While Jobs’s gifts to humanity are not affordable to everyone, the $35 tablet shows Indian politicians’ desire to play to the gallery Developments in the information technology world have been catching the headlines in the last few days. We lost “magician” Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc., none of whose innovations I see being…
The bulk of the country and its social, economic and political institutions are yet to become a part of our touted information revolution In the year 2000, when I was compiling a book titled Internet Economy of India, my team calculated the money invested in the country for the Internet and related businesses. Dominated by…
Women at the bottom of the pyramid need health, education and empowerment information, but they are likely to need subsidized service, voice-based apps and training in using VAS. India ranks 122 out of 138 nations in the United Nations Development Programme’s gender equality index—and for good reason. Only 65% of Indian women are literate, compared…
The beauty of the sudden emergence of community radios in India is that they are designed to be for and by the community There are no school dropouts in the Gop block of Puri district in Orissa and it has nothing do to with the efforts of the government. For several years, nobody applied for…
India’s literacy rate has increased six times since the end of the British rule—from 12% to 74% in 2011. Yet, India has the world’s largest population of illiterates and, at the current rate of progress, it will take until 2060 for India to achieve universal literacy. Global literacy experts say 70% of Indians are functionally…
Our nominees are less about mind-boggling technology and more about the beneficent use of basic information tools such as landline or mobile phones, SMS, community radio, LCD projectors, television, local language websites and so on. Technology is as good as what it does. That is the basic principle on which we started our journey at…
The situation of Internet connectivity in India is like our roads. It is not about how much Internet is available in India, but the quality of its bandwidth Despite good roads in Indian metros, we take no less than half an hour to reach a distance of 5-10km. Certainly, the reason is traffic congestion, red…
I have not gone as deep into finding how much of the total outlay in the 12th Five-Year Plan each ministry and department has proposed as how they are going to use ICT (information and communications technology) for efficiency and the larger good of the masses and good governance. But I got a chance to…
