It appears that the India-Sri Lanka joint venture in business process outsourcing is having a hard time because Sri Lankans are difficult to train. The LBO article is worth a read, but here is a key quote.

Revenues had fallen as the US recession took its toll on the auto and restaurant businesses which comprised the bulk of its customers but that the number of clients was growing, JKH said.

Roy also said it was important for Sri Lanka to expand higher education and technology training institutions to ensure the supply of trained people if the country wants to attract more BPO business.

He said Sri Lanka had the highest number of British-qualified accountants outside Britain and should capitalise on its own strengths instead of trying to compete with…

AT Kearny has issued the 2009 Global Services Index.

The good news for South Asia is that Sri Lanka has moved up from 29 to 16 and Pakistan from 30 to 20. India, of course, sits at the top, no change from 2007. The advances of Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been at the expense of the Northern European countries (e.g., Lithuania and Latvia), Singapore and the UAE. Other than Singapore, the rest of SE Asia, including Vietnam are ahead of Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Ghana, Jordan, Egypt are still ahead.

And where is Bangladesh?

It’s not only in Finland and India that they are returning fixed line connections . . . .

At the University of Washington, the communications department faculty did away with their landlines. (“Phones were our biggest line item,” said David Domke, the department chairman. “We’ve still got landlines in common areas and for staff, but we’re saving about $1,100 a month by getting rid of faculty phones.”)

Story. And the punchline:

“We found a way of saving money that doesn’t hurt the student experience, and I think everybody’s happy,” said Mr. Domke of the University of Washington. “With cellphones and e-mail, everyone can get hold of us. People think it’s funny that we’re the communications department and we cut phones. But it’s just a symbol, an old technology.”

…

Payal Malik, Senior Research Fellow, will speak on universal service policies based on LIRNEasia research to the participants of the 3rd Annual Connecting Rural Communities Asia Forum to be held from 23-25 June 2009 in New Delhi, India. The event is expected to attract stakeholders, policy makers and executives from across the ICT sector with the shared goal of shaping future of rural connectivity.

The organizers hope to be discuss:

• How can governments best support the creation of self-sustaining rural connectivity initiatives that benefit local people?
• Step-by-step practical guidance on overcoming the most pressing technical challenges
• Developing a world-class telecentre rural development programme
• Progress on delivering the promise of the United Services Obligation Fund
• Realising the benefits of greater rural connectivity though the delivery of E-services
• Mapping the future need for connectivity: Identifying choke points…

Our primary funder IDRC is having a big gathering of all its Asian fundees in Penang. As one of the main plenary events, they conducted a “talk show” with representatives of three of their leading projects in the region. Helani Galpaya participated in this talk show from LIRNEasia. At the conclusion, she was asked the following question: “we do not just fund good research, we ask what it will yield for development; we ask so what?”

She answered, saying that the good use made of resources entrusted to LIRNEasia could be illustrated through three examples:
1. The 2007 intervention that resulted in the rolling back of the regressive LKR 50 tax that was to be imposed by the government of Sri Lanka on all SIMs, resulting in all mobile…

One of the bad things about projections, especially long-term projections, is the lack of accountability. Or that like astrological forecasts, we only talk about the ones that were right. But anyway there is an interesting discussion of the Indian outsourcing industry, including a discussion on projections.

A decade ago, McKinsey and India’s powerful information technology and outsourcing trade group, Nasscom, predicted that revenue from outsourcing by foreign companies would reach $50 billion in India in 2010. The global economic slowdown has delayed that by three or four quarters — revenue is predicted to reach $47 billion this year.

And in April, Nasscom and McKinsey predicted that by 2020, outsourcing would yield $175 billion in revenue here.

Rohan Samarajiva, Chair and CEO of LIRNEasia was awarded the prestigious 2009 “Communication Research as an Agent of Change Award” by the International Communication Association (ICA) at the 59th Annual conference of the ICA on 23 May 2009, in Chicago, USA.

The award honors one person each year whose work has had a demonstrable impact on practice outside the academy, with clear benefits to the community.

The award was presented to him by Patrice M. Buzzanell, President of the International Communication Association.

At the ceremony a brief statement about his accomplishments and the ways his work has had sustainable social benefits was presented by the ICA:

“Dr. Rohan Samarajiva has co-edited a volume, ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks, that exemplifies the intention of this award, i.e., to…

Village Health Nurses (VHN) are the last-mile health workers attending to the primary health care needs of the rural villagers in the state of Tamil Nadu; where the real-time biosruveillance program (RTBP) is being pilot tested in India. They work under harsh conditions. For instance transportation schedule is limited to a bus that leaves in the morning and returns in the afternoon. Baking and sweating in the hot sun in Sivaganga District of Tamil Nadu, they walk for several kilometers, carrying a heavy load of Registers, making house calls to give the much needed health care to the rural poor.

