By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 17 2002 (IPS)

India’s digital divide is an ever-widening chasm that separates a narrow upper crust of band-width hungry urbanites from the vast majority of their malnourished, illiterate countrymen, who may have to walk days just to get to the nearest working telephone.

At a symposium marking World Telecom Day on Friday, industry leaders and policy makers concurred that India is not going to make any headway in bridging the digital divide unless the telecom infrastructure is improved and the money found to do that.

“In the Indian context, bridging the digital divide essentially means bridging the teledensity divide between rural and urban areas,” said R R N Prasad, member of the Telecom Regularoty Authority of India (TRAI).

“The major metropolises are at par with some of the developed countries but rural areas in states like eastern Bihar and Orissa states are worse off than several of the least developed countries (LDCs),” he explained.

Barely a decade ago, India and China, the world’s two most populous countries, had about five million telephone lines each. But while India now has 50 million connections, China has some 150 million connections — and is adding to it at the rate of 25 million connections every year.

Speakers at the symposium attributed India’s slow telecommunications expansion, compared to its giant neighbour, to a number of factors, including tight bureaucratic control, poor policies and inadequate investment by private companies and lack of funds of the government, which until recently held monopoly control.

Shyamal Ghosh, chairman of the Telecom Commission and secretary in the Department of Telecom (DoT), said the privatisation of telecommunications pursued since 1994, has brought in investments.

But these are concentrated in the profitable urban centres because private players are unwilling to invest in the non-profitable rural areas, where 70 percent of India’s one billion people live, he added.

Ghosh said this is a pity because investment in the rural areas could transform the lives of millions of farmers — not only in terms of freeing them from the stranglehold of middleman traders with reliable, real-time market information — but also getting to them and their families virtually non-existent health care and educational facilities.

“Unfortunately telecom networks are designed for people who can afford to pay around 35 dollars in monthly bills and very few people in the rural areas can afford that,” said Ashok Jhunjhunwalla, a professor at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).

Jhunjhunwala, who has been working at technological solutions that could make telephone connections cheaper and more reliable, said much of the problem has to do with “last mile connectivity”.

This means the existing telephone infrastructure cheaply and efficiently carries telephone signals over long distances, but becomes costly and falters when it branches out into homes.

His solution, increasingly popular in southern Tamil Nadu states, uses radio waves to beam telephone signals from local exchanges into homes within a 10 km radius, using wireless in Local Loop (WiLL) technology.

Feeling threatened, private cellular telephone companies petitioned the Supreme Court for a stay, but the court has refused to oblige and said technology could not be held down.

Apart from reliable voice communication, this revolutionary technology also provides reliable fast and affordable Internet at 70 kbps (kilobits per second), says Jhunjhunwala, who thinks it could become a model for other developing countries. Already it has been licensed to a few companies in Singapore, Tunisia, Brazil, Kenya, Fiji, Argentina and Nigeria.

Supported by solar-powered relay stations, the system can work in an extended radius of up to 25 km making it useful in rural areas that have no electricity supply and where expensive cabling is not practical.

In Tamil Nadu’s Nellikuppam district, sugar-cane farmers are already using a WiLL system to check their accounts with a local sugar mill and also market prices of fertiliser and pesticides.

The system has spawned numerous Internet connections and Internet kiosks run by villagers in the area surrounding Nellikuppam. The facility is expected to be extended to 200-odd surrounding villages in a 25 km radius, benefiting over 25,000 farmers in the region.

In central Madhya Pradesh state, the WiLL system is being used by the state government to help farmers access land records and also check on agricultural prices and also make complaints, in a prime example of e-governance.

But groaning under basic problems such as illiteracy, malnutrition and sheer poverty, India’s rural populace may as well living on a planet different from say Bangalore, which, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) human development report for 2001 is better off than many cities in the United States, Europe and Japan when it comes to technological innovation.

In fact, among the 46 cities identified in the report, Bangalore secured a joint fourth slot along with San Francisco and Austin in the United States and the Taiwanese capital of Taipei. It is even ahead of New York, Montreal, Cambridge, Dublin (where the European Media Lab is located), Tokyo, Paris, Melbourne, Chicago, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

The report clearly brought out India’s digital divide between a few urban centres and the vast rural hinterland. Among India’s 1.4 million Internet connections, more than 1.3 million are cornered by the states of Delhi, southern Karnataka (of which Bangalore is capital) , Tamil Nadu and western Maharashtra.

But the UNDP report also took note of Jhunjhunwala’s WiLL technology in providing Internet access as well as the Simputer, a cheap hand-held computer that allows users to handle sound files and e-mail through icons on a touch-sensitive screen, overcoming the language and literacy barrier.

Developed by the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) in Bangalore, the simputer (short for simple computer) is due to ship later this month. Costs have been pared down using free Linux software and cheap chips and the final shelf price is expected to be under 250 dollars.

A WiLL kiosk with a personal computer, printer, telephone, a power source can be set up at total cost of 900 dollars, which compares well with the present average cost to the government of providing a telephone line – 800 dollars.

In the late eighties, the Centre for Development of Telecom (CDOT), the government’s research and development wing for telecommunications, indigenously developed rugged electronic switches that worked without the need for airconditioning.

CDOT switches, available at a third of the cost of imported equipment, continue to support half of all the telephone exchanges working in India.

But along with privatisation and globalisation came big transnational corporations with their high priced equipment, which Jhunjhunwala said could only ensure that telecommunications services remain unaffordable to most Indians.

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