Sir Arthur imagined what the world could be. In some cases, such as the geostationary orbit that was named after him, he even did the mathematics to substantiate his imagination. But the mathematics was not the true achievement: it was that he imagined this wondrous idea of a specific orbit where satellites would be stationary in relation to the earth and could therefore serve as very tall towers for wireless transmissions with line of sight covering one third of the surface of the globe; it was that he imagined it a decade before anything had been sent that far into space and before the rockets with power had been designed.

His was a creative mind until the end. I recall him saying that we should consider a single time zone for the world at a video conference that we participated in back in 1998. I remember then laughing and telling him off camera that only he could get away with such outlandish and impractical claims. Yet, as I saw young people working in BPOs in Bangalore and Manila and then Colombo running to world time, I began to see his point.

I recall him forwarding me an e-mail from BT labs around 2000 asking what could be done on Giga Bit network. I, cautious quasi-bureaucrat, talked about the dangers of supply-side push. But Sir Arthur was all imagination. Today, when the YouTube site consumes as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000, I realize the incredible ability of that wonderful mind.

Satellites for arms control. He thought it first. And then Ronald Reagan said, famously, “doveryai, no proveryai” (trust but verify).

He also imagined Sri Lankan living in peace. With Sir Arthur’s track record, may be we stand a chance.

A generous man and a kind man. It was easy to be generous with money when you plenty. But he was generous with time, the scarcest of all commodities. I was an underling at the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies in 1985-86, tasked with connecting Sri Lanka to the inchoate Internet, then Arpanet. He paid attention to my project, invited me to play with his lifetime CompuServe subscription from his home at a time when international calls were like gold. It was rarely that he declined an invitation or refused an appointment for a visitor wanting an autograph and a photograph.

He cared. I recall one of the early “Internet to your home” programs I was helping with at the government TV channel in 1999. In the run up to the millennium, we had cooked up this idea of asking significant people to name five people who had made the most important contributions to the dying 20^th century, and then doing live web searches about the named individuals to demonstrate the power of the Internet. Few hours before the first show was to air, I got a desperate call. They did not have the person to answer the question lined up.

Sir Arthur to the rescue. I called him from the studio live. He spoke on speaker phone and I translated his list and rationale. I still recall the thought he had given to his list and rationale. The inventor of the jet engine was on his list, beyond the usual suspects.

The show went on for all of 1999. I recall how often Sri Lankans of significance who were asked to give their lists included Sir Arthur among the five. There he was, in the company of Gandhi and Mandela.

We were fortunate to have him live here in Sri Lanka with us. Over the last thirty years, not much good news has come out of this country. War, refugees, riots, tsunami. It gets kind of tiresome when you’re at lunch with a bunch of foreigners, someone asks where you’re from, and then a pall of gloom descends on the table because the talk is of war and suicide bombers.

I used to say I was from Sri Lanka, where Arthur Clarke lived. And then, we’d have a pleasant lunch-time conversation about the literary license he had taken to move Sri Lanka south to the equator so that the space elevators could be located there (Fountains of Paradise, 1979) or his claim that the oceans surrounding Sri Lanka were the closest he could get to outer space in his life time.

Thank you, Sir Arthur.

This was written for Montage, the monthly news magazine.

BANGALORE, India (AFP) — India remains the favoured technology outsourcing destination, an industry report said Sunday, amid concerns a rising rupee and soaring wages would blunt the country’s competitive edge.

A study by industry publication Global Services and investment advisory firm Tholons put the Indian cities of Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune at the top of a list of 15 emerging outsourcing destinations for global companies.

Kolkata at number five and Chandigarh at number nine were the other two Indian locations on the list, which contained three Chinese and two Vietnamese cities as well.The three hot cities for outsourcing from China were Shanghai at number eight, Beijing at 10 and Shenzhen at 13. Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi were put at number six and number 12.

Cebu in the Philippines came in at number four, the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo at seven, Cairo at 11, Buenos Aires at 14 and Sao Paulo at 15, the study’s sponsors said in a statement released in Bangalore.

