ICT's and the Resource-Poor
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If equity, justice, redressal are not built into our ICT strategies, all we will have accomplished is to upgrade our worlds, not change them. A colleague from Andhra spoke of how a person with a disability had accessed financial assistance through the government's ICT kiosks, and how, immediately after, a Panchayat official had come up to this person, and had asked him to ‘deposit' the funds with him.
If technology only strengthens the hold our ‘Babus' and our traditional village heads – the ‘Gowdas' and ‘Patils' – have on our world, if it does not contribute to changing their behaviour, then is the world really a better place just because we now have a ‘Laptop Gowda'? ICT's provide an opportunity to make a quantum change in our social constructs. Unfortunately, while business has seen the many windows of opportunity that ICT's offer, the traditional development world is still blind to this. Technology is seen to be too expensive, too far-removed from day-to-day poverty and, often, irrelevant. In SAMUHA, we have focussed on the information that this technology carries, and its relevance to the world we live in rural Karnataka. Our remote sensed application provides an opportunity for our thrift cooperatives to access significant credit to help their members as a group to develop their natural resources – land, water, vegetation, livestock, minerals. Our wireless telemetric rain gauges, we believe, will take politics out of crop insurance claims, and allow it to function as a safety net, as it should, for our farmers who are dependent on the rains for their livelihoods. CK Prahalad and Stuart Hall have done a good job on focussing the technology world's attention on the market opportunities that exist at the Bottom of the Pyramid. But they also take us into the past, into the days of strip mining: the technology world is only talking of what it sales it can extract from the Great Indian Rural market. We believe that you need to take a longer term view, and invert the Great Indian Pyramid: help our people to look after their stomachs, and they will not only sustain themselves, they will sustain the markets of this world.” Source: Samuha More |
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