What can IT Industry do for India?

IT industry's contribution to the resurgence of India as a major economic power on the global stage need not be over-emphasised. What can it do for the transformation of Indian society? And, why should we burden the industry with a 'social obligation' ? Why should it be expected to do more than what happens automatically from its normal business operations ?

These are some of the questions which Amartya Sen dwelt upon in his Keynote Address at the NASSCOM 2007 India Leadership Forum in Mumbai earlier this month on "I.T. and India". He talked about the possibility of the IT industry to reach out beyond its traditional domain. While acknowledging the enormous contributions made by the industry, the nobel laureate emphasised that it can do even more, indeed in some ways, much more.

"This is partly because the reach of information is so wide and all-inclusive, but also because the prosperity and commanding stature of the IT leaders and activists give them voice, power and ability to help the direction of Indian economic and social development."

Full text of the address is available at The Hindu website. This is a must read for all Indian IT professionals. I am highlighlighting some important points from the lecture.

Amartya Sen has elaboarted on the connections between the success of IT in India and some particular features of India's past - intellectual traditions of Indian society that have tended to support the pursuit of specialized excellence, a general attitude of openness influences from far and near, etc.

Social obligations of the IT industry go beyond the very obvious charitable activities such as building hospitals, research centres and other social institutions which have traditionally been performed by Indian industry, including many of the major IT leaders. As information is key to societal change, the IT industry can take a central role in this regard and make a big difference.

"As it happens the key to the success of IT, namely accessability, systematization and use of information is also very central to social evaluation and societal change. There is, in fact, a very foundational connection between information and social obligation, since the moral - and of course the political - need to pay attention to others depends greatly on our knowledge and information about them."

........"This foundational connection also gives the information industry a huge opportunity to help India by trying to make its contribution to the systematization, digestion and dissemination of diverse clusters of information in India about the lives of the underdogs of society - those who do not have realistic opportunity of getting basic schooling, essential health care, elementary nutritional entitlements, and rudimentary equality across the barriers of class and gender. This can also be said about problems of underdeveloped physical infrastructure (water, electricity, roads, etc.), as well as social infrastructure, that restrain the broad mass of Indians from moving ahead. There are particular causal connections also here: an enterprise that hugely depends on the excellence of education for its success - as the IT sector clearly does - has good reason to consider its broad responsibility to Indian education in general."

India's Mobile Revolution - the Great Leveler

The story of growth of mobile networks in India is nothing but revolutionary. The booming Indian telecom industry is adding over six million mobile connections every month and it is connecting various sections of society like taxi drivers, paanwallahs, farmers, fisherfolk.

Shashi Tharoor in a recent article published in International Herald Tribune says that the “mobile miracle” has accomplished something India's old Socialist policies talked about but did little to achieve — it has empowered the less fortunate. Hailing the transformation of India in communications as dramatic, he says the cell phone revolution is exciting not only as a sign of India's economic transformation, but as a symptom of something far more important, a change in the attitude of India's governing classes.

“Now to anyone who grew up in pre- liberalization India, that is astonishing. Bureaucratic statism committed a long list of sins against the Indian people, but communications was high up on the list; the woeful state of India's telephones right up to the 1990s, with only eight million connections and a further 20 million on waiting lists, would have been a joke if it wasn't also a tragedy — and a man-made one at that.”

Decrying the government's indifferent attitude to the need to improve communications infrastructure in the pre-liberalisation era, Shashi Tharoor says that perhaps the key contribution of the government has been in getting out of the way — in cutting license fees and streamlining tariffs, easing the overly complex regulations and restrictions that discouraged investors from coming in to the Indian market, and allowing foreign firms to own up to 74 percent of their Indian subsidiary companies.

Future of Internet – Towards Balkanisation?

Experts have warned that internet could one day be broken up into separate networks around the world. According to a BBC report, Nitin Desai, ‘a leading light in the development of the net’ and chairman of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), warned that concerns over the net's future could lead to separation and a 'Balkanisation' of the net. He was speaking at a conference in London organised to discuss the development of internet. The conference had been organised by Nominet, the UK body in charge of .uk domain names, ahead of the first-ever Internet Governance Forum to be held in Athens, Greece later this month.

Mr. Desai said there were tensions about the future regulation of the net and over specific issues such as international domain names. Five years from now, there will be many more internet users in Asia than Europe or America and there will be more Chinese web pages than English pages, according to him. People are concerned about whether the system we have now will also work five years from now.

Other speakers at the conference also echoed the concern. Professor Howard Williams of World Bank said the debate around future regulation of the web rested on the assumption that there would be a single web in the future. "Why would the technology we have at the moment be the ubiquitous technology across the world in the future?" he asked, while saying that 'Balkanisation' was already happening. The BBC report titled "Warning over 'broken up' internet" can be accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6037345.stm.

The debate on various issues related to internet governance is expected to generate more heat in the coming months. The issues will figure prominently at the forthcoming IGF Athens 2006, the inaugural meeting of the IGF (30th October – 2nd November). IGF is a body set up by the UN to accommodate multi-stakeholder policy dialogue in the field of internet governance. It seeks to bring together all stakeholders - states, private sector and civil society. Inaugural Meeting of the Forum will focus on the overall theme of “Internet Governance for Development” and the sub-themes of “Openness” (freedom of expression, free flow of information, ideas and knowledge), “Security” (creating trust and confidence through collaboration), “Diversity” (promoting multilingualism and local content) and “Access”(internet connectivity: policy and cost).