Starting in around 2013, points Rohan Samarajiva, Bangladesh will enter the best period for realising the demographic dividend, with the lowest levels of combined child and adult dependency in its history. It will be the closest to the ‘pot’ shape. This golden period will last until around 2033 when the more burdensome adult dependency (ratio of adults over 65 years of age to the working population aged 15-65 years) reaches significant proportions.

What does this mean to Bangladesh? How can that be exploited?

It is here that information and communication technologies can make a difference. In the past, only agricultural and manufacturing goods could be exported. Now, thanks to telecom, even services can be exported. Bangladesh is currently said to have 30,000 persons working in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry.

In 2005-06, it was estimated that India created 1.3 million direct jobs in the IT and IT enabled services sector, with another 3 million jobs created indirectly, to serve the industry. The proportionate numbers for Bangladesh, which has one-seventh the Indian population will be 182,000 direct jobs and 421,000 indirect jobs.

Read the full article in The Daily Star.

Other notable speakers at the event include Dr. Jonathon Donner of Microsoft Research, India, and Prof. Tim Unwin of the University of London.

“This is one of the highly effective tools for achieving financial inclusion. But the system is suffering because of the lack of interest among government agencies. There needs to be a policy change to take the model further and make the system financially viable,” says IIM-A Professor and LIRNEasia’s Senior Research Fellow, Subhash Bhatnagar, PhD.

The research is a part of a larger study conducted by LIRNEasia on the use of mobiles for more-than-voice.

Read the full article here.

The trick for Bharti, which pioneered low-cost telecoms in India, will be to bring down Zain’s high cost base and win subscribers, say analysts — and to get subscribers to talk more using lower tariffs.

Bharti is famous for its so-called “minutes factory” business plan — the low-cost, high-volume model that has made it India’s leading mobile company.

Mittal said Bharti expects to be able to “substantially increase usage” and sign up more callers that would boost call traffic and improve margins.

Bharti’s strength is “bringing down costs of operations and prices”, said Romal Shetty, head of Indian telecom at global consultancy KPMG.

In case licenses are not de-linked, there will be rollout obligations. Some analysts suggest penalties to be enforced, like taking away extra/unused bandwith for spectrum that is not used optimally. According to Kunal Bajaj, MD, BDA Connect, “Open auction will remove all these problems. Adequate spectrum will be allocated to the best player. However, there should be local benchmarks like existing players should get the first right of refusal.” According to Malik, “There should be no restriction on services as this inhibits competition. In fact, licenses should be given free, as they are meaningless without spectrum. After trading or auctions, those players who have enough spectrum should be allowed to use it the way they want.”

In this scenario, Tata Teleservices has suggested the formation of a spectrum pool, wherein players can pool their extra spectrum and trade it in a free and fair market. Furthermore, it is argued that currently a large chunk of the spectrum is being wasted as each operator requires start-up frequencies as well as guard frequencies to ensure that there is no interference between networks. “The concept of introducing a single radio frequency (RF) network based on the maximum available spectrum and controlled by an independent body will address this problem of scarce spectrum. It will provision the RF network in such a way that the complete spectrum is available to operators a on-required basis. This will resolve all the contentious issues related with spectrum, and provide an efficient RF network to all the existing as well as future service providers. This concept will drastically reduce the capital expenditure and operating expenditure of individual operators, and result in the most efficient use of the available spectrum,” it said on its official website.

Malik explains, “I am in favor of re-sale of spectrum. However, it depends on the micro market structure of pool for resale.” However, according to Satyen Gupta, “Whatever spectrum you can afford to put in a pool should be de-linked from license, as this procedure cannot work while being linked to a license.”

The Internet has become the third most popular news platform for American adults, trailing only local and national television stations, according to a survey released on Monday.

Seventy-eight percent of the 2,259 adults surveyed for the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism said that on a typical day they get news from a local TV station.

Seventy-three percent said they get news from a national TV network such as CBS or a cable TV news station such as CNN or Fox.

Sixty-one percent said that on a typical day they get news online while 54 percent said they listen to a radio news program at home or in the car.

