PRESENTATION

DISCUSSANTS
G. B. Samarasinghe is the Director General, Department of Meteorology, Sri Lanka. An expert in meteorology, Samarasinghe predicts tropical countries are becoming more and more vulnerable to weather-related natural disasters because of the climate change. Investing in disaster preparedness is more advisable than spending on emergency relief, he reasons.

Ainsley Alles, a Chartered Insurer and a Fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institutes of Australia, New Zealand, France and India counts 28 years in insurance. He currently heads the General Insurance arm of Aviva NDB Insurance (formally Eagle Insurance PLC) as its Director (General Insurance). He views Disaster Risk Reduction from the angle of private sector.

CHAIR
Rohan Samarajiva is the founding Chair and CEO of LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank active across twelve emerging Asian economies. He was Director General of Telecommunications in Sri Lanka, a founder director of the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Associate Professor of Communication and Public Policy at the Ohio State University in the US.

July 7, 2010
5.30 – 7.00 pm
Sri Lanka Foundation Institute Auditorium,
Independence Avenue, Colombo 7.

Medium: Sinhala/English

This event is open to public, but due to the limited availability of seats prior registration is mandatory. Please contact Ranjula on 0777-458808 or ranjula@lirneasia.net.

The conference, “The Civil Protection Forum – Towards a more resilient society” aims to explore the concept of resilience. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and impact of disasters, and Europe has to be prepared for this challenge. The Forum will start a debate on a comprehensive European disaster management strategy to enhance resilience. The organizers plan to bring together around 500 delegates, speakers and exhibitors from politics, academia, the civil protection services and international organisations.

Chanuka Wattegama, Senior Research Manager, LIRNEasia will be one of the speakers in the six practice-oriented seminars will look more closely at how European civil protection works in the field – how does it integrate with other international actors, three major phases of an emergency (prevention, preparedness, and response) and the roles of different stakeholders (institutions, civil protection professionals and civil society).

The agenda can be downloaded here.

Between a rock and a hard place

The tragedy of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the absence of any official warning. The Bengkulu earthquake of 2007 September 12^th shows that this is unlikely to be repeated. What we must guard against now is indifference to warning; of populations that will refuse to evacuate in the face of real danger.

Tsunami prediction is an inexact art practiced in conditions of imperfect information and time pressure. In the Pacific Basin, which has had the most experience with tsunamis, 75 per cent of all warnings are false. But this causes little harm because the false warnings do not get through to the general population for the most part.

Tsunamis are short-fuse hazards. It took 90 minutes for the 2004 India Ocean tsunami to reach the South-eastern coast of Sri Lanka. In September 2007, the earthquake occurred at 1110 UTC or 4:40 PM Sri Lanka time. Tsunami Bulletin 001 issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at 1124 UTC (4: 54 PM Sri Lanka time) projected arrival times of over three hours.

Time must be allocated to decision making at the national level about issuance of watch, warning or evacuation messages; and decision making and action at community level, including evacuation if appropriate. This means that the time taken to communicate the watch/warning/evacuation messages must be minimized.

This does not mean, however, that evacuation orders should be given as quickly as possible. False evacuation orders will reduce public response over time.

Given the massive costs associated with evacuation orders (not only in lost productivity but deaths, injuries and other negative outcomes), government must be the sole authority. Given the certainty of blame if a tsunami does hit, over-use of warnings and evacuation orders is likely. It is important that procedures be established not only to make considered but quick decisions about watch/warning/evacuation messages, but also to counter the bias toward excessive warnings and evacuation orders.

Disaster risk-reduction professionals know that false warnings are an artefact of the inexact art of predicting the onset of hazards: but the general public does not. If they are subject to too many false warnings, they will not respond even to true warnings.

Now that we have gotten over the problem of issuing no warnings, we have to address the problem of false warnings.

Rohan Samarajiva, Ph.D.

Project Director, Last Mile HazInfo Project &

Executive Director, LIRNEasia

The Forum will focus on using specific indicators to benchmark performance of the sector as well as the regulatory authority, and using indicator data to improve the performance of both. The latest results from LIRNEasia’s Asian Regulatory Web-site Survey, the Mobile and Broadband Price Benchmarks research and the Broadband Quality of Service Measurement research will be presented at the forum, and will set the background for broader discussion on benchmark regulation. The LIRNEasia developed and IDRC-funded Asian ICT Indicators Database will be introduced and hands-on training on using the database will be provided. The agenda is attached.

