Addressing the Commonwealth Connects International e-Partnership Summit here, Kalam said if the Indian experience in connectivity was any guide to the creation of a Commonwealth-wide knowledge grid, the large-scale adaptation of local languages that empowered people to access and make use of technology would be needed. This, in turn, would power the spread of education, healthcare and a range of other crucial services to a wider base of people than ever before, he added.
Referring to bandwidth as a demolisher of knowledge-barriers, Dr Kalam also said providing it free made good economic sense in the long term, considering that the costs could be easily recouped from the boom in offtake of services and products that it would enable.
He pointed out that out of the one billion-plus people living in India, 70 percent still lived in six lakh-odd villages.
Kalam said the answer lay in creating four criss-crossing grids that would help break the connectivity barriers across Africa and India. The four grids were a knowledge grid, a health grid, an e-governance grid, and a rural grid.
The knowledge grid would link people through an information mesh where people could create value-added products for exchange and consumption. Also, he said it would help take the education agenda forward by shifting learning from being textbook-driven to being creative and experiential, one that could be accessed by a wider group of people.
Dr Kalam said there was an embryo of a health grid in place that meshed some Indian institutions with African countries. This grid had made possible telemedicine, which was a boon to people across Asian and Africa living in non-urban areas. He said that telemedicine was the answer to the primary healthcare issues facing the Commonwealth countries.
Communications and IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran said he hoped the meeting would break new ground in helping bridge the digital divide that prevailed among the countries of the Commonwealth and even with the countries themselves.
It was important that the benefits of new technologies reached people in all socio-economic strata, he said, adding that the spread of technology so far had been uneven and it was necessary on the part of the governments to correct this.
Maran pointed to the exponential impact that technology could have on governance and the developmental processes of the countries. In particular, he underscored the benefits from e-governance in areas like tracking of proposals in development projects, land records, law and order related data, and healthcare services.
Earlier, delivering the inaugural address, Chairperson Dr Michael Frendo observed that Commonwealth Connects was aimed at providing a common solution to the problems faced by many of the countries of the Commonwealth.
Dr Frendo said that new technologies could impact the governance processes across Indian and Africa in a positive manner and help with the better sharing of resources among them. He added that the e-Partnership initiative would allow the Commonwealth countries share solutions to problems with local adaptations.
Don McKinnon, Commonwealth Secretary General, quipped that if the Indian cricket team had been playing Sri Lanka, he couldn't have hoped for the kind of undivided attention that the audience was lavishing upon him.
The cellphones would be too busy buzzing with updates on the latest scores to allow that, he pointed out. That was one indicator of how deeply technology-particularly, mobile telephony and the Internet-- had seeped into people's everyday lives, he said. Then again, he ventured to add, they hadn't affected large numbers of people, especially in Africa and Asia all that much. And that imbalance was precisely what Commonwealth Connects had to correct.
He referred to what World Bank's President James D Wolfensohn had told him about the world's growth engine having three speed gears: the rich countries; the haves in the emerging economies, and the world's have-nots.
McKinnon said carrying the message on bridging the digital divide was a key result area for him.
Quelle/Source: DailyIndia, 23.03.2007