Fifty percent said they read news in a local newspaper and 17 percent said they read news in a national newspaper such as The New York Times or USA Today.

Mobile 2.0 describes the use of mobiles for “more‐than‐voice”. Mobiles are increasingly becoming payment devices which can also send/process/receive voice, text and images; it is envisaged that in the next few years, they will also be fully capable of information‐retrieval and publishing functions, normally associated with the Internet.

Mobile 2.0@BOP has been researched from two aspects: vertical and horizontal issues. Horizontal issues are the basic competitive and regulatory conditions that affect the emergence of Mobile 2.0@BOP. The vertical components explore how particular aspects such as micro‐payments and remittances, agriculture applications, voting applications, e‐government services, disaster warning, etc are taking shape and form.

The research findings will be disseminated by the respective researchers as follows.

New Delhi, India on March 4 and 5, 2010

Payal Malik – Issues in licensing and Spectrum allocation
Tahani Iqbal – Mobile Number Portability

Dhaka, Bangladesh on March 28-29, 2010

Erwin Alampay, PhD – Mobile payments
Tahani Iqbal – Mobile Number Portability

Nirmali Sivapragasam – Mobiles, payment and logistics, based on a case of study of CellBazaar, Bangladesh

Bangkok, Thailand on March 30, 2010

Erwin Alampay, PhD – Mobile payments
Puree Sirasoontorn, PhD – Mobile value-added services, based on Buzzcity case study

Media coverage will be added here as they happen.

India’s long-delayed auction of third-generation (3G) mobile phone bandwidth will be held on April 9, the government announced Wednesday.

Applications from bidders for the multi-billion-dollar auction, whose proceeds are earmarked to help plug a gaping fiscal deficit, will be accepted until March 19, a government notice said.

The auction is seen as key to developing India’s mobile market which has been growing by 15 million to 20 million subscribers a month, making it the world’s fastest expanding.

3G, common in developed countries, allows mobile phone users to surf the Internet, engage in video conferencing or download music, video and other content at a much faster rate than the current second-generation or 2G service.

It is also crucial to improving the quality of existing voice and data services in India.

Full story.

For example, will Washington offer tax breaks or other export incentives? While businesses may clamor for them, these would be a setback for freer trade — after all, for years it has been America that has been hectoring other countries to end their subsidies to exporters. Will Washington try to pick winners in the global marketplace, like green energy? More often than not, this kind of industrial policy wastes money, fosters inefficiency and creates few permanent jobs.

So, let’s assume the government does its part to break down barriers and open more foreign markets — what can our businesses themselves do to improve their performance? First, no company should assume that its services can’t be exported. Today’s technologies allow us to do things that were unthinkable just a decade ago. For example, surgeons are using high-speed data connections and robotics to operate on patients thousands of miles away.

Zain has fared badly in Africa along with other Middle Eastern operators perhaps because their home turf has been heavily regulated. Most acted as comfortable monopolists until only recently. Bharti on the other hand has a good deal of experience in wringing out profits in a poor country where competition is growing. Africa merely adds more diversity and the potential for political instability to the challenge. It helps, too, that Bharti brings expertise of running low-cost operations in markets where consumers have very low incomes. It does this by sharing infrastructure and outsourcing most operations such as IT and running networks, leaving the risk of expanding to meet the needs of subscribers to others while it concentrates on marketing and strategy. And Bharti’s size and clout should allow it to pay much less than Zain for network towers and the like in Africa.

Bharti’s ability to concentrate on its customers should yield rewards in Africa, where innovations to bring down costs to customers have already helped to boost profits of other firms. MTN, for example, pioneered dynamic tariffs that charge users to make calls according to how many other callers are using a network at a given time. And Zain’s own scheme of “borderless roaming” lets customers move between Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda and make calls without incurring disproportionate charges.

Innovation can travel the other way too. We hope that Bharti will import to South Asia the borderless roaming that Zain introduced to the world.

