Observed few things fresh on my day at the Abhayagiri monastery complex. One was a rock inscription in ancient devanagari. It was not about a donation made by a king or a minister, as usual, or even a notification of a new regulation. The Sanskrit stanza was meant for Buddhist monks. Not a rule; but more a guide.
Priyantha Kariyapperuma, Director General of Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka, is in ‘banning’ mode these days. Having ‘banned’ twelve sex sites on the initiation of IGP, now he plans to ban the mobile phones at private schools. For government schools, Susil Premajayantha, Education Minister has taken a similar move. Minister Premajayantha said that he has taken this decision to avoid the harmful situations that had led to a ‘number of unfortunate incidents’ in schools recently. The incident that triggered this move was the suicide of a fourteen year old girl of a leading school in Colombo, whose mobile phone, with personal information, has been confiscated by the prefects.
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).
The demand-side data generated by the Teleuse @ BOP 3 study clearly shows the urban-rural gap among teleusing households (those who own some kind of mobile phone or have a fixed phone in the house) significantly narrowing. But respected colleagues are citing supply-side data to assert not only that the gap is not narrowing, but that it is significantly widening. This is contradictory not only with our demand-side results, but also with the claims made by the Indian Minister. We hope they will engage with us on clearing this fog. More perilous, however, is the inequality between rural and urban India.
Sustainability is not an issue for this telecenter. It provides all its service, be it Internet surfing, computer training, library facilities or even typesetting and printing services free of charge, treating them as community services. Thondaman Foundation, a non-profit organization, with a ministerial backing, that intends “to make available to the plantation community the wide advantages of the internet and intranet communication technologies” has set up this centre in the middle of the picturesque Glenore estate at Haputale, to serve a population of 5,000 from the surrounding villages. This is one of the 45 such centres in different estates in the Central, Uva and Sabaragamuva provinces. The white dish, gives a sense of remoteness, but it need not be.