Closing digital divide
by
AJ Philip |
Time is right for a toilet revolution in the country too
Last week, India unveiled the super-cheap tablet personal computer, Aakash (sky), which will be made available to students at $35 and to the general public at $60. In comparison, the cheapest iPad from the Apple stable costs $499 and the recently-announced Amazon’s Kindle Fire costs $199. The touchscreen device that supports two standard USB ports and has videoconferencing and browsing facilities has been manufactured by a British firm Datawind in collaboration with the Indian government.
While unveiling the tablet, Union communication and education minister Kapil Sibal said it would bridge the digital divide that exists between the rich and the poor. Initially, the government will pick up 100,000 units and distribute them among the students for a pilot study. On the launch day itself, 500 tablets were distributed free among student volunteers. Based on their feedback, Aakash would be modified to make it more appealing.
When the project was announced two years ago, the aim was to make available a computer for less than $10. Competition may bring down the price further and make it affordable to the poor. Early reviews of the device suggest that the touchscreen is a bit slow to respond but for the price it is a super bargain. If Aakash proves to be “user friendly”, it will go a long way in meeting the demands of not just students but ordinary people, who have been left out of the digital revolution.
Although the number of Indians who have access to the Internet has been increasing and has reached nearly 8 per cent of the population, it is nowhere near China, where 40 per cent of the population has the Internet facility. Aakash is a major initiative to spread the computer usage, particularly in the countryside, where users will be able to browse the Internet for a monthly fee of $2. What’s noteworthy is the government’s earnestness in making a success of the project, aimed at the poor.
Another important sector in which its attention should be focussed is public hygiene. In the year 2000, readers of the American newsmagazine Time chose toilet as the greatest invention in the second millennium from among 100 items, including computer, telephone and television. But in India, according to a 2008 Unicef study, 680 million people, i.e., about 54 per cent of the population, did not have access to toilets. Nearly 60 per cent Indian women had no toilet facilities.
Only Ethiopia had a worse record than India. Even countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan had a better record than India. China which had the same level of development when India attained Independence in 1947, had stolen a march over India in terms of sanitation. Only about 4 per cent of the Chinese had no toilet facilities.
Forget the national shame of people defecating in the open along railway tracks and roads, inadequate sanitation costs the nation billions of dollars in terms of public health. For instance, the totally-preventable diarrhoea alone claims 400,000 lives annually of which 90 per cent are children. Water-borne diseases continue to be a major killer. Yet, sanitation does not get the necessary attention.
As Union minister for sanitation and drinking water Jairam Ramesh lamented the other day, the annual allocation for sanitation is just $444,444, which works out to 2 per cent of the allocation for rural development. Constructing enough toilets is certainly a daunting — not impossible — task. Sulabh International is a non-government organisation, founded by Dr Bindeshwar Pathak, which has set up clean use-and-pay toilets in cities and towns, across the nation. It has developed toilets that need just a mug of water for flushing.
On October 2, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, the minister for sanitation launched a programme aimed at declaring India free from open defecation by the end of the 12th Plan, i.e., by the year 2017. Incidentally, Gandhi was one leader who laid great emphasis not only on building toilets but also keeping them clean. He fought against the pernicious system by which only some people, considered belonging to low castes, were supposed to clean toilets.
In the two ashrams Gandhi set up at Wardha in Maharashtra and Sabarmati in Gujarat, he insisted that all the residents should clean their own toilets. If the Union and state governments, public and private industries and non-government organisations like Sulabh join hands, it would not be difficult to end open defecation in six years’ time. After the green (agricultural) and white (milk) revolutions, India needs a toilet revolution, along with the digital revolution, symbolised by Aakash.
Oman Tribune |
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