Political exigencies to announce and roll out welfare schemes must match national urgency to address educational goalsI firmly believe that the digital age can change our country for the good, if digital tools are used with a citizen-centric strategy. Information poverty is the most sustained and perennial misery that a vast majority of the population…
With the emergence and rapid following of social media representing citizens voices, it is no more that alternative media is following traditional mediaIn 2011, a few days after the fall of Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, a Jordanian newspaper published a joke doing the rounds in Egypt: “Why do the Tunisian youth demonstrate in…
For a country where right to information is a law, India can’t become rightly and equitably informed until we have the Internet in every householdLast week, the world gathered in Bali, Indonesia, for the 8th Internet Governance Forum (IGF). While IGF is a non-decision-making body with multi-stakeholder participation that discusses all aspects of the Internet…
The poverty of resources in Ratnauli and adjoining villages is so abject that people talk about availability of print-outs from CIRC as a magic wandInformation is a great enabler for the educated as well as the illiterate. For many, Internet is the biggest junkyard of information. Yet, for many, the junkyard is a source of…
Getting the right amount of information at the right time is vital to making India tuberculosis-freeCan digital intervention and adoption of information communication technology (ICT) tools save 300,000 TB patients from dying every year? Health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said recently that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has in its two terms in office taken…
The average life of a mobile device in India is eight years, perhaps the longest compared with anywhere in the world. How? A majority of us are familiar with the front yard of the mobile landscape: the device, the design, the cost, the features, navigability, access and connectivity. Not unreasonably. We are living in a…
There is a buzz of excitement among Pashtun women in Pakistan. Corridors in Peshawar filled with news of extremism, for some extent at least, has been taken over by a teenage blogger. She writes her blog for the New York Times. It is a story of Sher Bano’s incredible courage that has brought the issue…
The Telecom Commission plans to use Rs.3,000 crore from the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) to provide mobile connectivity to 56,000 villages identified as mobile and telecom shadow areas. While USOF does that, we should not ignore the fact that out of the 867.02 million mobile subscribers (as of April) in the country, not more than…
Various examples show the role mobile phones can play to trigger social and behavioural changes in India Not many of us are aware of the role that mobile phones can play to trigger social and behavioural changes in India. Let us look at a few examples. Mobile Kunji has been implemented in eight districts under…
If you have no electricity, you can survive despite inconvenience; if you have no pucca house, you still survive on thatched shelters; if you have bad roads, you can still communicate on the patched roads. But if you don’t have sound health, you simply lose your life. That’s what happens in villages of India. The fundamentals of…
