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| .in India |
| Madanmohan Rao |
Overview Few other countries illustrate the vast potential and the domestic challenges of unleashing and harnessing ICTs as vividly as the billion-strong subcontinent of India. As a content-rich country with a free press, an affluent, tech-savvy, diaspora population spread across the world from the Silicon Valley and Sydney to Singapore and Southall, and a huge pool of cutting edge IT and design skills, India has a lot to offer the domestic and global Internet markets. But there is also the dark side to the proverbial coin: poor connectivity outside of the major cities, low levels of B2B activity online, and government policy foot-dragging in terms of creating a level playing field for infrastructure players. India has about 10 to 12 million Internet users, 8 million cell phone users and a teledensity of just over 3 percent in a country with close to half the population hovering around the poverty line. Though India is still by and large a developing nation, there is also a burgeoning information society within. Twenty-five percent of India’s workers are in the service sector, 60 percent in the agricultural sector, and 15 percent in industry. India has more information workers than Japan and the same number as the USA. Overcoming the digital divide in conjunction with other socioeconomic divides will remain one of the key development issues for decades to come. Innovations in low-cost devices have yet to reach take-off stage, and the open source movement is making notable but slight inroads into the education and government sectors. Standardisation of local language fonts and keyboards has been a stumbling block for local language digital content publication, though some initiatives are beginning to make headway. The youth -- especially in urban areas -- are very Net-savvy, and the gender divide is narrowing in this segment as well. At a time of growing religious conflict, the Internet is being used actively to spread messages of peace via Web-based signature campaigns and circulation of awareness-raising articles via e-mail. In terms of employment, the IT and IT-enabled services sector in India is a burgeoning industry and continues to draw significant pools of talent and energy, despite the current economic downturn globally. India seems to have cemented its position as the "outsourcing centre of the world"; and Indian software, services and content companies are gearing up to move up the value chain from basic services to products. In addition to tapping the global software market, having a sizeable domestic user base means India can sustain a lot of local infrastructure, content, foreign capital investment and an online market in general -- unlike other, smaller countries that need to focus much more on overseas markets. "No other nation provides a better example of the role of the new communication media in the development process through which a country moves from being an agriculture-based economy towards becoming an information society," according to Arvind Singhal and Everett Rogers (2001). Much attention has focused on the digital divide in developing countries as a question of lack of access to ICTs. The answers to bridging the gap, however, involve much more than basic Internet access. The key to unlocking ICTs for development involves a focus on a range of parameters which can be referred to as the 8 Cs of the digital economy: connectivity, content, community, commerce, capacity, culture, capital and cooperation (Rao, 2002). In other words, it is important to have affordable and widespread access to ICTs, locally relevant content in local languages, offline and online forums for discussing ICT applications, e-commerce services, human resource capacity, a culture which embraces innovation, investment capital, and cooperation between multiple stakeholders. This chapter will assess India’s digital environment along some of these parameters. Content India is an extremely content-rich country with a very free press: the news, culture, entertainment, sports and medical knowledge base of this country represents a formidable pool of content for the digital publishing industry. Like some other emerging economies, one peculiar feature of the Indian Internet scene has been that there were initially more Internet users of Indian origin outside the country than within. As a result, much of the initial push to create India-related content came from outside the country, especially from the academic and non-profit sectors in the USA, in the form of mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. As local diffusion of the Internet picked up, more content development work mushroomed at home. . . . . . the complete text of this chapter is available for purchase and immediate download as a PDF file, please click here for more information. |
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