A structural transformation of the Indian economy with a view to achieve high and sustained rate of growth and improvement in the standard and quality of living of the people with the eradication of the poverty to unemployment was conceived as a basic strategy of its planning so that the foundations of modern self reliant economy could be laid down.
Cultivation of high value but low water requiring crops like pulses and oil seeds are essential to conserve water resources. For this, weather information is highly essential for villagers on account of vagaries of monsoon. Thus, short, medium and long range weather forecasting is very useful for crop planning. The follow up action on the basis of weather forecasting is known as functional meteorological package.
A small farmer is not having free access to credit technology and remunerative markets. The smaller the farm, the greater is the need for marketing, surplus to derive some cash income. It is only by helping such farmers to overcome their handicaps that small farms can become instruments for green revolution. The green revolution is characterized by enhancement of productivity in perpetuity without associated ecological harm. The villagers demonstrated through the green revolution that they are ready to help the country if empowered. The most important step to take, in bringing about such empowerment is the effective and meaningful use of modern information and communication technologies, which highlight the basic point that they have the potential to help the lower strata of society relatively to a larger extent as compared to the higher classes. Some major applications on convergence that would be of interest are discussed below.
Health Services
Many of the villages and even small towns have no access to good health facilities. Even at the district level, doctors may lack expertise to diagnose and treat complicated cases. When it comes to surgery, the situation is even worse. Surgeons capable of handling difficult cases are hard to find in hospitals and patients often have to go to private hospitals for treatment. The first step is to make medical data bases available to doctors in smaller towns, with diagnostic software to enable them to make better diagnosis. Secondly they could be given access to more qualified doctors through streamed audio, interactive web sites and even video conferences where at particular fixed times, specialized doctors give advice to patients or other doctors directly.
In surgery, the potential to introduce video-based skill up gradation and consultation is great. Consultation, both on line and off the line could help doctors to consult eminent surgeons located in different cities on diagnosis and advice on the modes and procedures of surgery. Skill up gradation courses could be organized where doctors could upgrade their skills through lecture sessions, video films and video conferences conducted on line. The time they need to devote being much smaller, the present reluctance of doctors to upgrade their skills can be overcome to some extent. Old people share their traditional medical knowledge and make it available at the knowledge centres for various purposes to help improve their centres.
Development of education
The primary school education is essential for the quality of manpower in India in the long run. Unfortunately enrolment ratios are still low, and the drop out ratio before they complete the primary school is high. The main reasons for this are not poverty or unwillingness of parents to send the children to school, but the poor quality of teaching. Teachers do not go to the classes, and frequently text books are not available in the market. Interest in education can be kindled among the students and teachers through non-conventional means. We are aware that this cannot be done in many villages that do not have electricity or in the interior parts, but it may still be possible to do it in relatively large villages and smaller towns.
The application of computer in classes can be done at any time, and this would be especially so if we have video-on-demand services. Repetition of classes for different batches with little cost is possible. One group of children, for example, can be taught in the morning and another in the evening. Standardization of quality of teacher and materials and more effective pedagogy through better design of visuals can be achieved. The non-conventional learning methods can be adopted through subtitling of film songs and advertisements that arouse and sustain interest. School teachers can use educational CD’s to improve and update the science/arithmetic knowledge of the children.
Another application, which may be useful to high school students, is in having virtual magazines, newspapers and libraries. Many newspapers and some magazines are already available on the web. These can be downloaded and viewed by group of students, with commentaries from teachers. This would enhance their awareness of events.
A perennial problem in the Indian school system is the shortage of text books. Due to frequent revisions in the syllabi, new text books are not written frequently, besides, these are rarely completed. Very often, students get their text books when they have finished half their courses in a year. With internet, the drafts of the text books can be first put on the internet, Inviting comments, and after finalization, can be put up on the internet for public downloading. The students could download their text books directly, and various publishers can also download these and print them. In higher education, new courses can be offered on line. This would make higher education available to a far greater number of students than at present.
Development of e-commerce
The mobile phones and the internet provide rural people with a whole gamut of information they had no access to before. The fishermen in coastal India use mobile phones in high seas to get information about the weather, and about the prices in different markets before they come ashore, so that they can directly go to the most promising market of the day. Many rural entrepreneurs sell their mobile services to people on the move, especially truckers who would like to keep in touch with their clients and families. The stock market quoted and commodity prices are available on mobile phones in India and people are transacting business through SMS messages. The people in rural areas and smaller towns have to depend on brokers and sub-brokers for their stock market transactions.
E-Governance
By far the greatest impact of convergence is likely to be on the quality of governance, introducing a much higher degree of transparency. At present, information is a closely guarded commodity with the bureaucracy, and this leads to corruption, inefficiency and lack of accountability. The success of computerized Railway reservations in India gives an excellent example of how information technology has transformed a corruption ridden system to a virtually clean system. With broadband connectivity between cities, the reservation system, first introduced in the seventies, is now available in 700 locations. The villagers can get their tickets from reservation counters, with their berth number for trains from any station to any station. Recently in Delhi and Chennai, people can access the system themselves and make reservations, the tickets being delivered home.
Though it seems far fetched now, similar services can be made possible for applications such as passport, ration card, driving licenses, voter’s identification card and Income Tex Permanent Account Number Card. It is difficult for one who is not acquainted with the problem of rural areas and smaller towns to understand what such simple initiatives can mean to the inhabitants of those areas. People had to spend a day for each of the above activities. For example, they would have to come to the district headquarters to see the examination results.
Recently Prime Minister inaugurated a village resource centre (VRC) project. The VRC Project is a partnership made to uplift the life and livelihood of rural India. It aims to promote single window delivery need based services in the areas of education, health nutrition, weather, environment, agriculture and livelihood to rural women and men. The VRC’s will handle both dynamic and generic information to empower rural communities through spatial information infrastructure including broadband, internet, telephone and fax.
Rural knowledge centres based on an integrated application of view communication technologies, like the internet and cable TV as well as conventional ones like community can become effective instruments for harnessing the power of partnership among professionals, political leaders and public policy makers, the general public and rural families. Such partnerships alone can help to bridge the growing divide between scientific know-how and field level do-how.
In India, there is a growing recognition of the newer and wider possibilities that Information and Communication Technology presents before the society in the recent times. Many governments have started taking actions in delivering information and Information Technology enabled services to the citizens for making the lives of the people better and more comfortable in several ways using Internet Cable TVs.
The technological changes, convergence, and deregulation are taking place throughout the world including in India. Hence, specific road map needs to be prepared to apply information immediately to arrest many challenges considering our own requirements and priority. The role of government should help the rural communities to share the information on best practices and to help develop the internet economy it may help the farmers in selling agricultural products utilizing health services and developing primary education.
Autor(en)/Author(s): DR. B A Kumar
Quelle/Source: Greater Kashmir, 16.10.2006
