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In the age of social media, people will learn of distant hazards independently of government. What government must focus on is helping them respond on the most intelligent way, based on the best science. On this front, much remains to be done.

The most successful programs clearly define their objectives and broadly communicate their existence to civil society.

THE EXAMPLE OF SRI LANKA

To illustrate what such a program could look like, we look at Sri Lanka’s stated objectives, extracted directly from the Information and Communication Technology Plan for Sri Lanka 2011–2016

I thought I’d read the entire document, not just the long extract published in the report. Curiously, the reference (Ch 1.6; footnote 19) did not include a URL.

Searched using Google. Nothing, other than a Cabinet decision referring to the Plan and a survey conducted by ICTA also referring to the Plan.

Ministry website? Nothing.

ICTA.LK? Nothing.

The most successful programs clearly define their objectives and broadly communicate their existence to civil society.

Using methods other than the web, I presume?

Such connectivity provides opportunities for economic, social and cultural connectivity for the formerly “disconnected” populations in the former conflict zones. Yet leverage of ICTs for this, remains limited.

Preliminary research results on the use of ICTs in post-conflict Sri Lanka were presented at World Bank panel at ICTD 2012. This research is being conducted by Sriganesh Lokanathan for the World Bank as part of a series of studies that aim to fill the ICT4D knowledge gap in the areas of post-conflcit situations. The presentation was made by LIRNEasia CEO, Rohan Samarajiva.

The slides are available HERE.

While the actual data on the number of Internet users in Sri Lanka shows a significant increase in the last few years according to ITU data, it is useful to understand the methodologies behind the numbers.  The ITU, which is the basis of Amis’ article, recommends the use of demand side data (i.e. data obtained from representative sample surveys of the population) to measure the number of internet users.  But user surveys are costly and difficult to organize.

When survey data is not available, the current method for  estimating the number of Internet users is to take the number of internet subscriptions (as reported by the country’s operators, or by the country’s telecom regulator) and multiply that by a number/ multiplier.  This is because each internet subscription is assumed to be used by more than one person: so the multiplier accounts for people who use Public Internet Access Points (PIAPs) or people who use the Internet at their work places, schools or other public locations.

As at 2010 there were 298,100 fixed Internet subscriptions and 2.503 million Internet users in Sri Lanka according to the ITU, with an Internet penetration rate of 12%. But according to the 2009 Household ICT Literacy Survey conducted by the Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka had an “Internet using household population (aged 5 – 69)” of 13.1%.  It is estimated that there were 17.7 million people aged 5-69 in Sri Lanka according to UN Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs.  In that case there were 2.3 million internet users in Sri Lanka in 2009.

The Telecommunication Regulatory Commission Sri Lanka (TRCSL) website gives 280,000 as the number of “Internet and email subscribers – fixed” as at Dec 2010, a rather mysterious and undefined indicator that does not seem to have international comparators.   Though ITU recommends use of demand side survey data, they do not seem to be taking the data of the 2009 ICT literacy survey into account, nor do they seem to be using the TRCSL data, so where ITU obtains its figures of 298,100 or 2.503 million is unclear.

LIRNEasia conducted a research to understand the relationship between the multiplier used to calculate the number of Internet users from the number of subscriptions and GNI per capita income ranking.  We found that a reverse correlation exists – that is, higher the GNI ranking, lower the multiplier. In other words in countries with a high GNI ranking, fewer  people share their Internet subscription and therefore the multiplier is expected to be closer to one, while in countries with a low GNI ranking more people use public Internet access points and share any other given connection, which would give a higher multiplier. We recommended to the ITU the use of this correlation to estimate the number of Internet users, instead of the current arbitrary method/multiplier. Using our method, with ITUs 298,100 Internet subscriptions as the base we get 2.17 million users.

Indi had estimated 2 million users in Sri Lanka in a previous post. While this is closer to the calculation of number of Internet users from our methodology, here too there maybe some issues with the data used to arrive at the estimation as the different sources of data such as ITU and TRCSL give different figures. Considering these different estimates, it seems very probable that the number of Internet users in Sri Lanka should be between 2 – 2.5 million, but due to the inaccuracy of the available data in Sri Lanka it is not possible to narrow it down further.  The only way to be certain is through regular demand side surveys and by ensuring that all official figures are consistent with each other.

The story was about an award. But what I noticed was the role of telephones in the story. The award winning innovation is not just one new thing; it is a collection of process improvements. Critical elements involve phones as easy ways of contacting mothers on the one hand and health workers on the other.

Without the phones, would the innovation have been possible? Without the innovation, would the increase in immunization rates have been possible? Without the increase in immunization rates would it have been possible to save lives?

