October 2005 — LIRNEasia


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.
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 market development through ICTs, ICT and healthcare, ICT and disaster management, and the way ICT could be used for better governance through coordination between various stakeholders. More details available here.
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.
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. The study findings 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.
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.