Africa Study Centre Leiden, 6-8 September 2006

Democratizing potential of : Perspectives from the Developing World

Subbiah Arunachalam [email protected] , [email protected] M S Swaminathan Research Foundation 600 113,

This talk is about knowledge and development and bridging the divide between the elite and the marginalized.

I am going to discuss two questions: Does global exchange of information enable ubiquitous access to knowledge? How do information and communication technologies (ICTs) contribute to the solution or intensify global and local problems?

I want to show that only through sharing knowledge and building partnerships we can hope to make this world a harmonious place to live. We can use knowledge sharing to leverage development only by harnessing technology in innovative ways . I would also like to show the link between knowledge production in the sciences on the one hand and development through use of knowledge at the grassroots on the other.

How am I qualified to speak on these issues? I have felt the impact of ICTs on the developing world and I have been working for over ten years to overcome the deleterious consequences of ICTs in the context of the developing world, both at the level of scientists and scholars and at the level of the rural poor. Indeed I am fortunate to have had experience in both these areas. I want to share this experiential knowledge with all of you.

Let me begin with a real life situation that we in India were witness to. We had the general election in India two years ago and most Indians were especially happy about the election for two reasons. One, contrary to what is happening in many parts of the developing world, democracy in India is vibrant and we have been holding free and fair elections consistently for the past six decades. Two, despite outstanding achievements in the areas of ICTs and high tech, the ruling parties in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh (where the capital city of Hyderabad is called Cyberabad) and Karnataka (whose capital city Bangalore is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India) failed to return to power, largely because the rural poor who felt that the benefits of these technologies did not reach them voted against them. The Sensex – the index of the Indian Stock Exchange – has crossed 12,000 from a paltry 7,000 only two years ago; the software industry and business process outsourcing sector are booming and young men and women with computing skills are getting salaries unheard of in India a few years ago; a very large

1 number of Indian students are going to USA, UK, Australia, and elsewhere for higher studies and it is estimated that with the foreign exchange these students invest in overseas education annually India can build 30-40 Indian Institutes of Technology, those famous engineering colleges McKinsey’s Rajat Gupta considers to be the best in the world. While the knowledge-centric part of India is really making waves taking full advantage of ICTs, the large majority of the rural folks remain in the 19 th century hardly touched by technology. They registered their protest in the ballot box.

What can information and communication technologies do to help the poor? Can they do anything at all? As Muhammad Yunus has said, “we should not allow the future of mankind to be decided by the random needs, whims, and pleasures of individual users of ICT. Let there be a global vision, and a global commitment to translate this vision into reality through the use of ICT in the most creative ways. We must put the full power of ICT to use to accomplish the fond dreams of all ages: ending poverty and hunger, ensuring equality of all human beings, human rights for all, good governance, peace among nations, and so on.” Many other world leaders – such as Kofi Annan, Mankombu Swaminathan, James Wolfensohn and Mark Malloch Brown – have spoken in glorious terms about the tremendous potential of these new technologies for transforming the lives of the poor. The last few years have seen many initiatives that deploy ICTs in rural communities in many developing countries. Development agencies such as IDRC, IICD, GKP and Hivos support many ICT-enabled development programmes in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Poverty is much more than absence of money in one’s pocket. The poor have hardly any access to resources and services. Often generations in poverty lead people to a sense of utter hopelessness and deprive them of their sense of self-respect and dignity. They become increasingly marginalized and excluded. They lose their voice; they have virtually no say in what affects their lives.

We have always lived in an unequal world, but now the inequalities are widening far more rapidly than ever before. Virtually every new technology tends to exacerbate the inequalities that separate the rich from the poor.

It is mastery over technology that enabled the early adopters of industrial revolution technologies to colonize and exploit the rest of the world, in particular Africa and Asia. If you want technology to work for the poor you must make special efforts. It is like taking water uphill – it would not happen by itself; one needs to pump. In this talk I will describe from my own personal experience what may appear to be two widely different programmes where we are attempting to bridge the gulf dividing the rich from the poor through innovative use of information and communication technologies, and try to show how these two programmes are interconnected.

In the first part of my talk we will look at how we at MSSRF are trying to harness ICTs as part of a holistic strategy for alleviating poverty in rural India. I will show why the emphasis should be on people and the public commons approach rather than on technology. In the second part, we will look at how the advent of new technologies has

2 opened up the possibility for making knowledge distribution in the sciences a level- playing field so that researchers in Africa and Asia need no longer be denied access to information and swim against the current to make their own research results disseminated to researchers elsewhere.

We have seen in Pondicherry on the eastern coast of southern India rural families are ready to subscribe to a cable TV service and even to invest in a community antenna – which would cost a lot of money up front but would be cheaper in the long run than paying subscription to a cable TV service provider - even though they are poor and cannot afford three meals a day. People are ready to adopt technologies if they see some value in it. [Figure 1].

