ICT Archives — Page 3 of 3 — LIRNEasia


LIRNEasia‘s continuing work on the role of ICTs, and in particular mobiles, in improving the livelihoods of the rural poor, was recently published as a chapter in an IDRC publication called “Strengthening Rural Livelihoods – the impact of information and communication technologies in Asia.” The chapter titled “Price transparency in agricultural produce markets: Sri Lanka” covered the results from a year long study of the livelihood impacts for farmers from using a mobile-based price information service called Tradenet. The chapter was co-authored by LIRNEasia researchers Sriganesh Lokanathan, Harsha de Silva and Iran Fernando.
LIRNEasia Senior Research Fellow, Payal Malik, recently made a presentation on “Trends in the ICT industry and ICT R&D in India” at a conference organized by the Information Society Unit of the Institute for Prospective Technological studies (JRC-IPTS, European Commission) in Brussels, Belgium. The conference was titled, “Asian Rise in ICT R&D – Looking for evidence: Debating collaboration strategies, threats and opportunities”. The conference gathered some 60 selected international experts and commission’s staff. Click here to view presentation.

Role of ICTs in revolution

Posted on February 5, 2011  /  2 Comments

Telephone networks were shut down when Lech Walesa was leading the workers of Gdansk against the Polish government in the early 1980s. King Gyanendra shut down the mobile networks of Nepal a few years back. It is not the first time that telecom networks have been shut down by governments with their backs to the wall. Reflections on the Egyptian shut down should be read in this historical context. The key difference is that Egypt was perhaps at a qualitatively higher level of ICT use when they hit the kill switch.
Sri Lanka has a peculiar media structure. The government has its own TV stations (2), radio (2) and also an entire newspaper publishing company. These have no similarity to the BBC and CBC, on which they were modeled. These are out and out propaganda operations. I cut my media teeth at the government radio station in 1978-79 (it was a monopoly back then, so I had no choice) and have done many programs there since.
Today, Rohan Samarajiva delivered a speech at TEDx Colombo held at the Punchi Theater, entitled “Government services:  Anytime, anywhere, any official language, now.” Much emphasis was laid on the usage of ICT in order to help trilingual government service delivery. Using the T@BOP data he illustrated the popularity of mobiles among the Sri Lankan BOP, and therefore their suitability as a medium for accessing government services, to answer queries or assist in contacting other government offices.  This kind of help line service cannot be provided by private organizations; government has to be involved, in order to provide credibility. Ultimately, any citizen should be able to get things done, without hesitation, promptly, no matter what language they speak.
A case-study from Sri Lanka by Harsha de Silva and Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara
Iran’s ICT Minister Mohammad Soleimani has said his country’s Internet penetration had a 60% growth last year compared to year before last, reaching 16%. Therefore, he claimed Iran’s Internet penetration is above that of Malaysia today. But an industry analyst is reluctant to say “Yes Minister.”