‘BSNL’s monopoly over infrastructure a hindrance to growth’ – Financial Express (India)

Rural connectivity is now the focus of every telecommunication player in the country. Almost all stakeholders, from handset manufacturers to service providers, believe that the next wave of growth is in the rural areas.”However, India’s roll out (of telecom services) in rural areas has been slow. BSNL has the backbone infrastructure but is not yet ready to share it with private players,” he added.

BSNL should be made to share its fibre and access networks, Samarajiva said. With shared infrastructure and innovation in marketing, costs can be brought down further, he said. Moreover, telecom companies should also shift their focus from calculating average revenue per user (Arpu) to average margin per user (Ampu), he added.

Also at:  http://asia.tmcnet.com/news/2007/12/26/3184529.htm
http://in.news.yahoo.com/071226/203/6ovtq.html
http://in.biz.yahoo.com/071226/203/6ovva.html

Book also discussed at Yahoo Tech Group forum.

‘Fact or fiction: Telecommunications in Asia By Liffy Thomas’ – Ergo (the Hindu, India)

At a time when GSM operators, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) are at an imbroglio over spectrum allocation, Prof Rohan Samarajiva’s book, “ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks”, makes for a timely read. In Chennai for the launch of the book, Samarajiva, Executive Director of LIRNEasia and former Director General of Telecommunications in Sri Lanka, spoke to Liffy Thomas.

BOOK EXTRACT: ‘Subsidising The Smart Way’ – Business World Magazine (India)The Latin American experience holds lessons for the development of rural telephony in Asia, says Harsha De Silva

The supply of telephony has traditionally been skewed towards the urban affluent as opposed to the rural poor. The literature describes this bias as having been caused by a ‘market efficiency gap’ and an ‘access gap’. The market efficiency gap is the difference between what markets achieve under existing conditions and what they can achieve if barriers are removed. This gap can be bridged through effective competition, private provision of services, and market-oriented policies and regulations that create a level playing field for new entrants. The access gap refers to people and places that remain beyond limits of the market due to inadequate income levels or its skewed distribution. Bridging this gap needs subsidies to encourage service providers to enter these areas.

‘Policies for ICT’ – New India Express (Chennai, India) 

WHILE the common perception remains that India has the lowest mobile phone tariffs, other countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have lower tariffs than India, Rohan Samarajiva, executive director, Lirne Asia, said on Tuesday.

Talking about his new book ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia – Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks, he said, when compared to all these countries, India’s cost is much higher.

The Deccan Chronicle, Chennai, 16.12.07:

 Policies and regulations are the main bottlenecks blocking the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in India, according to Prof Ashok Jhujhunwala, Telecom and Networks (TeNet) Group, IIT, Madras.

Releasing the book ‘ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks’, a collection of articles edited by Rohan Samarajiva and Ayesha Zainudeen, ICT experts, here on Sunday, Prof Jhunjhunwala said any technological problems associated with ICT could be sorted out by scientists within two to three years. “But the policy-makers and regulators fail to move ahead with the times. We are living in an era when things which were socially desirable once have become commercial to the core,” the professor said. He pointed out that ICT has the potential of helping developing countries tackle a wide range of health, social, and economic problems.

“While urban India is marching rapidly ahead, rural India is being left behind. We have to use ICT to accelerate the growth of rural India,” said Dr Jhunjhunwala. Elaborating on the pace of growth of ICT, Dr Jhunjhunwala said the next two years will see payments through mobile phones catching up all over the country.

“Instead of going to ATM centres or Banks, you can have cash transactions through your mobile phones,” he said. Dr Samarajiva said the book was a step forward in identifying the reasons for under-connectivity in emerging Asia. “The book itself is an introduction, not a conclusion. It reports the findings of a cutting edge demand-side survey of telecom use at the ‘bottom of a pyramid’ in India and Sri Lanka,” said Dr Samarajiva, a former director general of Sri lanka Telecommunications.

He said there is enough scope to bring down telecom charges. “It is the outdated policies of the governments in the region which are playing havoc with the communication revolution. This is aggravating the digital divide which will lead to major catastrophe,” he said.

The publication of the book was co-funded by the IDRC and Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

More information on the book can be found on the book page.

