The government of Indonesia has announced that World Bank, as administrator for Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA) , in April 2009 has signed a grant agreement for US$1.9 million with the Republic of Indonesia to facilitate access to Internet and associated telecommunication services for people living in remote areas in Java dan Sumatra. Access development and provision are fully financed by GPOBA and supervised by Ministry of Communications and Information’s Directorate General of Applied Telematics (Ditjen Aptel). Minister of Communications and Information, Mohammad Nuh, said that witnessing Indonesia’s development and progress in becoming a knowledge-based society driven by existence and free flow of information is mutually beneficial. Furthermore, targets to be reached with this grant is in line with government efforts in making information more accessible to communities in remote areas.
Reading an article by Araba Sey on a small-sample study of teleuse among non-owners in Ghana in a special issue of info, edited by two colleagues in LIRNE.NET, I was surprised to see no references whatsoever to our work. We who are at edge of the global academic system had excuses, but really, after Scholar.Google, no one has excuses. Further, I was told that Araba had been at a talk given by Helani Galpaya at USC Annenberg School in October 2007 and had been given an entire set of teleuse@BOP2 findings, which makes the omission even more saddening.
Interesting how research gets used. We draw the conclusion that mobile is the path to the information society or digital Bangladesh or whatever it’s called. In the Dhaka Mirror article, the Bangladeshi experts draw the conclusion that what is needed are more telecenters. M Faizullah Khan, president of the Bangladesh Computer Samity, disagrees with the notion that the Bangladeshi poor can in no way afford computers while the Indians and Pakistanis can. Contradicting the country’s much trumpeted success in mass education, Khan said, ‘Effective literacy had not been ensured for the poor people.
The last burst of dissemination for the teleuse@BOP3 results is yielding good results, this time with an agency story about more BOP homes in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan having phones than radios, a story we had blogged about some time back. Phones are catching up with TVs, and the number of phones being used by ‘bottom of the pyramid’ households have already outpaced the number of radios and computers in South Asia, researchers have said. LIRNEasia, a Sri Lanka-based Asia-Pacific information and communication technology (ICT) policy and regulation capacity-building organisation, said in India a hundred bottom of the pyramid (BOP) households now had 50 TVs, 38 phones, 28 radios and one computer. Radio has been displaced from its No.2 position after television in India.
Politicians are not known for strict adherence to truth, but I personally thought the Minister of Science and Technology Tissa Vitarana being a man of science was cut from different cloth. The first time he stated that the original telecenters set up under e Sri Lanka (Vishva Gnana Kendra or VGKs) were in urban areas and that after the government changed in 2004, the decision was taken to take them to rural areas (renamed as Nenasala), I blamed not him, but the flunkies at the ICT Agency who did not give him the true facts. None of the VGKs were in major urban centers, while some Nenasalas are in the centers of major cities (e.g., one inside the Dalada Maligawa premises and another inside the Natha Devalaya, in the heart of Kandy).
Talk in the Bangladesh telecom sector has been focused on taxes these days because the government had proposed a 25% tax on handsets and the retention of the controversial TK 800 tax on SIMs. These are counterproductive taxes both in terms of improving government revenues and connecting people electronically; their combined effect is to make it a lot more expensive to get connected. It’s only people who are connected who generate usage-based taxes, they are counter-productive for the government and they absolutely go against plans for a Digital Bangladesh. At the end of all the efforts to change the government’s mind, all that happened is the reduction of the handset tax. Full report in the Daily Star.
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 India.
A recently released World Bank report states that mobile prices in Sri Lanka dropped by 43%, the world’s highest, in 2004-06. Next were Uzbekistan and Chad at -37% and -31% respectively.
In other countries, government are focusing on removing electronic equipment from the waste stream, basically requiring the equipment vendors to take the unwanted equipment back. Since January, Washington State residents and small businesses have been allowed to drop off their televisions, computers and computer monitors free of charge to one of 200 collection points around the state. They have responded by dumping more than 15 million pounds of electronic waste, according to state collection data. If disposal continues at this rate, it will amount to more than five pounds for every man, woman and child per year. In Sri Lanka, the Environment Ministry is collecting massive amounts of money from mobile usage, in the name of recycling mobile phones.
The results of the migrant study that was conducted along with the teleuse@BOP 3 study were released in Dhaka today. The first of the news coverage: Expatriate Bangladeshis called home more frequently than their Pakistani, Indian, Sri Lankan and Filipino counterparts, spending $48 a month to stay in touch, a survey says. The survey ‘”Teleuse at the bottom of the pyramid”, conducted by LIRNEasia, a regional ICT policy research institute, found 87 percent of Bangladeshi migrants called home at least once a week, while 34 percent called home daily. Dr Rohan Samarejiva, chairman and CEO of the LIRNEasia, disclosed the result of the survey on Sunday in Dhaka. Dr Samarejiva said the survey was conducted over 1,500 overseas and domestic migrant workers from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Thailand.
The Shining Path did it; the JVP in Sri Lanka did it; the Taliban have made it a habit, and now the Maoists are on the job. What is this telephone envy? Concerned over frequent setback to telecommunication, hampering operations against the Naxals, the Home Ministry has offered that the towers could be located in the premises of para-military forces stationed in the troubled districts or in the campuses of police stations. Home Ministry officials said the highest number of 20 towers were destroyed during the last three years in Chhattisgarh, where last year alone 14 mobile telephone towers of both private and government networks were attacked. Full story.
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.
Some governments shut down telecom networks including the Internet to control dissent. Others do not. What are the conditions that give rise to the former action? Why do others not do this? Israel never shuts down telecom networks but Sri Lanka does.
To many people’s surprise, the UK has decided to tax every fixed line 6 pounds a year to build “next generation broadband” throughout the country. But Virgin’s network is limited and fibre-optic cables are expensive. The two firms can profitably reach only around two-thirds of the population, reckons Matt Yardley of Analysys Mason, a consultancy that helped to prepare the report. Connecting the rest at high speed will cost around £3 billion. So Lord Carter surprised the broadband industry by proposing a £6 annual tax on telephone lines, raising around £150m.
Good news for the many outside and inside government who struggled to get this done, including our colleagues from Research ICT Africa. The necessary condition for cheap connectivity is about to the fulfilled. Last week, in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, a regional communications revolution belatedly got under way when Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, plugged in the first of three fibre-optic submarine cables due to make landfall in Kenya in the next few months. They should speed up the connection of Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as bits of Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, to the online world. Of course, as the West African cable showed abundantly, and then the landing of SEA-ME-WE 4 in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh did, the cable by itself does not make things better.
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.