Internet India
Tamil Nadu, India
I had just travelled along the Delhi to Jaipur road. It took an age to get out of the city. Delhi seemingly goes on forever. The bus fought its way through traffic jams, people, urban sprawl and more urban sprawl. As we passed the Indira Gandhi International Airport, I thought “At last – we must be nearly out of the city”. Officially, we probably were. But I didn’t account for the new developments. It must have been about another forty minutes before we encountered countryside.
The Delhi-Jaipur route is fascinating. It is where hi-tech India meets rural India. The edge of the Delhi conurbation is now scattered with ugly high rise apartment blocks. I can never work out whether it is they that are grey and dismal, or it is the haze that makes them appear that way. They are too far in the distance to provide me with an answer. From the distance, they look as though they were inspired by Soviet era planning. Maybe from close up they are beautiful. I doubt it. Nearer to the road, however, is hi-tech Delhi. Office blocks gleam in their newness and would not look out of place in Manhattan or Hong Kong.
As we follow the road, we eventually hit greenery. Within another hour or so we are in Rajasthan. The contrast with that part of the road which leads out of Delhi cannot be more striking. Village women walk along dirt paths close to the road, dressed in long yellow veils. They look as though they have just time travelled forward from two hundred ago. They carry pots on their heads and are covered from head to toe with and jewellery. The hardships of rural India are etched into their darkened, sun-baked faces. Tall, elegant village men dressed in white and wearing traditional head gear cycle and walk along the tarmac. This is bullock-cart India.
People in the West used to section the world according to First, Second and Third World terminology. Those are outdated stereotypes, and even then they were misguided. But in the age we live in global corporate capitalism is everywhere. Its monuments, the shiny office blocks, are no longer as confined as they were to Western cities. To use the old terminology – The “First World” is now firmly entrenched in the “Third”. You do not have to look at the office blocks in Delhi or to survey the IT parks near Bangalore or Hyderabad to know this, but it kind of reinforces it.
So what has all of this got to do with the internet? Well, if hi-tech India has now crawled its away along the Delhi-Jaipur road it does not stop there. The internet in particular is clawing its way into rural India. It is already on just about every major street in every town. Internet cafes abound. Some are nothing more than box rooms with three or four machines crammed in. From the outside the building may look like a crumbling shed on a cow-infested, muck strewn street; but inside is the majestic PC. Others are larger, modern enterprises, with rows after row of machines.
These days, the internet and computer technology are no longer confined to middle class urban dwellers. Schemes exist to give slum children access in Mumbai, and agencies such as the SwamiNathan Research Foundation support putting “knowledge centres” into villages in Tamil Nadu, close to Pondycherry. The centres have been effective in empowering rural communities with information in the fields of environment, health, sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, meteorology, markets and prices. For example, in a coastal village inhabited by fisher families, the women download from the internet each evening information on the likely wave heights in the sea adjoining their village at various distances from the shore line. This information is broadcast throughout the village through loudspeakers. The fishermen then have access to accurate information on sea conditions before they set out for fishing in their wooden boats.
“Development”, if it is to mean anything, has to make the benefits of technology available to people in a way that is meaningful to them. And that does not mean being subjected to western inspired, urban-led consumerism while sitting in front of global TV with eyes wide shut.
I am sure there are dozens, maybe hundreds of organisations across India attempting to bridge the digital divide with various projects. Globalisation without ethics or equity may be the unstated logo for the rich and powerful, but not seemingly for everyone. Giving rural people access to IT may not in itself bridge the cleavages between rich and poor in the world, but it is about planting a seed from which something better may grow.