The forum will bring together National Regulatory Agencies (NRAs), National Statistical Organizations (NSOs) and leading operators from the SAARC and ASEAN countries, and will focus on assessing telecommunications regulatory performance and establishing a sustainable system for measuring and benchmarking ICT sector indicators in developing Asia.

For more information about this event, email asia@lirne.net

Businessworld: Pak Betters India

The sharp growth in the Indian telecom industry has been talked about for quite sometime. That growth happened after many contentious issues got straightened out over the years at the regulatory level. Despite that, a study by Colombo-based LIRNE Asia (Learning Initiatives on Reforms for Network Economies) claims that the telecom regulatory mechanism in India is way behind Pakistan in five of the six parameters it considered.The Telecom Regulatory Environment 2006 has compared six countries including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Not surprisingly, India leads the pack on price. However, it lags behind on market entry, spectrum, interconnection, anti-competitive procedures and universal service obligations.

The TRE Study including analysis of Indo-Pak growth rates and the possible contributions of TRE and investment is available now.

Divakar Goswami, LIRNEasia’s Director, Organizational and Projects, who was moderating the panel asked the following question:

One of the first achievements of your government was to delicense the 2.4 GHz frequency that allowed communities to use Wi-Fi extensively in the country. Despite that, Indonesia currently has Internet penetration of 0.69 percent. You have about 124 ISPs that operate in Indonesia. How do you explain the low penetration and what are the barriers preventing Internet from growing faster in Indonesia? When we look at broadband sector we see that penetration is even lower. What are the barriers that can be lifted so that this sector can grow?

Minister Sofyan Djalil:

There are a number of barriers to Internet growth that we have identified and we will solve in short period of time. One of the bottlenecks is international fiber optic cables. Right now the international capacity is low and price of international bandwith in Indonesia is very high. Currently international backbone is on the basis of half-circuit and Indonesian operator cannot determine the price as they wish. Next month we will invite investors to come to Indonesia, and several have shown interest, to lay fiber optic from Jakarta to any destination in the world. To Hong Kong, Sidney or to any other country especially where the destination has liberalized international bandwidth market and no discriminatory pricing. So this should take care of the bottleneck of international fiber optic in a very short period of time.

The second problem is we have limited access to domestic backbone. Right now several operators have fiber optic based network in the country. But they don’t share with others. So we are going to introduce a new regulation to force all operators to share fiber optic facilities. In addition to that, we will invite investors lay down domestic fiber optic to come and connect all our cities in Indonesia. We have an objective that with the Palapa Ring project we want to connect all the cities, about 500 cities all over Indonesia with Internet.

To solve the problem of last mile, next week may be this Friday, we will issue a tender for interested parties to bid for 2.3 MHz frequency for broadband wireless. We hope that it will be deployed very soon in Indonesia.

By introducing these three initiatives, we believe that by next year or no later than one and a half years from now the problem of broadband in Indonesia will be solved.

The other problem of course is like other developing countries, we have many people living in rural areas. Right now 30,000 islands have no access to telecommunications as yet. We have a very ambitious program to connect them. We charge universal service obligation from any operator, 0.75 percent of their gross income. We believe that by using this USO fund by 2010 all these villages will be connected. After that we start providing Internet service to those villages.

The 2007 course is designed to enhance the strategic thinking of a select group of senior decision makers in the telecom and related sectors in the Asia Pacific and elsewhere. The focus will be on the most current strategic issues.

The faculty includes:
Prof. William Melody (course convener; designed and led the previous Telecom Reform courses); Prof. Rohan Samarajiva (course convener;designed and led the previous Telecom Reform courses); Dr. Tim Kelly, Head of the Strategy and Policy Unit of the International Telecommunication Union; Mr. Rajendra Singh, of the World Bank, also Former Secretary, TRAI; and Dr. Harsha de Silva, Lead Economist at LIRNEasia.

Mr. Yusuf Annuar Yaacob (Chief Executive Officer of TM International Sdn Bhd. [Telekom Malaysia], a leading investor in the South and South East Asian region) will deliver the keynote at the opening session.

M.H Au (Director General of Telecom, Hong Kong China) will deliver the keynote speech at the course banquet on 1 March.

A day and a half will be set apart for discussing cutting-edge research on sector and regulatory performance commissioned as part of the 2006-07 World Dialogue on Regulation at the Expert Forum on March 2nd and 3rd.

