Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) once the political ally to ruling Peoples’ Alliance of Sri Lanka, has come up with an innovative idea to link 300,000 plus Internally Displaced Persons with their relatives. Why not create Face Book accounts? Daily Mirror story does not say so, but perhaps JVP wants it done by the government. Rohan Samarajiva made a less complex and more effective suggestion: Why not give them mobile phones? ‘The technology that allows freedom to talk even without the freedom to walk is the phone.
In the context of the debates about banning mobiles for school children, the issue of phones that constrain use has become relevant. The NYT has done a full survey of the options available to parents in the US, an excerpt of which is given below. Why doesn’t someone do a similar survey for India, Sri Lanka, etc.? Now for some real cellphones.
It was gratifying to see McKinsey picking up on the work that PIPU did in 2002-04 and praising the TRCSL in the regulatory chapter in GITR 2009. There is a lot more refarming to be done TRC; keep up the good work. The move toward a more technology- and service-neutral spectrum policy was mainly triggered by a desire to treat all providers equitably, the urging of mobile providers to shift to GSM technology, and the need to use CDMA as a low-cost solution for fixed wireless access in rural areas. Although the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) was constrained to some extent by existing allocations and defense considerations, it issued more spectrum space. The regulator also recognized the problem of scattering spectrum and attempted to streamline allocations while it cleared capacity in the 1800–1900 megahertz range.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Network Readiness Index (covering 134 countries in 2008-09), only Sri Lanka has gained any ground among the South Asian countries. India is the first within the region, ranked 54th (down from 50th in 2007-08). Sri Lanka has made considerable progress from 79th place in 2007-08 to 70th place in a straight comparison (72nd among the 2008-09 countries). Congratulations to the industry, ICTA and all who contributed to this gain. Pakistan has slipped to 95th in a straight comparison from its 89th position in 2007-08.
TVEAP (on behalf of LIRNEasia) videoed a series of interviews with teleusers to explore their usage patterns at the BOP. Below is an interview with eighteen-year-old Chamara Pahalawattage, a Sri Lankan school leaver, who does not have a steady job but that hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for mobile phones he now uses his sixth phone in two years. This resident of Gonapola, western Sri Lanka, finds odd jobs at construction sites thanks to his phone. And after a hard day’s work, he unwinds listening to the radio, or swapping phone songs with friends. Click here to view other videos.
The Sunday Times (English) and Ravaya (Sinhala) carried the results of the migrant component of the teleuse research, making direct reference to the need to set the rules in place, a topic that was addressed in a previous issue of the Times by M. Aslam Hayat. “The challenge for mobile operators is to make a remittance service as simple as handing over the money and a slip, with hand-written transfer details, to a bank clerk,” said the study. On average, a Sri Lankan migrant sends home US $ 137 per month. The most common method of remittance is through the banking system.
Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka, which, now also regulates pornographic content, today created telecom regulatory history by appointing perhaps the world’s first Pornographic Monitoring Committee. While congratulating the newly appointed Chairman and his proud family (“Amma, you are never going to believe this! Hubby is now getting paid for watching nude girls”) we, in our own humble manner like to suggest a mission statement. (above) Reports Daily Mirror Online: The Sri Lanka Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has appointed a monitoring committee to be on the alert for pornographic websites in the island. The TRC had said that telephone and internet services companies have agreed to be constantly on the alert for pornographic websites and to control access to them in the island, with twelve such websites already having been banned.
This was not a representative sample survey like Teleuse @ BOP, but still it was conducted in a remote village in the Polonnaruwa district in Sri Lanka as part of a community communication effort. The numbers they came up with were much higher than ours. We also spoke about the advantages of using mobile phones to complement the radio productions. 3G was not present in all areas, and in any case, few of the handsets supported audio streaming. That said, the production team said that upwards of 95% of all households owned at least one mobile.
Both India and Pakistan had negative growth in fixed wireline 2003-2008: -3.5 for India and -0.4 for Pakistan. Sri Lanka has too, but this is masked by the rapid growth of CDMA, which in this country is called fixed.
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.
Rohan Samarajiva made a presentation entitled, “Improving transport and transportation policy: lessons from telecom” at the recently concluded Seminar on the Draft National Transport Policy of the Ministry of Transport. Held on 23rd of July, the seminar was organized by the Pathfinder Foundation in collaboration with The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport. Drawing on the similarities between the telecom and transport sector, including opportunities for private sector participation and availability of new technologies for market structure transformation in both sectors, he stated that while telecom sector has flourished under market reforms, the transport sector may, in fact, have worsened. As cited in The Island and Lanka Business Online, Rohan argued that “the draft policy appeared to perpetuate existing inefficiencies, poor service and waste of public funds”, as well as that “the national transport policy does not allow for adequate private participation, and where there was, such as in bus services, regulation was lacking”. Click here to download slides.
LIRNEasia’s lead economist Dr Harsha de Silva has been selected for the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship. Our warm congratulations to Harsha on this high recognition of his potential as a decisive actor in public policy. The focus on potential for future contributions is evidenced by the fact that all Eisenhower fellows have to submit a proposal of what they will do upon their return. Mr Lalith Weeratunga who was an Eisenhower Fellow from Sri Lanka some years back is now Secretary to the President. I guess the Eisenhower process works.
LIRNEasia lead economist Harsha de Silva presented a paper on “ICT Policy for Agriculture in Sri Lanka: An Economic Perspective” at the first ever information technology in agriculture conference jointly organized by the IT Department of the University of Moratuwa and the Agriculture Department of the University of Ruhuna. Harsha argued for mobile-centric, demand-driven, value-chain based, accurate and timely two-way information exchange systems that could lower transaction costs leading to increased efficiencies in agricultural markets to move farmers from subsistence to commercial agriculture. His slides are here. LIRNEasia lead economist Harsha de Silva presented a paper on “ICT Policy for Agriculture in Sri Lanka: An Economic Perspective” at the first ever information technology in agriculture conference jointly organized by the IT Department of the University of Moratuwa and the Agriculture Department of the University of Ruhuna. Harsha argued for mobile-centric, demand-driven, value-chain based, accurate and timely two-way information exchange systems that could lower transaction costs leading to increased efficiencies in agricultural markets to move farmers from subsistence to commercial agriculture.
An article in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka features the 3R (reduce-reuse-recycle) work done by the Girl Guides Association of Sri Lanka, administratively/logistically supported by LIRNEasia and funded by IDRC. More information on LIRNEasia’s 3R project is available here. In recent years they have designed projects such as 3R which stands for the three-fold environmental concept of reduce, reuse and recycle, and several other environment related projects. Their current focus is on the environment to be in tow with the United Nation’s (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDG). A 3R Community Programme was launched recently, organised by the Project Executive Hemamali Rajapaksa, which is a scheme that undertakes environmental conservation related activity on religious holidays.
Pakistan did it, with supposed good results. The Maldives studied it and decided it was not worth it. Sri Lanka is supposed to be thinking about it. It is mobile number portability (MNP). None of them had the benefit of the teleuse@BOP results.
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.