Africa Study Centre Leiden, 6-8 September 2006 Democratizing potential of Open Access: Perspectives from the Developing World Subbiah Arunachalam [email protected] , [email protected] M S Swaminathan Research Foundation Chennai 600 113, India 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.