Text of Round Table presentation on

The Digital Divide

by Srinivasan Ramani
Director, R&D, Silverline Technologies Ltd.

Bangalore, March 13, 2001

When a boy starts going to school he may unknowingly create a divide in his family, the Educational Divide. If he gets a job, he may create the Job Divide. Similarly, if he learns to use computers intelligently to increase his productivity, he will be creating a Digital Divide. Everything that improves human productivity becomes a potential divider. The agricultural revolution created the zamindars and the landless peasants. The industrial revolution created another class structure. Surely the information revolution will create its own gap, termed the digital divide. This is no longer a future threat. It is a matter of deep concern today to the parents of every school going student.

We need to look at many dimensions of the Divide. Some of them are:

• Employed Vs the Unemployed
• Urban Vs Rural
• Users of the Roman Script Vs Others
• The Well-to-do Student Vs the Others
• The Boy at School Vs the Girl

Jobs: A very imaginative step by the Govt of India had thrown open what we call STD Booths, almost a decade ago. These are kiosks retailing long distance telephone services, and can be seen by the roadside everywhere in India. Providing this service had been, earlier, the monopoly of the state. This opening up created over 300,00 new job opportunities. These are low paid jobs, but they are self-financing. We did not need any big budgetary provision to create them! These jobs are a shining example of what can be done by IT in job creation.

I believe that we can repeat this revolution all over again. A large number of cyber cafes are coming up, to serve those who do not have a PC, a telephone, and usually not even table space at home for a PC! A large number of shops are coming up, selling PCs to those who can afford them, mobile phones, and a whole variety of IT related equipment. All these places need to be staffed by well-trained employees. I believe that training large numbers of these technicians is far more important than creating a hundred more departments of computer science at the universities. The most important use of IT is to benefit millions of new users. Training technicians will serve this purpose, besides creating another 300,000 jobs.

An important part of the STD Booth revolution in India was the fact that it contributed to closing the gap between urban and rural areas to some extent. STD booths are needed everywhere. In fact, they are needed more in the rural areas, with a low telephone density, than in urban areas. Similarly, IT related kiosks and shops in rural areas would need trained technicians as much or more than the urban kiosks and shops.

The Tyranny of the Keyboard: The English language has dominated The Internet, and even more the Roman Script. Huge resources of the net are largely denied to users of other scripts. We need to do a lot to change this situation. But, perhaps the most important challenge is an R & D challenge. Speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies are waiting in the wings to create the next wave in the IT industry. Speech oriented interfaces make all human languages equal. Only computers that you can talk to can truly end the tyranny of the keyboard, which favours scripts such as the Roman Script. The
R & D effort required to create good speech interfaces poses a very important challenge to Asia. R & D people in Asia can do a lot more for our own languages than others working elsewhere.

The Divide at School: A major Divide I see in India is being increased by the differences between opportunities offered by different school systems. The better-managed schools contract with private parties to offer computer education as an optional activity, for which parents pay happily. However, the skills thus imparted are so basic to modern life that we need to share the benefits with more students. We need effective computer education, at the requisite level, as a part of the syllabus in all schools. Otherwise, we run the risk of vastly increasing the urban/rural divide; we also run the risk of magnifying the gender gap, because parents usually reserve optional items for the boys. We cannot allow students in publicly funded schools to be left far behind the ones in privately funded schools. I believe that getting computers into schools calls for a big national effort.

School Portals: Some possible projects can be quickly implemented, such as the creation of portals for schools. Schools can arrange for Internet access to go only through such a portal, enabling some selectivity in the content that is made available to the student. These portals can vastly reduce the cost of Internet access by making frequently desired information locally available. They can provide locally relevant content in the student's own language, and promote creativity by encouraging students to run widely accessible online magazines, all by themselves. And, of course, the government can allow schools to dial up into a low cost Internet access facility, specially creating it for supporting education.

A Low Cost PC: But, ultimately one will have to tackle the problem of the cost of computers required by schools. I estimate that schools in India need over five million computers to do their job well, but this is about as big as the total number of computers in India at present. I am not assuming that we should have one computer for every ten students as they do in advanced countries (see http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9908/18/education.portal.idg). My assumption is closer to one computer for every thirty students.

The cost of these computers will be of the order of two billion US dollars, spread over a number of years. The existence of such a huge market gives several Asian nations an enormous clout that we can use to ensure the production of sturdy, low cost computers for use in schools and in offices. They do not need many things that go with a PC designed for individual use, because they can use common resources on a local area network. It will be worth defining the requirement for a low cost "school computer", and encouraging industry to come up with suitable designs. Import duty as well as excise and sales tax exemptions, plus the willingness to buy an initial hundred thousand computers through one contract will electrify the Indian hardware industry, now in doldrums. What started as a low cost "people's car" became the Volkswagen. What we need now is a similar initiative to create a basic computer. The Indian government had, quite successfully, worked to bring out low-cost color TVs in the eighties, and contributed to the growth of the TV industry. This shows that the Indian environment responds well to initiatives like this.

I hope that a similar initiative can now be launched to bring the PC within reach of the average school.