The list is based on criteria such as scale and quality of workforce, financial infrastructure, risk environment and quality of life.

But it does not include established outsourcing locations such as Bangalore, the New Delhi capital region, Manila, Mumbai and Dublin that have had a decade’s headstart.

Costs are surging in the prime cities in India, which has earned a reputation as the world’s back office, as property values and rentals rise and wages increase at an annual pace of more than 15 percent amid a shortage of skilled employees.

Indian outsourcing firms are also feeling the pinch from an appreciating rupee, which dents dollar-billed earnings, forcing them to cut costs by expanding to less expensive locations.

“With the demand-supply gap widening, newer tier II cities will play a critical role in re-engineered globalisation models,” said Tholons chairman Avinash Vashistha.

“Destinations will need to provide greater level of cost effectiveness and operational efficiency.”

India’s outsourcing companies have thrived by winning work from companies in the US and Europe that sought to tap the country’s low costs and large employee pool by handing over jobs ranging from answering customers’ calls to risk management and financial analysis.

Pure-play outsourcing firms account for about 10 percent of the 50 billion dollars in revenue logged in the year ended March by the entire information technology industry, which also includes software giants such as Tata Consultancy and Infosys.

The special issue is edited by Subash Bhatnagar, an acknowledged expert on e government who provides a good summary, marred unfortunately by the use of wrong data in Table 1 (p. xvi), where

• the per capita income in USD for India is given as 3,100; Pakistan as 2,200 and Sri Lanka as 4,000 (obviously calculated on a PPP basis, but this has to be stated; year not given);
• “Telecom penetration percentage” is given as India 4.63; Pakistan 2.66 and Sri Lanka 4.42 (without specifying that this is only fixed phones and giving a year, which is extremely important in this fast growing field.  Not including mobiles in this day and age is a serious error); and
• No source is given for the data (or dates)

The special issue also carries an article by Erwin Alampay, a colleague associated with LIRNEasia and a comment by Emmanuel C. Lallana, the keynote speaker at CPRsouth1 in Manila, in January 2007.

The article itself is not on web, but is likely to be placed on the web at some time in the future, aligned possibly with the lag between publishing in August 2007 a journal issue for Autumn 2006.   We received the invitation to write and responded without delay in 2007, so we’re really confused.

Communication Policy Research (CPR) south is intended to be a vehicle for building capacity in communication policy research in the Asia Pacific in the first instance, and then in the South. The core functions of CPRsouth are to organize an annual conference and to provide a virtual platform for interaction among communication policy researchers in the South. The objective is to create policy intellectuals capable of informed and effective intervention in ICT policy and regulatory processes in specific country contexts, within the larger context of communication policy research as a field flourishing in the universities and research institutes of the South.  More info…

The specific objective of this conference is to provide a foundational knowledge for scholars working on ICT policy and regulation in the region and help build a network among them. The events also include a Pre-conference tutorial on 17-18 January 2007 and the inaugural meeting of the CPRsouth Board which are to be held on the same venue.

The  agenda for the conference can be found here: download agenda

The updated CPRsouth1 agenda can be downloaded HERE. Logistical information will be posted as it becomes available.

To those applicants who will not be able to make it to the conference, we hope you continue to participate through the CPRsouth website (www.cprsouth.org) which should be ready in a few weeks. We expect to have a regularly updated site giving the latest news and events of interest to the CPRsouth community and a searchable depository for scholarly works from the community.

For more information, download the complete programme HERE

Also, please check the Call for Papers and the Call for Young Scholar Award Applications to see how you may participate in this event and join an emerging community of scholars committed to improving the lives of people in Asia through information and communication technology.

I was invited to this event, I think, primarily because of the perception of LIRNE.NET as a university-based, effective organization for applying knowledge to problems of ICT4D. The presentation that I made was entitled “LIRNE.NET: ICT4D with or without universities” (Manila Presentation), which should give a clue about what I think of the role of Asian universities in this task.