Asia Times: India reaps small IT benefit


	July 11, 2001	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

India reaps small IT benefit

NEW DELHI - A new United Nations report paints technology as both boon and bane for South Asia's 1.4 billion people, as critics begin to ask about the real costs of the information technology boom in countries such as India.

This year's Human Development Report, issued by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on Tuesday, adds a new measure called the "technology achievement index" that ranks 72 countries according to the ability to create and use technology.

The report and the index are replete with paradoxes in the play of technology in a region whose constituent countries figure dismally in terms of its human development index (HDI), a UN-developed yardstick of life expectancy, education and standard of living.

Nowhere are the paradoxes so pronounced than in India, which dominates the region with its billion-plus people and ranks 115th out of 163 countries on the HDI scale, but which has also emerged a leader in information technology.

The report notes, however, that despite having a world-class hub in Bangalore, which is comparable to those in the United States and Europe, India ranks only 63rd in the technology achievement index (TAI), behind Zimbabwe and Syria.

This is because Bangalore "is a small enclave in a country where the average adult receives only about five years of education", says the report, which adds, "The TAI shows that having a world-class technology hub is not sufficient to ensure the diffusion of technology across an entire country."

Increasingly, the new subcontinent's Internet-using elite identifies less with their digitally-deprived compatriots than with what Kenneth Keniston, an expert on the South Asian software industry, calls the "global digiterati".

The UNDP report notes that revenues from India's rapidly growing information technology industry jumped from US$150 million in 1990 to $4 billion in 1999.

But while this is often seen as a financial reward, the benefits of the information technology are being reaped by the privileged few in cities such as southern Bangalore. The phenomenon of Bangalore, which has close links with California's Silicon Valley, exists in India where adult illiteracy is at 44 percent, electricity consumption half that of neighboring China and still has just 28 telephones for every 1,000 people.

UN experts speaking about the report in Bangkok last week said India had not yet "diffused" the benefits of the information technology boom in selected hubs such as Bangalore. Likewise, highly qualified personnel migrate from their native developing countries, nullifying vast investments made in creating a labor force.

For instance, the Human Development Report says, "100,000 Indian professionals a year are expected to take visas recently issued by the United States - an estimated resource loss for India of $2 billion."

P R Sengupta, a former scientist at the US National Space Administration at Texas and now information technology advisor to the government, says remittances by overseas Indians and investments are only limited compensation for the huge brain drain suffered by South Asian countries. "Just as our participation in the first industrial revolution was as sources for cheap manpower and raw material, we are now turning out cheap cyber coolies for the information technology age," Sengupta says.

The UN report in fact cites proposals that countries such as India impose a tax on overseas employers and companies for every national who leaves the country to take up work in the IT sector overseas.

Still, information technology has had some uses for South Asia's communities. Farmers in South Asia are starting to get information on market prices using information technology, and fishermen are able to download satellite images of where the day's catch could be, the report says. It cites the example of cellular phone revolution in Bangladesh, which allows individuals, schools and health centers to get the information they need easily and cheaply.

Nepal's Healthnet has 150 user points around the mountainous country, reaching 500 health professionals and getting 3,000 hits a day on its website, the report notes.

But South Asia, along with sub-Saharan Africa, lags far behind other regions of the world with human and income poverty still high. More than 40 percent of people in the region are living on less than a dollar a day.

The technology revolution is, in fact, creating a new "network age" which is determining not only how technology is created and diffused across the world, but also which side of the digital divide a country or area within a country would be. This network age, observes the report, is structured along horizontal networks that leap across continents to link the Silicon Valley to Sao Paulo, Gauteng (South Africa) and Bangalore through organizations that focus on competitive niches.

Connecting a major portion of the population will be a challenge in developing countries, the report says. "But the digital divide need not be permanent if technological adaptations and institutional innovations expand access."

But skeptics say that the UN report may be relying too much on information technology when a lot of more basic poverty problems exist in the region and in other parts of the world. They say that there are other kinds of technology that ought to be given importance, though the UN report does cite technology contributions from the developing countries like anti-malaria treatment.

Food security experts and activists here are angered by the report's suggestion that "farmers and firms need to master new technologies developed elsewhere to stay competitive in global markets".

"This is to completely ignore the scores of technological alternatives to high-tech and biotechnology that have been developed by ordinary people around the world in areas like agriculture, medicine, industry and energy," says Devinder Sharma of the New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security.

Sharma says the report talked of "savage" inequalities that could stop the benefits of technology reaching the poor, but fails to recognize that technologies need to be built on the native capacities rather than alien ones. Argues Sharma, "The 2001 report's conclusions indicate that the UNDP can no longer be relied upon to stand by the on the side of the very people from whom it derives its credibility - the underprivileged millions across the world."

(Inter Press Service)

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