Category: Information and Communications Technology

Underplayed IT Innovation

Rajesh Jain blogged about
a News.com
contest on underplayed IT innovation. My take on the underplayed
trend is based on Rajesh’s ideas. I entered the following.


The PC-centric world of computing evolved in an age when networks did
not exist and users were technologically sophisticated enough to
comprehend the complex system. In a world where networks are
ubiquitous and fast, where the average user cannot manage the
increasingly complex software, where spam and viruses
abound—centralized network computing model wins but has been ignored
by most IT gurus.


Network computing did not take hold in the developed countries because
networks arrived after the PC was fairly common. But for the next
billion users in the vast emerging markets of the developing
economies, sophisticated telecommunications networks (fiber optic and
wireless, for voice and data) precede the adoption of computing
devices. These users need computing services, not computers. They need
the affordability and manageability they associate with cellphones.
Computing as a service delivered over the net is the answer. It will
be built around thin clients (including cell phones), remote desktops,
open-source software stack on centralized servers, and pay as you use
subscription service.


It took the PC-centric computing model 20 years to have a 700-million
user base. In less than five years, the network-centric computing
model could get the next billion users—if the industry wakes up.

Choosing between WCs and PCs

Conferences can be terribly boring affairs. But for real tedium, you cannot beat a conference on ICT and development. So it was with a great deal of trepidation that I ended up in Bhopal a few days ago to attend one. All I had to look forward to was an endless series of talks on how ICT will totally transform everything and finally deliver the holy grail of development to the billions who are pathetically underdeveloped.
Continue reading “Choosing between WCs and PCs”

Mud-wrestling with Pigs

“ICT for Development” seems to be all the rage these days. One cannot turn anywhere without being bombarded with the conventional wisdom that ICT will solve all developmental problems, so much so that people have begun to employ the idiotic shorthand “ICT4D” without so much as a beg-your-pardon.
Continue reading “Mud-wrestling with Pigs”

Misplaced Conclusions

“My uncle died sadly due to his habit of drinking tea?”

“That’s amazing! I have heard of people dieing because of alcohol. But tea?”

“Yes, tea lead to his death. He was crossing the road to get himself a cup of tea, and a bus ran over him. Tea caused his untimely demise.”

You may think it’s funny. But wait till you see the conclusion drawn from the following. This is from a report by my friend Priya Ganapati of rediff.com:

Jhunjhunwala cites a case where an email was sent to a number of government officials including the chief minister about a possible breakout of the small pox epidemic in a certain area.

Though the email was ignored by many, it finally did reach the right official and prompt administrative action to prevent the epidemic was taken.

“In Attapatti village, Veermani, a man with disabilities was unjustly dismissed from his job. He wrote an email to many government officials, one of whom finally took note and he was reinstated,” Jhunjhunwala points out.

You may not believe it but one is supposed to be persuaded that the above examples argue for IT-enabling of Indian villages. A moment’s consideration is all that is required to see that the conclusion is as asinine as blaming tea for the uncle’s release from this mortal coil.

If you substitute postcard for “email” in Priya’s report, then obviously the conclusion would have to be that what is required for rural development is a postal system. But wait!! We do have a postal system, don’t we? So what exactly does an email do that a postcard does not do?

Someone should clue these people in: emails and postcards are the means of conveying a message. Emails don’t suddenly make caring people out of apathetic government bureaucrats. The failures of government is not a technological failure and producing technical fixes for that is as effective as casting spells to fix a broken car.

One may say, “Well, emails are faster. And you can send it to a zillion officials.” Sure, you can. But so when everyone and his brother is sending a zillion messages to thousands of officials, the officials will also learn to file those emails under “T” for trash. You would be back to square one with the only difference being that money that could have helped with development ends up in the pockets of Bill Gates, HP, and Intel.

The bottom line is very simple. We need to ask where the failure is in the above examples. Then figure out a solution. And if in that solution we find that the use of IT tools is cheaper than any other method, we should use IT tools. Until then, all who are IT-trigger happy should sit on their hands and contemplate the universe.

