How do we get the attention of policy makers? It’s very simple, use national rankings. These are very good at actually grabbing attention. Back in the late 1980s we did some work at the OECD on how to develop performance indicators for public telecom operators. The work we did comparing countries, etc, got the interest and I think spurred reform.
Sujata Gamage Let me define informal. Glenda talked about knowledge in universities, that’s formal knowledge. Rasheed talked about intermediate organizations that take it to farmers. Maybe we should focus on the informal. Innovation is part of the human condition, we’re always trying to make our life easy.
Bill Melody: Over the last five years the world has seen the explosion of prepaid cell phones. Neither policy makers nor researchers understood the prepaid model. The development was an unexpected one promoted by poor people. I’d be interested in the panels interpretation. Emmanuel Lallana: In the Philippines that’s the case.
Let me give you a small glimpse into corporate reality, where I’m free. We discussed the challenges of conveying research results to corporate people. They’re very busy people and the distance is enormous. Rohan then asked me to suggest how to target these decision makers in the corporate setting with relevant evidence. This is something I’ve been struggling with for 18-20 years.
I will talk about the Indonesian example. The trigger for the study was a study published by LIRNEasia in 2005. This found that leased line prices in Indonesia were multiples of those in Asia. Leased lines are large capacity pipes. In some cases the prices were 48 times those in India.
Minister Milinda Moragoda taking question from audience Mehta: The Governor General Of Hong Kong said, the danger if they gather statistics someone might use them. I think the deeper problem is not data. The kind of data you need has to be in the context of interventions. It’s in the context of the program that data makes sense. The issue is, can you design programs that can do course correction as the data comes in.
Abu Saeed Khan: China and India have been investing on resources on armaments, while countries like Brazil are meeting their Millenium Development Goals. Thoughts? [Paraphrased] Mehta: If you look at the most astonishing things that have happened in India, I would say one is the rural employment guarantee act in terms of creating a great scale of programs. I think education, especially primary education, there’s a lot of movement there. If India gets GST and if it’s tax over GDP ratio goes up over 16%, you’re talking an extraordinary expansion in the capacity of the state.
Sri Lanka we have not been very successful with toll roads, but India has made a start. Xue Lan: I think what China has done in the past in many regions. The public private partnership is at work taking advantage of market reform. Once you have some success in one region that will be quickly spread to others. Mehta: I think this is exactly the area you need evidence based research.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta Milinda: Professor Xue Lan, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing China today? Xue Lan: One is the disparities, regional disparities, disparities between people in the same town. The other challenge is the environment. The resource constraints and pollution. Milinda: What are the challenges facing India?
Minister Milinda Moragoda opened the discussion with some thought provoking questions about China. Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Center For Policy Research, India): The quick reaction I had was it’s precisely these kinds of questions that make the best case for evidence based policy making. I would contest most of these dichotomies. There are interesting contrasts, but I think his diagnosis is a bit misapplied. On this question of infrastructure and roads, but I think the character of this debate will be very different five years from now.
In December 2009, Sri Lanka Railways will launch a service that will allow the making of railway reservations using mobiles. We congratulate the past and present management of the Railways for taking this innovative step in an otherwise hidebound organization. We are sure they had to overcome some very serious administrative barriers in what is still a government department.
Many countries have yet to open up government information. Even India, which has a freedom of information law, has so many exceptions to the duty to release. Simply releasing information is not enough. We need to have information in usable form. This NYT article shows some good examples.
We are always happy when people use our research. Happier when we are mentioned as the source too. We thank the writer and/or the source for attributing the results to us. While there is no separate data on the number of female subscribers in the country, according to a recent Lirneasia Teleuse Survey (a regional ICT policy and regulation think tank), mobile phone ownership is far lower among females than males in South Asia. Statistical analysis shows that gender has a significant impact on mobile phone adoption at the bottom of the pyramid in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India.
Bangladesh government will allow the private sector to plug the country with two more submarine cable systems. They will create redundancy and diversity to the lone SEA-ME-WE4 undersea cable that is state-owned. The regulator has invited response to a public consultation in this regard. The licenses will be awarded through beauty contest. The new players will also deploy optical fibre backhaul up to Dhaka, the nation’s capital.
e Sri Lanka, when designed in 2002-03, broke new ground. Now six years later, it seems opportune to assess whether it delivered on its promise. This assessment was triggered by discussions on how best to respond to the Brazilian government’s invitation to Helani Galpaya to share the learnings of e Sri Lanka. It also builds on our work on indicators and indices and discussions on this site. What did it achieve in its originally allotted five years?
Prof. K. Vijayraghavan, Director of the National Center for Biological Sciences, in Bangalore is one of five recipients of this year’s Infosys Science Foundation prize, given to world-class researchers in social science in India. Along with our friends from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras’s – Rural Technology and Business Incubator, Prof. Vijayraghavan is one of the Investigators of the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) carried out in the state of Tamil Nadu in India and Sri Lanka.