Bridging digital divides

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  VIP convoys criss-cross the country on highways but not everybody is 
able to see their favourite leaders. Likewise information technology has 
been proclaimed as the icon of the current age, but it doesn't touch 
everybody's lives. "Despite all utopian drams, the Information Age has 
so far touched only a tiny majority of the world's population," write 
Kenneth Keniston and Deepak Kumar in /IT Experience in India/, published 
by Sage (www.indiasage.com <http://www.indiasage.com>) . "If we define 
household access to the World Wide Web as a criterion for joining the 
Information Age, less than 5 per cent of the world's population of 6 
billion had gained access by the year 2002."

Therefore, we need to bridge the divide. But there are "four digital 
divides", not just one: "The first is internal - between the 
digitally-empowered rich and the poor. The second is a 
linguistic-cultural gap between English and other languages and between 
`Anglo-Saxon culture' and other world cultures. The next gap is 
underscored by disparities in access to information technology and 
between rich and poor nations. Finally, there is the phenomenon of the 
`digerati'. This is an affluent elite possessing the appropriate skills 
and means to take advantage of the ICTs."

There are daunting statistics: That only 1 per cent of the country's 
population have home access to computers; of that, only a half has Net 
facility; more than 40 per cent of the one billion are illiterate; one 
in two newborns is below ideal birth weight; and only around 3 per cent 
can afford a telephone. Priorities could be different: With 60 million 
Indian children not in school, "for the cost of a computer, you can have 
a school."

Yet there are bold initiatives. An example: Veerampattinam, a coastal 
village with 98 per cent of the families involved in fishing, receives 
information on wave heights in the next 24 hours, downloaded from a US 
Navy Web site. "The information requirements in that village are 
focussed on the safety of fishermen while at sea, on fish/shoal 
occurrence near shore, and on techniques for post-harvest processing."

Reverting to the divides, how do we bridge them? By committing to that 
goal "the same intelligence and imagination that have gone into creating 
the technologies themselves." A simple reminder that nothing is 
impossible, nor any chasm that is uncrossable.

Source:
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ew/2004/04/14/stories/2004041400150200.htm