 |
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
|
| |
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|
When we got going
nearly four years
ago, ICT for development
wasn’t such
a fashionable issue;
hardly anyone
seemed to be aware
of its potential and,
fortunately, there
was far far less funding
involved. Not
that our own initiative at BytesForAll was
particularly insightful. To be frank, we
stumbled onto it largely by accident.
June is the month for the outbreak of the monsoons in parts of South Asia. It was then, in 1999, that the first seeds of BytesForAll were planted in one’s mind. The goal at that stage was just a limited one: could we collate information of how ICT is being, and can be, used for ‘development’? Or, to help meet the needs of the commonman? A small number of experiments were already being conducted on the ground. If this information was circulated widely, couldn’t it influence at least a handful of more techies to look at this perspective? And, if enough enthusiasm was built over this, couldn’t it become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy on what ICT could actually deliver? After all, South Asia’s, and particularly India’s, techies have a notorious gap between potential and performance. On the one hand, this is a region with an undeniable huge amount of software skills. But, at the same time, apart from employing this to earn the export dollar, we don’t even have the basic software to meet the needs of our own people. For instance, our kids can easily learn the geography of the United States using a slick jigsaw-puzzle type of game. But one has yet to see something parallel when it comes to learning about India. We have millions of school-children, but very little educational content for them. Even today, ‘educational CDs’ often end up being little more than text-books-on-CDs. India is home to some of the widest spoken languages in the globe. But our low purchasing power means that computing is yet to become feasible in many of these. Of late, that reality is fast changing, though. We can expect breakthroughs in the near future. But it could come faster if issues like these are persistently put onto the agenda of public priorities. Interested? Read the complete article here. |
|
|||||||||
Features