Expanding India's access to the Internet

By C. V. Gopalakrishnan

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, AUG. 4. The broadbasing of the Internet and the bridging of the digital divide in India by expanding the Net access through cable television envisaged by the Task Force on Knowledge Society report, which has been released by the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Mr. K.C. Pant, will initially require a huge expansion of Net connections in the country from the present number of 5,00,000, according to a survey of the hi-tech scene in the country carried out by the Crown Business publishers of New York. The Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Mr. N. Chandrababu Naidu, is mentioned as the country's ``most outspoken pro-reform politician''.

It is expected that within two years the number of Internet connections in India would go up by four times because of the rapidly growing interest in the promises it holds out. Also, there will have to be a correspondingly increase in the number of television sets from the existing 60 millions, while the number of personal computers will have to go up from the present four millions along with a big increase in telephone connections from its present penetration of not more than two per cent of the population.

A significant point made by the survey is that India's ``appalling inequalities'' and prior insulation from the rest of the world inspired by its earlier policy of self-reliance and import substitution had actually ``created the fodder for an Internet revolution'' because of the sense of futility brought about by the country having failed to make any headway because of pursuing such a policy. The rebound from the pursuit of such a policy wholly devoid of any dynamism for more than three decades has been the drastic shedding of it and throwing the country open to advancing global technology. A gain from its having stuck to an insular policy for a long time is that India was protected from the financial crisis that devastated the East Asian countries in 1997-98.

The survey looks forward to the Internet pushing India faster on the trail of accelerated hi-tech development. In India, Internet has the potential to bring about a ``broad transforming effect across an entire society and economy for demolishing the barriers to wholesale change that made India an Asian laggard during the second half of the last century''.

Taking note of the forging of close ties by India's electronic engineers with the Silicon Valley, the survey points out that India has an edge over Taiwan in matters relating to the development of software. India's output of 65,000 engineers at the college degree and higher levels is ``not just a matter of quantity''. The IITs match the quality of their counterparts in the U.S. The 2,80,000 engineers turned out by India met the requirements of around 1000 software companies in the 1990s. The number of non-resident Indians living abroad in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere is stated to be 10 million - which is much higher than the estimates made in India.

Their average income is placed at $ 30,000 per head. ``If the Indian Government had been more hospitable for the NRIs they would have invested some of their wealth in the motherland with more enthusiasm,'' says the survey. Unlike the overseas Chinese who were ``overwhelmingly traders and businessmen and brought business to China'', the well-educated English speaking NRIs are mostly, doctors, scientists, mathematicians and engineers. They had little business expertise to offer to India but the arrival of software was changing all that.

The headway made in hi-tech by the Indian software engineers has made it wholly unnecessary for the MNCs setting up software technology parks (STPs) in India to seek the services of expatriate engineers. ``Once proprietary satellite communications were allowed to set up in India there was little reason for an American software firm not to set up shop in an STP.'' The fast expanding operations of Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Texas Instruments and Oracle in Bangalore have been taken note of by the Survey. The arrivals in Hyderabad include Microsoft and GE. The debugging which Indian engineers of Satyam could turn out for the Y2K projects has been mentioned by the survey. Internet work accounted for the bulk of its sales in March 2000.

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