Without the reforms, would there be phones? Would it be possible to assume that all health workers could be reached, and that the mothers would have phone numbers to give when being registered?

These benefits, it appears, far outweigh the millions of dollars generated by the telecom industry for government.

Even better, imagine if you could email a letter to the post office, pay for the stamp online, and never set foot outside of your door? You could send mail digitally, with minimal fuss. People still like receiving letters, if it wasn’t such a pain sending them we might do it more. All of these are simple innovations which barely even amount to innovation at all. They would just bring the post office up to the operating level of a modern teenager.

The Internet boom
On a broader level, the Internet boom in America saw renewed business for the post as people began ordering more from Amazon and eBay and online delivery sites. Sri Lanka looks poised to see a similar boom in eCommerce, but few trust the Postal Service to deliver. Most local eCommerce start-ups I’ve talked to consider courier services (either their own or outsourced) their first resort. To a degree this is natural (even the US Postal Service has lost out to UPS and DHL), but if the Sri Lanka Post was even slightly proactive, they could at least get into the game.

The column.

But I hope I am wrong and that there will be real implementation. A low-hanging fruit is bilateral lowering of roaming charges and termination charges for calls from Sri Lanka to India and vice versa. We have been waiting for SAARC to implement these things, much easier if India and Sri Lanka show how it can be done.

Sri Lanka and India have signed an agreement to set up a mechanism of technical and institutional cooperation in telecommunications. It aims to develop telecommunications in both the countries particularly in the areas of technology and access to telecommunication services, a statement from the Indian High Commission said.

The deal covers oversight of service provision, convergence, next generation networks, new technologies, spectrum issues, number portability, and economic regulation, it said.

The awaited end of rapacious money making from international calls is nigh, according to Telegeography.

International long distance traffic growth is slowing rapidly. According to new data from TeleGeography, international long distance traffic grew four percent in 2011, to 438 billion minutes. This growth rate was less than one-third of the industry’s long-run historical average of 13 percent annual growth. Because telcos must rely on strong volume growth to offset inevitable price declines, slowing traffic growth is making life ever more difficult for international service providers.

Governments, of course, haven’t a clue, and are erecting even more elaborate gateway monopolies (e.g. Bangladesh) and slapping extra taxes on outgoing international calls (Sri Lanka). The first is futile; the second is stupid.  But the question is when international telephony disappears, not whether.

Sri Lanka will collect information about areas like internet access in the first nation-wide household and population census to be conducted in over 30 years, an official said.

The census which is to conducted from February 27 to March 21 will have 80,000 ‘enumerators’ visiting every house in the country to count the population and also questions about amenities in the house.

The head of Sri Lanka’s statistics office Suranjana Vidyaratne asked people to give correct information.

“We are not giving this personal information to anyone,” she said. “This time we are also asking questions like internet access.”

While senior scholars were listed as co-authors, all the presentations were made by young scholars, including some based on undergrad thesis work. The encouragement given to young people to present their research in a peer-review setting was praiseworthy. It would however not be a bad idea to put a little more effort into preparing young scholars to make effective research presentations, something that we at LIRNEasia do through the tutorials and coaching we provide in the context of CPRsouth.

Interdisciplinary work is great, but requires more effort either in the form of the researcher really taking the trouble to speak multiple disciplinary “languages” or, the more logical route of working in teams, which seemed to be the favored mode among those who gave papers on the 29th. The trouble is that agriculture is not really a single discipline, containing within it as many disciplines as a small-sized university. So, for example, I felt that economics could have been better represented in the mix and that, in fact, some papers suffered from the lack of economics.

This was the point I chose to emphasize when I was invited to make comments at the closing panel. Those looking at the agricultural supply chain would be well served by using concepts from economics such as transaction costs, without engaging in the fashionable but counter-productive bashing of “middlemen.” Of course what is intriguing is the possibility of using “agents” (software entities that operate with preset rules) that seemed to reflect a lot of research going on at Moratuwa. Now that could reduce transaction costs in a way simple economics cannot.

Research on farmers’ information needs and the means they use to meet those needs is interesting to us, especially because we have been studying the subject for some time, the most recent effort being by Kapugama, Lokanathan and Perera. The research reported on at the conference had been done in one village in Sri Lanka. The paper says simple random sampling was used, while the abstract says it was a purposive sample. I tried to get it clarified at the conference but failed. Another paper read at CPRsouth7 on a related set of research questions had serious problems with sampling as well.