{Deja vu? Indeed, this one is recycled 🙂 }

The Power of Incentives

It is said that one should not ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained as stupidity. I would go one step further and say that one should not ascribe to malice or stupidity what can be explained by basic self-interest. In other words, the power of incentives. Incentives matter and just like you can explain all sorts of natural phenomena by understanding the law of gravitation, you can explain all sorts of diverse economic puzzles by asking what are the incentives.

Consider this. BBC News on Sept 3rd 2004 carried an item: Solar plan for Indian computers. Some excerpts:

Authorities in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have drawn up a pilot project to use solar power to run computers in village schools…

Many have to use kerosene lamps for light and most government-run primary schools have no power at all.

It is hoped the plan will help schools cope with the rural power crisis.

Last year, the Uttar Pradesh Education for All Project Board bought about 1,000 computers for selected primary schools in all 70 districts.

The schools were selected in villages which had no power lines, and teachers were given special training for computer-aided education.

Consider the typical village school in UP: totally strapped for resources, teacher absent most of the year, perhaps not even a blackboard, students unable to afford books and most likely malnourished. Why, one asks incredulously, would anyone be spending money on computers when there are more important needs that are crying out for resources?

The report goes on to say:

A further 1,000 computers are to be purchased this year for village schools, but most of these will not work because there is no power available.

The mind boggles at the waste of resources which a poor state can ill-afford. Funds for rural public education are severely limited and yet they are wasting it buying computers that will serve no apparent purpose. These funds could have been used more effectively in paying teachers living wages, buying supplies such as books and blackboards, perhaps food for the starving students. Why?

Here is my explanation. Some time ago, I had pondered the question of why telephones, radio, and TVs don’t make the conference circuit. The vendors of PCs have an incentive to push their wares and they are a powerful lobby. Couple that with the avarice and corruption of the “authorities” mentioned in the BBC report, and you have the answer. When tens of millions of rupees are spent in bulk purchases of computers, there are kickbacks. The authorities make their pile, never mind that the computers end up being expensive non-functional display items in the villages without power.

But wait, it gets better. No power for computers? No problem: use expensive solar power to power them. And you will find the vendors of solar power panels eagerly getting into the game of rural development. They make hay while the sun shines.

It is disgusting, all things considered. Last Friday I made the mistake of driving about 10 kms on Mumbai roads. It took an hour and a half. We were stuck at a T-junction for about 20 minutes because of a deadlock. Vehicles had moved into the intersection and there was no way any vehicle could move. I had described a similar situation earlier in a post entitled Seduced by ICT:

Recently I came across a news item which said that they are looking at solving Mumbai’s traffic problems by making Mumbai roads “electronic intelligent roads.” I don’t have the slightest doubt that it would involve huge outlays to the tune of millions of dollars and lots of people will make lots of money up and down the line providing expertise and hardware and software for this hi-tech venture. I am also convinced that it will not make the slightest effect on the congested Mumbai roads because it is not the roads that need the intelligence but the people designing the roads that need to be intelligent.

Close to where I live in Kandivali, a suburb in North Mumbai, there is an intersection that is almost always caught in a grid-lock. The intersection is like an “H” with bi-direction flow of traffic along all the sections and it has one traffic signal at one of the points where the horizontal section meets the vertical sections. Traffic gets log-jammed around 300 meters of this intersection and it takes about a half hour to cross this bit every evening. Hundreds of autorickshaws, buses, cars, trucks, two-wheelers, and whatnots spew exhaust fumes and honk continually and people suffer. It is astonishing that the traffic people have not figured out that the simplest thing to do would be to paint some part of this intersection with the “KEEP CLEAR — DO NOT BLOCK” sections and put a couple of traffic cops to teach the people to keep off these sections. It would be a simple effective system which would cost very little compared to the enormous price that everyone pays throughout the day due to the congestion.

Instead, the Mumbai municipal corporation is investigating ways of using electronics. Why not better road markings and so on? Because there is not much money involved in a simpler but more effective system. Simpler may be better but there is not much profit in it. A blackboard, a teacher, and a dozen slates and some chalk may be simpler and better for adult education, but there is not as much profit as in putting PCs with literacy programs to teach adults how to read in rural areas.