For the past eight years [since 1998] MSSRF has been working in many villages in Pondicherry where we have set up rural knowledge centres [with the support of International Development Research Center, Canada]. These knowledge centers are connected through a hybrid wired and wireless network and they provide information on agriculture, health, employment, weather, education, government entitlements, micro- enterprises training, etc. Although we use a variety of technologies, our focus is on the people, their context and their needs. Today we are taking this programme to cover all of rural India – 637,000 villages – under a programme called Mission 2007 – Every Village a Knowledge Centre.

Village knowledge centres are based on these principles –

o Community Ownership o A Development Tool o Inclusive in nature o A win-win situation for all

One may use both new and old technologies. Horses for courses, as they say. Information gathered using high-tech may be delivered through low-tech. For example, we download forecasts of wave heights in the Bay of Bengal from a US Navy website

[http://www.nemoc.navy.mil/Library/Metoc/Indian+Ocean/Bay+of+Bengal/Models/ Swaps/Sig+Wav+Ht+and+Dir+Series/index.html]

36 and 48 hours in advance and transmit the picture in colour along with a written statement and a voice recording as a multimedia file to knowledge centres in coastal villages where the pictures and the written statements are displayed on a notice board and the voice recording is broadcast over a public address system. Loud speakers are placed in different streets of the village and everyone in the village can hear the announcements. The message is broadcast several times during the day. [Figure 2]. The fishermen (and their families) are thus forewarned of any impending rough weather and they can decide if it would be safe to venture into the sea on a given day. Ever since this service was started in 1999 not a single fisherman died in mid-sea.

3 In partnership with the Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) we provide information on Potential Fishing Zones – latitude, longitude, depth, direction, etc. INCOIS obtains the information from satellite pictures (based on colour variations). [Figure 3].

Bridging the Digital Divide is used as a powerful tool for bridging the gender divide.

Many of our village volunteers – called knowledge workers – are women. In partnership with the District Rural Development Agency, banks, District Information Centre, agricultural university and veterinary college, we provide assistance and training to women in several livelihood opportunities. These include training in software, mushroom growing, animal husbandry and production of biopesticides.

In collaboration with a major eye hospital we have trained village volunteers to check eyes at the village knowledge centres. Pictures of eyes taken with a web camera are sent as email attachments (along with the results of the vision test finding) to the Aravind Eye Hospital where doctors examine them and decide which of the patients need to come to the hospital. Not only the local volunteers acquire paramedical skills, but they also save the time of both the hospital staff and the village community.

There are four kinds of knowledge flow:

Lab-to-lab. Lab-to-land. Land-to-lab.. Land-to-land.

Lab-to-Lab denotes knowledge sharing among scientists, scholars and experts. This takes place through journals, conferences, doctoral theses, reports, etc. about which we will see in the later part of this paper.

Lab-to-Land denotes flow of knowledge from experts to ordinary people – from the laboratory to the field and the user community. This takes place through extension departments, media, public lectures, etc.

Land-to-Lab denotes flow of information from common people to experts. This is very vital in helping scientists reorient their research to address the felt needs of the end users of knowledge.

Land-to-Land exchange is exchange of knowledge among common people, e.g. when farmers share their experiences with other farmers.

Each one of them can be facilitated by ICTs. In the knowledge centres we focus on the second and the third types of information flow. The third type of flow is especially important in poverty alleviation. The farmers and fishermen and the rural poor may have concerns that could be addressed by scientists and other experts. Also knowledge centres

4 play a role similar to the village well or temple where people meet and socialize and thus can facilitate the fourth type of knowledge flow.

We have formed the Open Knowledge Network for rural communities in different parts of the world to share their knowledge. Several countries in South Asia and Africa are partnering in this venture. We use local languages to create the content but use English to create metadata. Knowledge is exchanged either through Internet or through WorldSpace radio.

We also use Internet radio as well as conventional radio to broadcast content developed by rural communities. In partnership with the Indian Space Research Organization, we facilitate tele-agriculture, tele-fisheries, tele-medicine, tele-health and tele-education.

With the experience gained over six years, we wanted to take the telecentre movement forward and launched the Mission 2007 – Every Village a Knowledge Centre programme two years ago. It is a truly multistakeholder programme with the members including government departments, academic institutions, NGOs, corporations and industry associations. The Mission aims to take the knowledge revolution to all of rural India.

We have instituted an annual eight-day event called the South-South Exchange Travelling Workshop. Twenty development workers from Asia, Africa and Latin America come together and visit several villages in southern India, meet and discuss with local communities and knowledge workers and share knowledge and experience. So far we have held four such workshops and about 80 development workers from about twenty countries have benefited.

Today thousands of telecentres such as the ones we have pioneered in India are serving hundreds of thousands of people around the world, demonstrating that if intelligently used modern ICTs can help the poor and the rural communities and help in poverty alleviation, education, healthcare and bringing about gender equality.