This will be the 11th LIRNE.NET executive training course on telecom regulation, and the second to be offered in the Asia Pacific by LIRNEasia and CONNECTasia Forum Pte. Ltd. Previous LIRNE.NET courses have been offered in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. This course builds on the successful course held in Singapore in September 2005, with attendees from 18 countries.

Registration ends: January 10th, 2007 (early bird) or February 9th, 2007 (regular; extended due to some seats coming open at the last minute)

More information…

This project was partly funded by the World Bank’s Small Grants from 2005 and was implemented by LIRNEasia in partnership with Sarvodaya. It will run until June 2006.
Peter Harold, the country director of the World Bank in Sri Lanka, dispersed grant allocations to six selected civic society organizations and officially launched the SGP 2006. The award program this year supports and promotes youth involvement in development. The selected organizations will work with diverse youth sectors to empower them by building capacity and developing skills.

LIRNEasia released A Concept Paper for a Dam-related Hazard Warning System in Sri Lanka: A Participatory Study on Actions Required to Avoid and Mitigate Dam Disasters in collaboration with its project partners, the Vanguard Foundation, Sri Lanka National Committee on Large Dams (SLNCOLD), Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) and Sarvodaya. This work was funded by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives. Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, Executive Director of LIRNEasia, handed over the final concept paper to U. W. L. Chandradasa, Director, Disaster Management Centre, Government of Sri Lanka. Excerpts from Kantale: 19 Years Later, a video documentary that was directed by Divakar Goswami and produced as part of the dam hazard project was screened on this occasion.

LIRNEasia and Sarvodaya formally launched a project to prepare tsunami-affected Sarvodaya villages to be disaster resilient. In the first instance, this project would evaluate disaster mitigation training and a number of ICTs for last-mile connectivity to 32 tsunami-affected villages in Sri Lanka. Based on the relative effectiveness of the ICTs, recommendations would be made on a wider-scale deployment of last-mile technologies and disaster preparedness training.

Rohan Samarajiva outlined the project objectives, methodology and introduced the project partners. Dr. Vinya Ariyaratne, Executive Director of Sarvodaya, described the last-mile hazard information project as part of Sarvodaya’s integrated response to disasters. He also announced the opening of the Samana Teta Disaster Management Institute in Moratuwa the day before, that would act as the coordinating hub for the project. Dr. Wil Baker, Senior Vice President from WorldSpace, described the features of the Disaster Warning Response and Recovery system based on addressable satellite radio technology that would be deployed with other ICTs in the coastal villages. Nalaka Gunawardena from TVE Asia Pacific and Gordon Gow from the London School of Economics, project partners, were also present to answer questions from the media.

The media coverage of the event will be tracked in the comments thread below.

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 and Vanguard Foundation, in collaboration with the Sri Lanka National Committee of Large Dams, have conducted an Expert Consultation as the basis for developing a concept paper on an Early Warning System for Dam Related Hazards. Most of the Sri Lankan experts on dam management and safety were invited to this event.

The event was kicked off by Chandra Jayaratne, Director of the Vanguard Foundation and Rohan Samarajiva, Executive Director of LIRNEasia with a welcome address and opening remarks.

The first presentation titled, Nineteen years later, what lessons have been learnt from the Kantale breach (and what changes have been implemented)? by D W R Weerakoon, Former Director General of Irrigation and Secretary, Presidential Commission on the Kantale Dam Breach.

It was followed by a presentation by Nimal Wickramaratne, Director, Headworks of the Mahaweli Authority documenting International best practices in dam safety.

The third presentation documented the Current situation of dam management in Sri Lankaby Badra Kamaladasa, Deputy Director (Dam Safety), Department of Irrigation.

The fourth and the last presentation was made by Tissa Illangasekare, AMAX Distinguished Chair of Environmental Science & Engineering & Professor of Civil Engineering; Director, Center for Experimental Study of Subsurface Environmental Processes (CESEP) Colorado School of Mines, USA & Anura Jayasumana, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering & Computer Science, Colorado State University, USA via videoconferencing from Colorado. Their presentation explored What are some innovative technologies for hazard detection in dams?

Each presentation was followed by 30 minutes of discussion. The Expert Consultation ended with an open forum where dam experts discussed some of the crucial issues raised in the presentations. This session was chaired by K.S.R. De Silva, Director General of Irrigation & President, Sri Lanka National Committee on Large Dams.

Based on the discussions and presentations, a concept paper on an Early Warning System for Dam Related Hazards is currently being written and will be presented on this website shortly for your comments. Please check back later.