According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the apex body for software services in India, the revenue of the information technology sector has risen from 1.2 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in FY 1997-98 to an estimated 5.8 per cent in FY 2008-09. Further, the industry body expects the sector to grow between 4 per cent and 7 per cent during 2009-10 and return to over 10 per cent growth next year. India’s IT growth in the world is primarily dominated by IT software and services such as Custom Application Development and Maintenance (CADM), System Integration, IT Consulting, Application Management, Software testing, and Web services. Moreover, according to a study by Springboard Research, the Indian IT services market is estimated to remain the fastest growing in the Asia-Pacific region with a CAGR of 18.6 per cent.

Despite the uncertainty in the global economy, the top three IT majors—Infosys, TCS and Wipro—have seen revenue growth from all important sources of income: from the North American and European regions, in the financial services vertical and from application maintenance and development (ADM) offerings between fiscal years 2008 and 2009.

Outsourcing
A research by Gartner forecasts India as the undisputed leader in the outsourcing space in the year 2008. India’s most prized resource is its readily available technical work force. India has the second largest English-speaking scientific professionals in the world, second only to the US. It is estimated that India has over 4 million technical workers over 1,832 educational institutions and polytechnics, which train more than 67,785 computer software professionals every year. The enormous base of skilled manpower is a major draw for global customers. According to NASSCOM, software and services exports (including exports of IT services, BPO, engineering services and R&D and software products) reached US$ 47 billion in FY 2008-09, contributing nearly 78 per cent to the total software and services revenue of US$ 59.6 billion.

India continues to be the most preferred destination for companies looking to offshore their IT and back-office functions. It also retains its low-cost advantage and is among the most financially attractive locations when viewed in combination with the business environment it offers and the availability of skilled people, according to global management consultancy AT Kearney.

Indian IT-BPO sector grew by 12 per cent in FY 2009 to reach US$ 71.7 billion in aggregate revenue (including hardware). Of this, the software and services segment accounted for US$ 59.6 billion. IT-BPO exports (including hardware exports) grew by 16 per cent from US$ 40.9 billion in FY 2007-08 to US$ 47.3 billion in FY 2008-09.

According to Payal Malik, sr research fellow, LIRNEasia, “It is difficult to verify whether the spectrum is actually being hoarded, but given the way allocation has taken place, I won’t be surprised if it is. In an effort to eliminate competition, the existing players inflate subscriber numbers. To add to this, the verification process is difficult and has to be done by Trai which has not done anything about this issue till date.” She adds, “Only 5-7 MHz on an average is the bandwith provided per operator, which is very little when compared to the 10-11 MHz allocated abroad. This in turn leads to fragmentation of spectrum.”

ITC Limited, an Indian company that is one of the largest buyers of soyabeans, felt it was paying over the odds, but was unable to monitor the traders closely. Starting in October 2000 it began to introduce a network of internet kiosks, called e-choupal, in villages in Madhya Pradesh. (Choupal means “village gathering place” in Hindi.) By the end of 2004 a total of 1,704 kiosks had been set up, each of which served its host village and four others within a five-kilometre (three-mile) radius. The kiosks displayed the minimum and maximum price paid for soyabeans at 60 mandis, updated once a day, along with agricultural information and weather forecasts. ITC also posted the price it was prepared to pay for soyabeans of a particular quality bought direct from farmers at 45 “hubs” (mostly in the same towns as mandis). By setting up the kiosks, ITC enabled farmers to check that the prices being offered at their local mandi were in line with prices elsewhere. It also gave them the option to sell direct.

Bean there, done that
To evaluate the impact all of this had on prices, Ms Goyal used historical data from mandis and the locations and installation dates of the kiosks. She found that the presence of kiosks in a district was associated with an instant and persistent increase of 1.7% in the average price paid at mandis in that district. As expected, the availability of price information increased the level of competition between the traders, raising prices and reducing the variation in prices between nearby mandis. Farmers’ profits increased by 33%, and the cultivation of soyabeans increased by an average of 19% in districts with kiosks. And by buying some produce direct, ITC reduced its costs, which paid for the kiosks.

Evaluation planning workshops took place in Karraikudi, Tamil Nadu and Kurunegala, Sri Lanka. This was to present the lessons to date and get a common consensus on the evaluation methodology. Participants were health officials and health workers (medical officers and nurses) belonging to the jurisdictions the project is being pilot tested. Besides the workshops, the researchers held meetings with health workers and officials to understand other elements towards evaluating the project.

