[chapter-delegates] Fwd: Economist: skeptical take on telecenters & ICT4D

[Veni Markovski]

FYI, if you've missed it:

>Behind the digital divide
>Mar 10th 2005
>The Economist
>
>
>Development: Much is made of the ⌠digital divide■ between rich and poor. 
>What do people on the ground think about it?
>
>IN THE village of Embalam in southern India, about 15 miles outside the 
>town of Pondicherry, Arumugam and his wife, Thillan, sit on the red earth 
>in front of their thatch hut. She is 50 years old; he is not sure, but 
>thinks he is around 75. Arumugam is unemployed. He used to work as a 
>drum-beater at funerals, but then he was injured, and now he has trouble 
>walking. Thillan makes a little money as a part-time agricultural 
>labourer≈about 30 rupees ($0.70) a day, ten days a month. Other than that, 
>they get by on meagre (and sporadic) government disability payments.
>
>In the new India of cybercafИs and software tycoons, Arumugam and Thillan, 
>and the millions of other villagers around the country like them, seem 
>like anachronisms. But just a few steps outside their section of the 
>village≈a section known as the ⌠colony■, where the untouchables 
>traditionally live≈the sheen of India's technology boom is more evident in 
>a green room equipped with five computers, state-of-the-art solar cells 
>and a wireless connection to the internet. This is the village's Knowledge 
>Centre, one of 12 in the region set up by a local non-profit organisation, 
>the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF). The centres, 
>established with the aid of international donor agencies and local 
>government support, offer villagers a range of information, including 
>market prices for crops, job listings, details of government welfare 
>schemes, and health advice.
>
>A conservative estimate of the cost of the equipment in the Embalam centre 
>is 200,000 rupees ($4,500), or around 55 years' earnings for Thillan. 
>Annual running costs are extra. When asked about the centre, Thillan 
>laughs. ⌠I don't know anything about that,■ she says. ⌠It has no 
>connection to my life. We're just sitting here in our house trying to survive.■
>
>Scenes like these, played out around the developing world, have led to 
>something of a backlash against rural deployments of new information and 
>communications technologies, or ICTs, as they are known in the jargon of 
>development experts. In the 1990s, at the height of the technology boom, 
>rural ICTs were heralded as catalysts for ⌠leapfrog development■, 
>⌠information societies■ and a host of other digital-age panaceas for 
>poverty. Now they have largely fallen out of favour: none other than Bill 
>Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, derides them as distractions from the 
>real problems of development. ⌠Do people have a clear view of what it 
>means to live on $1 a day?■ he asked at a conference on the digital divide 
>in 2000. ⌠About 99% of the benefits of having a PC come when you've 
>provided reasonable health and literacy to the person who's going to sit 
>down and use it.■ That is why, even though Mr Gates made his fortune from 
>computers, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, now the richest charity in 
>the world, concentrates on improving health in poor countries.
>
>The backlash against ICTs is understandable. Set alongside the medieval 
>living conditions in much of the developing world, it seems foolhardy to 
>throw money at fancy computers and internet links. Far better, it would 
>appear, to spend scarce resources on combating AIDS, say, or on better 
>sanitation facilities. Indeed, this was the conclusion reached by the 
>recently concluded Copenhagen Consensus project, which brought together a 
>group of leading economists to prioritise how the world's development 
>resources should be spent (see articles). The panel came up with 17 
>priorities: spending more on ICTs was not even on the list.
>
>Still, it may be somewhat hasty to write off rural technology altogether. 
>Charles Kenny, a senior economist at the World Bank who has studied the 
>role of ICTs in development, says that traditional cost-benefit 
>calculations are in the best of cases ⌠an art, not a science■. With ICTs, 
>he adds, the picture is further muddied by the newness of the 
>technologies; economists simply do not know how to quantify the benefits 
>of the internet.
>
>The view from the ground
>
>Given the paucity of data, then, and even of sound methodologies for 
>collecting the data, an alternative way to evaluate the role of ICTs in 
>development is simply to ask rural residents what they think. Applied in 
>rural India, in the villages served by the MSSRF, this approach reveals a 
>more nuanced picture than that suggested by the sceptics, though not an 
>entirely contradictory one.
>
>Villagers like Arumugam and Thillan≈older, illiterate and lower 
>caste≈appear to have little enthusiasm for technology. Indeed, Thillan, 
>who lives barely a five-minute walk from the village's Knowledge Centre, 
>says she did not even know about its existence until two months ago (even 
>though the centre has been open for several years). When Thillan and a 
>group of eight neighbours are asked for their development priorities≈a 
>common man's version of the Copenhagen Consensus≈they list sanitation, 
>land, health, education, transport, jobs≈the list goes on and on, but it 
>does not include computers, or even telephones. They are not so much 
>sceptical of ICTs as oblivious; ICTs are irrelevant to their lives. This 
>attitude is echoed by many villagers at the bottom of the social and 
>economic ladder. In the fishing community of Veerapatinam, the site of 
>another MSSRF centre, Thuradi, aged 45, sits on the beach sorting through 
>his catch. ⌠I'm illiterate,■ he says, when asked about the centre. ⌠I 
>don't know how to use a computer, and I have to fish all day.■
>
>But surely technology can provide information for the likes of Thuradi, 
>even if he does not sit down in front of the computers himself? Among 