Let us turn our attention to flow of knowledge among scientists and scholars of the world – the lab-to-lab exchange of knowledge.

It has been estimated that there are around 24,000 scholarly science and technology journals publishing something like 2.5 million refereed research papers each year. Until recently, all the libraries of India combined had subscriptions to only around 1,500 of these journals. And many of the smaller colleges and institutes had only less than 100 journals. The situation is even worse in many parts of Africa. So, if information is key to science development, how can we expect our researchers to perform good science at the level of someone at MIT, Oxford or Harvard or science that can help solve the many problems we face?

To be a scientist in a developing country is to be on the periphery of world science. One works virtually in information vacuum. One's work goes unnoticed. A scientist in a developing country, who invariably works under adverse conditions, needs to achieve a

5 lot more to win recognition than those who work under much better conditions in developed countries.

Thus developing country scientists suffer from the twin problems of poor access to information and lack of visibility.

To access information in cyberspace one first needs access to the corresponding electronic technology, and most scientists and scholars in the developing countries, especially in Africa, do not have access to the new information technologies. One computer can be shared by ten or twenty people, or even more. But one problem still remains. How are we going to provide inexpensive Internet access to scientists and scholars in poor countries? The transition to electronic publishing runs the risk of widening the gap between the developed countries and the developing countries, unless computers and Internet access are available at affordable costs in the developing world.

Thanks to men like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, we have abolished skin-colour-based apartheid, but are letting the new ICTs to create an information-access-based apartheid. It is here men like Swaminathan are playing a visionary role.

As is evident from our own experience in using ICTs for alleviating poverty in rural India, intelligent human intervention alone can help us realize the advantageous potential of new technologies.

The subscription prices of journals have been rising at rates far higher than the general inflation for several years. This has led to drastic reductions in the number of journals subscribed by many libraries. Even in the advanced countries of the West academic librarians felt the impact of this “serials crisis”. That led to serious efforts to mount low cost and toll free alternatives to commercial journals as well as open access archiving.

The advent of new technologies, especially the Internet and the World Wide Web, has opened up instantaneous and inexpensive ways of disseminating scientific knowledge. The physicists were among the first to take advantage of these technologies. They established arXiv, a central archive where scientists anywhere from the world can deposit their pre-prints and post-prints, about 15 years ago. Paul Ginsparg played a key role in setting up arXiv.

If every scientist deposits his / her papers in such open archives then anyone anywhere with Internet connection can access all papers at virtually no cost.

There have been many open access initiatives. Some of them are

o Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), Berlin Declaration, Bethesda Declaration [and the Bangalore Declaration to be released in November 2006] o SPARC, PLoS, NIH in the USA o Wellcome Trust, UK Research Councils and EPT in the UK

6 o OSI, Howard Hughes Foundation o Champions such as Stevan Harnad, Peter Suber and the Civil Society Group on Scientific Information

Bruce Alberts, former President of the US National Academy of Science, suggests that heavy subsidies should be available to provide the computers and Internet connections to all scientists throughout the world. He has visited our knowledge centres in Pondicherry four times and he emphasizes the need for land-to-lab flow of knowledge and the need for developing countries to perform scientific research and be part of global science. This makes sense especially when we are faced with SARS, avian flu and tsunamis which affect large parts of the world within a short time. Unfortunately, global organizations such as the InterAcademy Panel and the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World (TWAS) are not doing enough.

Today there are several centralized archives of full text papers as well as more than 725 institutional archives and all of them are interoperable. There is resistance from both commercial publishers and even some society publishers to make research findings openly available through the Web. Also, there is still confusion in the minds of many about the role of institutional self archiving. However, more than 92% of about 9000 journals surveyed permit authors to archive their papers.

As more and more scientists and institutions around the world start archiving their papers, access to information will become a level playing field. Also the work of developing country scientists will have much greater visibility.

Recent studies by Alma Swan, D K Sahu and Harnad and colleagues have shown that making research papers open access leads to greater visibility and increased use as reflected in increased downloads and citations.

Thus ICTs used innovatively can help bridge the gap between the rich and the poor be it in the area of rural development and poverty alleviation or in the field of accessing research information by scientists.

The notion of ‘public commons’ is an important element too. Tim Berners Lee and CERN did not patent the World Wide Web. Linus Torvald gave Linux free to the world.

If IT is becoming the defining paradigm of our times, it is imperative that we learn to use it as an ally in the equity movement. Do we have reasons to hope that the electronic revolution that is currently widening the information gap will eventually narrow, and perhaps even abolish, the gap? Another question before us is “If technologies spread to rural areas as well, can we retain the virtues of olive tree societies while taking advantage of the Lexus technologies?”

The answer to these questions is not in the domain of technology, but rests with us. An electronic discussion group [email protected] provides a forum for Africans, Asians and Latin Americans to keep abreast of developments in both the areas – open access to

7 scientific and scholarly literature and knowledge-based development. I welcome all of you to join the group.

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