masses has the potential to exponentially increase the pressure on their taxed income over coming decades.