Nevertheless, the findings were congruent with our findings about farmers relying mostly on their peers, preferring voice to text and so on. It went further, to show that the government’s Nenasalas were of no relevance to farmers. But the recommendation was that more resources be put into Nenasalas.

This is a problem we experience at CPRsouth too. Research shows something has failed. Most often, the recommendation is to put more money into it. Rarely does anyone recommend that the plug be pulled. Why?

What is even more worrisome is the lack of knowledge among all the parties about the available modes of communicating early warnings. No mention of cell broadcasting that is capable of delivering location-specific tailored information to all mobile handsets within the range of a base transceiver station. The journalist has done a good job except for repeating misinformation about poor communication infrastructure and access in rural areas.

Pradeep Koddippilli, the DMC assistant director-in-charge of early warnings, told IPS that the centre had not received any warning from the meteorology department tasked with assessing dangerous weather events. “We kept contacting them repeatedly through the 25th, but there was no warning,” he said.

Despite the millions spent on setting up early warning towers and networks, a recent assessment by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released in November said that the meteorology department, in fact, lacked the technical capacity to predict rainfall and fast moving weather patterns.

“The U.N. assessment confirms the technical capacity of the department of meteorology needs to be further developed in order to enable it to deliver reliable quantitative rain forecasts,” said the report titled ‘Disaster Response and Preparedness Assessment Mission to Sri Lanka’.

Experts told IPS that multiple dissemination systems are at the disposal of the DMC – ideal for a country where communication infrastructure is poor in rural areas.

In addition to the 67 warning towers set up island-wide, the DMC can also tap into the wide network of public officials at the village level, volunteers with the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, secure satellite communications and, at least, one national mobile network to send out alerts.

“You cannot say what is the best system because each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. What is important is to have several systems to make sure vulnerable communities receive warnings in time,” Suranga Kahandawa, disaster management specialist at the World Bank, told IPS

The government’s own nationally and provincially representative Household Income and Expenditure Survey shows that more than 75 percent of households in the Southern Province (affected by the most recent early warning fiasco) have a telephone in the house (almost all being GSM and CDMA handsets capable of receiving cell broadcasts), clearly contradicting the claim of poor infrastructure in rural areas.

LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP4 research (representative of those at the Bottom of the Pyramid; but not at the level of Province) showed that urban households has slightly higher (7%) ownership of phones, but that when it came to access to a phone within the household there was no difference between urban and rural households.

In the course of the debate, Mr Gammanpila claimed that e waste could not be transported across borders and that therefore the levy was needed to fund the construction of a factory. I questioned the veracity of this claim and even challenged him to a public debate. See the summary and my continuing efforts to engage the issue here. And who will be held to account for the wasteful expenditures, if any, on the e-waste processing factory?

Today, it was reported that the CEA that Mr Gammanpila headed had been instrumental in the export of 27,000 tons of e-waste, including mobile phones, for proper processing. This suggests the CEA has proved me right with regard to the interpretation of Basel.

But the Minister’s reaction is fully understandable. People died needlessly, because the agency that is mandated to warn our people of hazards that may harm them willfully neglected to do so. I was one of the first to tweet on Nov 27th that there appeared to have been a massive failure in communicating the early warning. The Minister in charge of disaster management (representing a Southern coastal district who should have been enraged by what happened) first said he’d launch an investigation and then said the Met Department had been “unable” to issue a warning and that it would be given more resources to do its job. But now, his Cabinet colleague has unequivocally refuted the claim of inability:

Fisheries Minister Dr Rajitha Senaratne in Parliament today blamed the Meteorology Department for failing to warn residents and fishermen along the souhern costal belt of incoming gale force winds despite being warned ahead by the National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency (NARA).

The failure to issue an early warning led to the death of nearly 20 fishermen last month.

Dr Senaratne said that he had not previously revealed the fact of NARA warning the Met Department, Disaster Management Centre, Coast Guard Department and the Sri Lanka Navy of the impending danger a day ahead.

Chairman of the NARA Dr Hiran Jayawardena had sent SMS messages to the Navy and the Coast Guard of the gale force wind with the time it was expected to hit the Southern Coastal belt areas, the Minister said.

When the NARA officials had informed the Met Department of the information that there would be strong winds of larger magnitude, the Met Department officials had rubbished them saying that such event is not in their forecast so that could not be happened.

Basically what I understand the Minister as saying (I was watching the debate on TV) that internationally generated weather information will be sent directly to fishing vessels capable of receiving them by the National Aquatic Research Agency. This is a workaround. As long as NARA simply transmits the information without issuing warnings, we could safeguard the principle. But of course it is more important to safeguard lives than principles.