The projects that Nuwan worked on were on first responder warning. Our first foray into public warning was in the Maldives. You can see from the Maldives, there’s very good mobile coverage. At the peak tourists amount to 1/5th of the population. In the Maldives there was great property damage in the Malidives.
We are the first highly personalized professional information service for farmers. RML has over 170,000 subscribers across 12,000 villages. By one estimate RML might have reached up to a million farmers. This is because farmers don’t consumer the information by themselves but share it with 8-12 other farmers. They say that it’s information, and it gives me a different status in the village (to share).
More coverage on LBO of the proceedings of the LIRNEasia@5 conference: “The biggest contribution from research is not what is adopted, but what is adopted,” says Bill Melody, founding director of World Dialog on Regulation for Network Economies. “Harmful policies that are avoided with the information generated from research.” R K Arnold the head of the executive secretariat of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India says all its recommendation is based on extensive but decisions are not “We used a (LirneAsia) research on a tax and the government reduced the tax. In infrastructure sharing we drawn heavily on your research,” Arnold said. “But whether the decision makers use it at the top depends on a very fluid situation.
Anjani Sinha, MD National Spot Exchange, India: National Spot Exchange’s objective is to reduce cost of intermediaries and enable farmers to sell directly to consumers. When the farmer harvests they can bring produce to our warehouse. A receipt is issued to him. He can then sell immediately to us, and electronic negotiation will happen. Buyers anywhere in the country can see the price and bid.
For any market to succeed it needs to be efficient. Transaction costs in this part of the world in agri markets are very high. It is the information search cost that has caused this. ICT must step in here and reduce the cost of obtaining information; allowing farmers to have more access to information and ultimately enable farmers to participate more actively in market activity. Many attempts have been made at reducing the info search cost.
This panel comes at a stage where LIRNEasia is trying to go beyond the passive use of ICTs to how ICTs can be used for welfare. What I’m going to start with is to ask Sriganesh to set the context for this particular session. Sriganesh: What the rural poor is looking for is reliable and good quality information. What they care about is enhancing their livelihoods. They’re looking for locally driven content in local languages, demand driven more than push.
Partha Mukhopadhyay: Four broad issues I think we could think through. This whole concept of knowledge-based economies Is the classification of indicators, drivers sensible and what would you put in there Where is LIRNEasia’s work most suited What would be specific sectors that make sense (IT, agriculture) Robin Mansell: Early volumes made the case that change is not just technology but related to humans and people. A 1999 quote – ‘knowledge is like light, weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere.’ This was a very top down economist view. All one had to do was count investments in these areas.
Dinidu de Alwis has uploaded a quality set of the Day Two photos to Flickr. As day two ends you can view a slideshow of the selection here. They include headshots of pretty much all the speakers. The photos from all days are and will remain available in the LIRNEasia@5 collection on Flickr.
Bill Melody: As Rohan has said, this is the last event of the day. The real question is does policy research do anything besides keep policy researchers busy. We recognize that policy research is also done for the wider community, including industry, NGOs, academics and others to inform and build support for evidence based policy. We are constantly asked to show that research affects policy. However, you generally find that policy makers and regulators go through their own decision making process and tracing the affect of research is not easy.
AJ: If mobile trasactions have a huge role to play in smoothening the income of the bottom of the pyramid some form of loan is required at a cost below microfinance. How do you do risk assessment? Harsha de Silva: You have hit the nail on the head. This is where the revolution will take place in financial inclusion. What we may see is poor people maintaining a marginal account in the bank with a set OD limit.
Chirag Jain, GupShup, India The platform is, to begin with, Yahoo Groups on SMS. All you had to do was create a group, invite your friends and communicate them. The difference was that we sat between and subsidized the cost with advertising. We were able to insert contextual advertising and targeted advertising. The platform is now offering itself to enterprises as a fantastic mobile CRM application.
Professor Xue Lan of Tsinghua University in Beijing participated in the inaugural session of the La@5 conference through a video link, kindly provided by Tata Communications Lanka. We were worried about this, because he was competing with real people (Milinda Moragoda, Minister of Justice and Law Reforms, Sri Lanka, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Center for Policy Research, New Delhi) in the co-presence of the large audience. This report by an LBO journalist who was in the room suggests that the message overcame the limitations of the medium. Ad hoc public policy formulation can be disastrous and both China and India are evolving evidence based processes to back effective government action, academics and researchers said at a policy forum in Colombo. “The strategic direction is set by the Party and State Council and the People’s Congress makes legislation,” Xue Lan professor of Public Policy at Tsinghua University in China said, participating in a regional policy forum in Colombo.
by Ayesha Zainudeen CellBazaar is a classifieds site in Bangladesh. Potential buyers and sellers can search for and post information on goods. If you compare CellBazaar to a developed marketplace like Amazon, Amazon covers the full range of a transaction. The search, payment, feedback, delivery. CellBazaar actually just focuses on the search.
Understanding the volatility of cash flow of poor people is important in assessing the mass appeal of Mobile Money. M transfers must be used to smoothen consumption and expense. We need to consider how a poor person who skips meals can use technology to avoid it. The urban poor live in congestion while another group lives in rural isolation. The estate poor are institutionally dependent i.
Harsha de Silva I’m looking at mobile payments from an economics angle. The idea here is to understand the volatility of cash flow of the poor. Then the prevalence of m-commerce to smoothen consumption. Then finally how to increase use of m-commerce solutions. As a logic for this, you’re looking at people with irregular income streams.
After reading the historical studies of telecom in the United State, my grad student said don’t pay too much attention to interconnection. The standard answer, what are the three priorities of regulation -interconnection, interconnection and interconnection. Now, later, I have to kind of say Divakar was right. This is such a radical statement that the guy from the FCC is cringing here. My example is Bangladesh.