The Sarvodaya Report on six months of post-tsunami activities is available at http://www.sarvodaya.org/wp-content/Tsunami6monthsreport.pdf.
Sarvodaya is Sri Lanka’s largest most broadly embedded people’s organization, with a network covering 15,000 villages, 34 district offices, over 100,000 youth. Sarvodaya has been working at the grassroots for almost fifty years. It has earned the trust and respect of communities and individuals across the country. Sarvodaya led one of the largest relief efforts after the December 2004 Tsunami that took almost 35,000 lives along Sri Lanka’s coastline.
‘One of the biggest lessons we learned from the Tsunami was how lacking Sri Lanka was in terms of an emergency warning system. The most tragic aspect of the events of 26th December 2004 was the needless loss of life.’ (p.73)
Prior to the 2004 Tsunami, Sarvodaya…
Monthly Archive for October, 2005
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for Development, December 03-04, 2005
This workshop at IIM Calcutta will equip managers with the perceived benefits of ICT in the development sector in India, along with the roles that the government, corporate sector, non-governmental organizations, and people themselves can play. Bringing together faculty members from various functional groups of IIM Calcutta including Management Information Systems, Regional Development, and Business Environment, the lectures and discussions will focus on the managerial reforms and institutional aspects to make ICTs an integral component of development.
Topics to be covered will include the information infrastructure, the policy issues related to ICTs, with special attention to the legal and regulatory frameworks, ICT and effective public management, public-private partnership in service delivery, especially in e-governance, pro-poor…
By Payal Malik (Senior Researcher, LIRNEasia)
The Indian Express: Op-Ed
October 31, 2005
TRAI has recently come out with its recommendations on Growth of Telecom services in Rural India (www.trai.gov.in). It is an insightful attempt to address the anomalies of the current universal service obligation (USO) regime for the provision of rural telephone subsidy. In this article I describe the main lacunae of the current USO policy and outline how TRAI’s proposals ameliorate these flaws; the interested reader is directed to an independent research study that reviewed the current rural telephony subsidy mechanism. (read more…)
LIRNEasia’s past researcher Chanuka Wattegama will be making a keynote address at an Internet Governance and Telecom Regulation session at the International Workshop on Building an Information Society: Road to Tunis that will take place on October 23-25 in Dhaka, Bangladesh.Some of the material in his talk will be based on some of the findings of LIRNEasia’s current research that Chanuka was involved in while he worked with us.
Chanuka was the lead researcher on a LIRNEasia project to Benchmark National Telecom Regulatory Authority websites of the Asia-Pacific Region, and recently took up a post at Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme in Colombo.
Findings from Indonesian study WiFi Access Innovations by LIRNEasia researchers, Divakar Goswami & Onno Purbo were presented at a press conference at the Jakarta Hilton, Indonesia on October 1. The results from the study have been covered by Indonesian newspapers. The news story by Rakyatmerdeka is online and can be found here.
Divakar and Onno identified high leased prices as the main factor forcing ISPs to deploy their own WiFi-based networks to connect customers to the last mile. Leased line prices in Indonesia are about three to four times the price for similar bandwidth in India or the European Union. In the case of a 2mbps local link, Indonesian prices are more than 48 times the price compared to India. This is the primary reason why Internet service in Indonesia is…
LIRNEasia’s maiden telecom reform course was successfully completed by 36 participants from 18 countries. The 10th telecom reform course was co-organised with LIRNE.NET, in association with the School of Communication and Information of Nanyang Technological University, and the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore. Themed ‘Catalyzing change: Strategies to achieve connectivity and convergence,’ the course took place at the Elizabeth Hotel in Singapore on the 24th-30th September 2005.
see pics
The course aimed to prepare regulators to face the challenges that lie ahead to achieve connectivity and convergence. One of the key issues that much of the discussion focussed on was VOIP or voice over internet protocol, an application that is revolutionizing the voice market, bringing down costs significantly; this will have an enormous bearing on universal access, given the…
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