Click to view the Indian Workshop report.

The medical officers in both countries agree that they cannot enter data while attending to 100 patients in a morning. The Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) in India and Sri Lanka have, to date, collected 46,000+ and 76,000+ patient records since June 2009, respectively. This data comes from health facilities submitted through the m-HealthSurvey. Dr. M. Ganesan (Senior Project Officer, RTBI – Rural Technology and Business Incubator) discussed the progress of the data submission patterns and the associated shortcomings in the newly introduced process. While in India the challenge lies in getting the health workers to send data in real-time in Sri Lanka it is finding an incentive for the health workers submit reliable data. Analyst programmers: Vincy Pushpa Mary and Sheebha Ryer at RTBI are placed with the challenge of enhancing the mobile phone application: m-HealthSurvey to overcome the user induced challenges.

Prof. Artur Dubrawski (Director, Auton Lab) was able to show the workshop participants in both countries, live, real data subject to detection analysis through the T-Cube Web Interface. Although the data is quite noisy and somewhat unreliable signals of Acute Diarrheal Disease in India and Common Cold in Sri Lanka were detected, which were confirmed by Medical Officers attending the workshops. Karen Chen (Research Analyst, Auton Lab) mined the Sri Lanka Epidemiology Unit published Weekly Epidemiological Report data and exemplified propagation patterns of Dengue over a 6 month period; where the disease first started in Kandy District, then moved east to Ampara District, eventually moving south of the country at which time the disease in Kandy District seems to have been contained. Another set of analysis showed Dengue to emerge each year in the months of May (i.e. seasonal trend); however, an exceptional case of Dengue emerging in August;  illustrated in presentation slides (Dubrawski, 2009).

Project came to learn of two main use cases for detection analysis that both health departments (DDHS Sivagangai and RE Kurunegala) require: 1) investigate the temporal scan and spatial scan of a suspected disease outbreak 2) regularly monitor the Group A, Group B, Sentential disease in Sri Lanka (i.e. what’s reported through H-544) and S-form and P-form diseases, part of the Integrated Disease Surveillance Program (IDSP), in India. While, the full fledged T-Cube with all functions remain available, the team at Auton Lab will reduce the present TCWI to a minimal set of functions to fit the requirements (i.e. two use cases) suggested by the health departments in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka; instead of going through the tedious process of setting of parameters to run the statistical methods and estimations. The process will be automated to a single push of a button.

Users of T-Cube agreed to participating in the frequent periodic on-line assessment on utilization, usability, effectiveness. Moreover, the project is interested in assessing the Receiver Operation Characteristics (ROC), Activity Monitoring Operating Characteristics (AMOC), and RECALL (commonly known as sensitivity). For this, the project will, periodically, submit a set of high probability events (disease outbreaks) detected through T-Cube to the health departments. They will tell us whether those alerts were true or false, as well as tell us those events that were not detected by T-Cube.

The Sahana Messaging/Alerting Module with CAP messaging was presented. In an alert message, the Medical Officers in Tamil Nadu want to know the disease name, effective date, when, where, and what to do. This would transforms to receiving the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) elements: info.event, info.description (disease names), info.effective, info.onset, area.area description, via SMS. However, the full CAP message will be posted on the web and the xml file emailed as an attachment with the short CAP message in the body. The users are interested in both upstream and downstream alerting.

The news media breathlessly chronicle each of Mr. Tharoor’s supposed Twitter missteps in editorials and talk show discussions. One news channel scrolled his latest Twitter updates across its screen under the rubric “Breaking News.”

Twitter enthusiasts say the news media make a fuss about it because it usurps its traditional role as intermediary and interpreter between the powerful and the masses.

“By constantly associating Twitter with controversies, Indian media will successfully dissuade other politicians from joining the social networking site,” Ajit Narayana, an avid Twitter user who is organizing a conference this month on Twitter’s use in India, wrote in an e-mail message.

Not only in Sri Lanka that there is a conspiracy behind everything. But not a bad story.