[Reader-list] "India's New Mantra!"

[Arun Mehta]

At 4/17/2001, Monica Narula wrote:
>Sent to Sarai by Patrice Riemens:
>
>An article with the playful title "India's New Mantra: The
>Internet" appeared in the April 2001 issue of Current
>History,
>* On low penetration: "the Internet reaches less than 0.37
>   percent of India's citizens."

I really would be interested in determining how these numbers are arrived 
at. What are they counting: Internet accounts? E-mail accounts with an 
Indian address worldwide? There must be around 2.5 million Internet 
accounts in the country, and of course the entire family uses each. Then, 
there are the countless numbers who visit cybercafes. Oh, and do we count 
those who use SMS on their mobile phones to and from the Internet?


>* On costs: "it costs $700 to install a single telephone
>   line in India, making it prohibitive for more than 3
>   percent of the population to afford telephone lines."
>   (Currently, 2.2 percent do.)

Technology is helping here -- CorDECT (a wireless in the local loop last 
mile solution, developed at IIT Chennai by Professor Jhunjhunwala and team) 
cuts that cost to half. Better and cheaper solutions exist as well, not 
least of which is Internet telephony. However, the government is putting 
roadblocks where it can to prevent these cheaper technologies from being 
deployed. The problem is not cost, rather bad policies.

>* On literacy and language barriers: "61 percent of females
>   and 36 percent of males age seven above" are "unable to
>   read and write" in any language. English is "spoken only
>   by between 2 and 3 percent of India's population." Many
>   Indian languages "still need standardization in terms of
>   fonts, keyborads, and software for effective Internet
>   use."

We can overcome these barriers if we strengthen the ability of the Internet 
to work with audio input and output. To this list, therefore, I would add: 
speech recognition software that works with Indian languages.

>Only in 1999 were
>independent ISPs allowed to set up gateways for
>international Internet traffic.

In theory only: the conditions that apply are so rigid (particularly the 
requirement that diverse intelligence agencies must be able to 
independently run keyword searches on all traffic) that nobody has set one 
up for optic fiber cables so far.

>For the future, the article sees potential along two
>divergent paths: one private and the other
>community-based. The first involves putting set-top boxes in
>the houses of people with cable TV (there are 37 million
>households subscribing).

Cable modems are frightfully expensive. It is cheaper to simply do an 
Ethernet LAN.



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