More about the Digital Divide:

"A survey of delegates to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland in January 2000 found that 50% believed information technology would widen, not narrow, the gap between rich and poor. A recent BBC report claimed that more than 80% of the world’s people have never used a telephone [1]; however, it quoted no source for this. The UNDP Human Development Report (HDR) puts the figure at about half the population, and indeed UNDP has recently set up mechanisms to try and reduce the digital divide [2].

According to the HDR, 26.3% of the United States population use the Internet, but just 0.8% of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean use it , while only 0.5% of the population in South-East Asia use it with an even lower percentage in the Arab world, Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The divide is within, as well as between, countries, and not simply in the developing world. The BBC quotes the OECD as saying that in France, the highest income bracket had 74% PC penetration in 2000, against just 11% for the lowest income bracket [3]. However, the internal gap is more dramatic in developing countries. The number of computers in India has now reached 4.3 million [4] but this is just a fragment of the country’s one billion people, and the country is a leader in information technology. Statistics must be interpreted with care; in 1998 there were six times as many Indian-registered Hotmail accounts as there were Internet subscribers [5].

Poverty can make a terrible mockery of the information revolution. The point was made forcibly in May 1998 by the distinguished Indian scientist Dr M.S. Swaminathan, whose role in introducing dwarf wheat varieties to India in the 1960s was a key part of the Green Revolution. Speaking to scientists in the Middle East he pointed out that birthweights as low as 2.4 Kg were common in South Asia, causing what the U.N. had called “the cruellest form of inequity”- retarded intellectual development which would prevent people in the developing world from coming to grips with the new Information Age. How are such people supposed to compete in a world of the Internet and galloping information technology [6]?

But information technology can be used to benefit the poor; given sufficient imagination. A recent EC report quoted the case of “one poor village in southern India… where two solar-powered computers were installed in a room at the side of the village temple, giving access to a wealth of data. Sometimes, computers are obtained by an NGO through a donor agency; in other cases, they are bought by the village and franchised to an operator who charges a modest fee for use. Examples of results cited include finding a local veterinarian to cure a sick cow, to downloading a local map from the US Navy website, showing wave heights and wind directions in the nearby Bay of Bengal. This information was communicated to the local fishing village, which broadcast the daily weather report from loudspeakers fixed to poles along the beach" [7]."

Mike Robbins- http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/asia