During a recent workshop, in Tamil Nadu, a discussion around the accountability of submitting data revealed that the VHN sometimes cheat on the statistics they tediously record…

Tharoor recalled the infamous words of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s communications minister in the 1970s, C.M. Stephen. In response to questions decrying the rampant telephone breakdowns in the country, the minister declared in Parliament that telephones were a luxury, not a right. He added that ‘any Indian who was not satisfied with his telephone service could return his phone’ — since there was an eight-year waiting list of people seeking this supposedly inadequate product.

According to Tharoor, Mr Stephen’s statement captured perfectly everything that was wrong about the government’s attitude: ignorant, wrong-headed, unconstructive, self-righteous, complacent, unresponsive and insulting. “It was altogether typical of an approach to governance in the economic arena which assumed that the government knew what was good for the country, felt no obligation…

Teleuse@BOP3, LIRNEasia’s six country study has shown that between 2006 and 2008 there has been significant uptake of mobiles by the BOP in emerging Asia. Access to computers on the other hand (see here for numbers)  in these countries at the BOP is minimal.  Together with the increasing capabilities of mobiles to deliver an array of services, which essentially boil down to what you can do on the Internet (information publication and retrieval, transactions, etc) this means that much of the BOP will have their first Internet experience through a mobile.

The current issue of Nokia’s Expanding Horizons quarterly magazine highlights LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP3 study findings from India, illustrating this point.

Mobiles are now the most common form of communication, pushing public phones into second place… The rapid evolution…

In line with our current research focus on mobile-beyond-voice, we have been highlighting some novel information services that could be provided over the mobile.  Here is another.  In operation in India now.

A number of civic groups, meanwhile, have devised cellphone-based ways of informing voters about candidates for Parliament. If you text your postal code to the Association for Democratic Reforms, it will reply with candidate profiles like this:

CANDIDATE A Crim. Cases – No, Assets 175373142, Liab 0, Edu graduate_professional

CANDIDATE B Crim. Cases – Yes (1), Assets 445015617, Liab 2489959, Edu illiterate

Full story with other interesting applications.

Until recently, I believed, with Richard Heeks quoted below, that radio is found in more homes (at the BOP or all) than phones and TVs. Survey data from the BOP at three countries that account for the world’s greatest concentration of poor people (Pakistan, India and Bangladesh) tell a story that contradicts the common wisdom. In India, 58% of BOP households have TVs, while only 32% have radios. And some kind of phone in the household? 45%!  In all six countries, TV is present in more BOP households than radios.  And radio is less a player in TOP households, who have probably relegated it to the car.

Finally, some have asked if the Internet should be the focus or if developers should look at where the…

Unsatisfied broadband users added flavor to both our Public Seminar and Mobile Broadband QoSE workshop. That included university students prevented access during the residential peak to Wi-Max subscribers experiencing 20% of the promised speed – even with perfect LoS (Line of Sight).

Such complaints are common and not limited to Sri Lanka. From Indonesia to India and from Bangladesh to Philippines we find broadband users rant not receiving the promised. We empathise with them, but this hardly an Asian or a developing world issue. The conditions elsewhere can be worse.

The weird arrangement above is an attempt by a Guest House in Johannesburg, South Africa to provide me Internet access. They still failed. It was in a way good, because I was told the quality was poor…

The demand-side data generated by the Teleuse @ BOP 3 study clearly shows the urban-rural gap among teleusing households (those who own some kind of mobile phone or have a fixed phone in the house) significantly narrowing. But respected colleagues are citing supply-side data to assert not only that the gap is not narrowing, but that it is significantly widening. This is contradictory not only with our demand-side results, but also with the claims made by the Indian Minister. We hope they will engage with us on clearing this fog.

More perilous, however, is the inequality between rural and urban India. Despite several policy initiatives to promote rural penetration, growth in teledensity continues to be skewed in favour of urban India. In fact, the rural population is much…

A paper authored jointly by Professor Subhash Bhatnagar and Nupur Singh titled “Results from a study of impact of eGovernment projects in India”, was selected as the Best Paper at ICTD 2009 held recently in Doha. Our warm congratulations to Professor Bhatnagar and his co-author.

Subhash, who is leading the work on one of our Mobile 2.0 components, had a 20 minute one-on-one with the Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates.

ICTD 2009 was attended on a scholarship by Nirmali Sivapragasam of LIRNEasia. Nuwan Waidyanatha also participated with a display table and got media coverage as well.