That is all there is to it. Expensive solutions are proposed because those in control of the spending benefit. This is a universal phenomena, not restricted to poor overpopulated corruption ridden third-world people. Doctors in the US freely sometimes recommend unnecessary heart-bypass surgeries instead of recommending life-style changes. They make more money performing by-passes and don’t make any money if the patient changes his life-style.

The power of incentives is awesome. Look carefully at the roots of persistent poverty and you will see that someone makes money and therefore it is in the interests of the person to perpetuate that poverty. This is not even limited to the economic sphere alone, of course. Mother Teresa’s goal was religious glory and her incentive was therefore perpetuation of overpopulation because people are the fodder that the church feeds on. Is there a way out? I think there is. Stay tuned.

The magic that is the internet

The internet is huge. It is bigger than one can imagine. We are fortunate that we have access to the internet. And I feel for those who do not have access to this astounding wealth of information and possible source of wonder, amazement, delight, instruction, and possibly enlightenment.

Take for instance a website such as number27. You can spend so much time getting informed and getting entertained at the same time. Check it out sometime. [Thanks to

“GPS for the common man”

Every now and then, I screw up enough courage to read the newspapers. I am faint of heart and avoid newspapers because they generally report such stuff that nightmares are made of, such as Islamic terrorism killing a few hundred in Russia (recently but around the world with sickening regularity.) But occasionally they report news from a surreal world and my morbid curiosity wins over my basic distaste of horror stories. A few days ago, I came across an item that gladdened my heart: Sibal plans GPS project to help common man reported the Times News Network on September 3rd.

Can’t find your way around in a metropolis? Don’t know how many bus stops are there in your town? Want to know the exact size of your farm? Geo-technology may give you the answers.

The science and technology ministry has embarked upon some major projects which it claims could change a common man’s life. By 2005, the ministry is planning to provide global positioning system (GPS) for motor vehicles in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kolkata.

A central server will be set up by the ministry that can be accessed by GPS screens installed in cars. “Most sedans have GPS technology, but car owners who don’t have it can get it installed and access the service,” said science and technology minister Kapil Sibal.

This system would allow drivers to know their location and the directions to reach their destination,” he said.

The concern that the policy makers in Delhi feel for the common man is nothing if not touching. Their passion for the commonweal is awe inspiring. Imagine, if you will, the horrors that the common man faces as he drives his car looking for an address in an unfamiliar neighborhood. But the common man need not worry anymore. Science and technology (and the passion of the Indian policy makers for the common man) will solve this incredibly complex and terribly urgent problem.

Some time ago, I had written in a piece called It’s the small stuff, stupid:

I just went out to lunch in the neighborhood of where I work. A passerby stopped me to ask me where a certain company was. I said I don’t know but if he had an address, I could perhaps direct him. He only knew that it was close to the ‘Empire Building’. We spent some time trying to locate it and then finally gave up. I don’t know how long he spent walking around in the noon-day sun trying to get where he wanted to go. Perhaps he just wasted an hour, a lot of shoe leather, sweated in the heat, and when he arrived, he was tired. The opportunity cost of his trying to find a place is small but non-zero. He could have spent more time with his family or done some productive work. Add the cost of millions of people spending non-productive time searching, and soon you get a significant amount of loss.

That streets should have a name and locations along a street should have a number is a concept that should be evident to the meanest intelligence, one would expect considering that it is not exactly rocket science and that many parts of the world have had that innovation for generations, if not centuries. Yet it is a rare exception when you can find a place in India without an algorithmic description of how to get to it.

“GPS for the common man” should rightfully be listed under the LET THEM EAT CAKE category. Other items in that set: One computer in every village. Never mind that most villages lack a teacher who comes somewhat regularly to teach the children, and electricity is almost non-existent.

Deva, deva!

It is transaction costs all the way – Part 1

It is worth pondering this question: What exactly is the role of ICT in any economy?

This week, I would like to address myself to that question in detail. The answer can be succinctly stated as: It reduces transaction costs. It will take a pretty long time to explore that answer. But first a few personal experiences to set the stage would be appropriate.

Today I called up a local store which sells “white goods” (major appliances such as washing machines, etc.) I wanted to order an air-conditioner. Could I order the AC over the phone, I asked when the phone was finally answered by someone. I was told that I had to come down personally and bring cash. Will they accept a debit card? No. Will they deliver today? They can’t tell me that until I had paid and only then will they check to see if the department that does the delivery has the capacity to deliver today.