>other things, the centre in this village offers information on wave 
>heights and weather patterns (information that Thuradi says is already 
>available on television). Some years ago, the centre also used satellites 
>to map the movements of large schools of fish in the ocean. But according 
>to another fisherman, this only benefited the rich: poor fishermen, 
>lacking motorboats and navigation equipment, could not travel far enough, 
>or determine their location precisely enough, to use the maps.
>
>Such stories bring to mind the uneven results of earlier technology-led 
>development efforts. Development experts are familiar with the notion of 
>⌠rusting tractors■≈a semi-apocryphal reference to imported agricultural 
>technologies that littered poor countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Mr Kenny 
>says he similarly anticipates ⌠a fair number of dusty rooms with old 
>computers piled up in them around the countryside.■
>
>That may well be true, but it does not mean that the money being 
>channelled to rural technology is going entirely unappreciated. Rural ICTs 
>appear particularly useful to the literate, to the wealthier and to the 
>younger≈those, in other words, who sit at the top of the socio-economic 
>hierarchy. In the 12 villages surrounding Pondicherry, students are among 
>the most frequent users of the Knowledge Centres; they look up exam 
>results, learn computer skills and look for jobs. Farmers who own land or 
>cattle, and who are therefore relatively well-off, get veterinary 
>information and data on crop prices.
>
>
>⌠I'm illiterate,■ says one fisherman. ⌠I don't know how to use a computer, 
>and I have to fish all day.■
>
>Outside the Embalam colony, at a village teashop up the road from the 
>temple, Kumar, the 35-year-old shop owner, speaks glowingly about the 
>centre's role in disseminating crop prices and information on government 
>welfare schemes, and says the Knowledge Centre has made his village 
>⌠famous■. He cites the dignitaries from development organisations and 
>governments who have visited; he also points to the fact that people from 
>25 surrounding villages come to use the centre, transforming Embalam into 
>something of a local information hub.
>
>At the centre itself, Kasthuri, a female volunteer who helps run the 
>place, says that the status of women in Embalam has improved as a result 
>of using the computers. ⌠Before, we were just sitting at home,■ she says. 
>⌠Now we feel empowered and more in control.■ Some economists might dismiss 
>such sentiments as woolly headed. But they are indicators of a sense of 
>civic pride and social inclusiveness that less conventional economists 
>might term human development or well-being.
>
>A question of priorities
>
>Given the mixed opinions on the ground, then, the real issue is not 
>whether investing in ICTs can help development (it can, in some cases, and 
>for some people), but whether the overall benefits of doing so outweigh 
>those of investing in, say, education or health. Leonard Waverman of the 
>London Business School has compared the impact on GDP of increases in 
>teledensity (the number of telephones per 100 people) and the 
>primary-school completion rate. He found that an increase of 100 basis 
>points in teledensity raised GDP by about twice as much as the same 
>increase in primary-school completion. As Dr Waverman acknowledges, 
>however, his calculations do not take into account the respective 
>investment costs≈and it is the cost of ICTs that makes people such as Mr 
>Gates so sceptical of their applicability to the developing world.
>
>Indeed, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor at the Indian Institute of 
>Technology in Chennai (formerly Madras), argues that cost is the ⌠deciding 
>factor■ in determining whether the digital divide will ever be bridged. To 
>that end, Dr Jhunjhunwala and his colleagues are working on a number of 
>low-cost devices, including a remote banking machine and a fixed wireless 
>system that cuts the cost of access by more than half. But such innovation 
>takes time and is itself expensive.
>
>Perhaps a more immediate way of addressing the cost of technology is to 
>rely on older, more proven means of delivering information. Radios, for 
>example, are already being used by many development organisations; their 
>cost (under $10) is a fraction of the investment (at least $800) required 
>for a telephone line. In Embalam and Veerapatinam, few people actually 
>ever sit at a computer; they receive much of their information from 
>loudspeakers on top of the Knowledge Centre, or from a newsletter printed 
>at the centre and delivered around the village. Such old-fashioned methods 
>of communication can be connected to an internet hub located further 
>upstream; these hybrid networks may well represent the future of 
>technology in the developing world.
>
>But for now, it seems that the most cost-effective way of providing 
>information over the proverbial ⌠last mile■ is often decidedly low-tech. 
>On December 26th 2004, villagers in Veerapatinam had occasion to marvel at 
>the reliability of a truly old-fashioned source of information. As the 
>Asian tsunami swept towards the south Indian shoreline, over a thousand 
>villagers were gathered safely inland around the temple well. About an 
>hour and a half before the tsunami, the waters in the well had started 
>bubbling and rising to the surface; by the time the wave hit, a whirlpool 
>had formed and the villagers had left the beach to watch this strange 
>phenomenon.
>
>Nearby villages suffered heavy casualties, but in Veerapatinam only one 
>person died out of a total population of 6,200. The villagers attribute 
>their fortuitous escape to divine intervention, not technology. Ravi, a 
>well-dressed man standing outside the Knowledge Centre, says the villagers 
>received no warning over the speakers. ⌠We owe everything to Her,■ he 
>says, referring to the temple deity. ⌠I'm telling you honestly,■ he says. 
>⌠The information came from Her.■