I drove to the bank to withdraw the cash. At the bank, the line for withdrawing cash was immensely long. I could not use the ATM because the amount I needed was above the ATM cash withdrawal limit. It took me a half hour before I had the cash in hand.

Next step: drive to the store. The closest branch was in Shivaji Nagar. I told the driver the address and we proceeded to drive the four or five kilometers to the store. It was on ‘L.J.’ road. The traffic was bad, as usual. The driver did not know where L.J. road was. We asked for directions from various taxi drivers. We traveled with hope thinking that this time the directions were right. In about 45 minutes, we had reached the store. It was closed because that branch of the store is normally closed on Mondays. I could not have found this out without going to the store. This was in Mumbai, the commercial capital of India.

I had spent about 2 hours in trying to buy something that in a different setting (for instance in California) it would have taken me all of 5 minutes and that too from the comfort of my home: I would have checked the prices of ACs on the web and ordered it online and paid for it with my credit card. Instead, after about 2 hours of frustration, I was still without what I wanted.

This little episode is indicative of a depressingly large set of similar experiences. The features of this set almost always include having to spend an inordinate amount of time searching. The search cost of locating a place is non-trivial. Street addresses don’t exist. You could be looking for a place with an address with reads “122/1/B Lajpat Nagar II”. You reach 121/1/B. And then you discover that 122 is not adjacent to 121 but is somewhere else altogether. Sequential numbers are not physically close. The house numbers are in the order in which the plots were registered, for instance. Once I spent about an hour hunting around for a place in Lajpat Nagar in Delhi. I am sure that I was not the first — nor I was the last person — to waste time and energy (gasoline) trying to locate an address there.

Another feature common to all the episodes includes transportation. On Saturday last, I was invited for dinner at a house that was about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the Andheri local train station. I took a bus from the station. It took about 50 minutes for the bus to cover the 5 kilometers. Traffic moves about 8 kms an hour in the city of Mumbai, and at the breakneck speed of 18 kms an hour average on the nation’s highways.

Traffic is not the only thing that is slow. The movement of payments is an important function in any economy. I had to pay my brother Rs 25,000. I mailed him a check to Nasik without asking him first. He called to say that it will take about 3 weeks for that check to clear and so it would be good if I could send him cash or do a wire-transfer.

Cash is inconvenient to handle and carrying large sums is stressful. For furniture shopping, the only acceptable form of payment appears to be cash. Part of the reason is of course tax avoidance. But the slowness with which checks clear could have something to do with it as well.

There are a few things that one can do at a macroeconomic level to push the economy towards its potential such as fixing the monetary and fiscal policy. But they are limited instruments. Fundamentally, what really puts the brakes on the machinery of the economy is a very large number of very small grains of sand which are individually ignored but together form a very potent force. These grains of sand arise from what can only be said to be the overall culture of the economy.

It is an unfortunate fact that the Indian economic culture is dismal and unless that changes, India’s economy cannot reach its potential. Becoming aware of the problem is fundamental to the solution, of course.

In the next piece, we will explore what ICT can do to remove the sand from the Indian machinery.

[Continue reading part 2 of “It is transaction costs all the way“.]

Seduced by ICT

Yesterday I started writing about the ICT for development meeting I was at held at ICRISAT at Hyderabad earlier this week. The usual suspects were in attendance. I had met many of them at the MS Swaminathan Policy Makers’ Conference at Chennai a few months ago. One face new to me was Prof Ken Keniston of MIT who gave an opening address.

He made five cautionary points which are worth noting. They are:

  • Do not get seduced by ICT
  • Localize, localize, localize
  • Do realistic cost projections
  • Given the complexity of systems, choose operators with extreme care
  • Be patient

The use of ICT tools for development is a no-brainer. But it is a mistake to think that a Pentium4 in every village will solve India’s developmental problems. The point one has to pay special attention to is to examine the entire set of ICT tools and then choose ones that are appropriate to the task. Information and communications technology tools are not limited to PCs and internet connections. There are many other tools such as radio (both FM and shortwave), ham radio, and TV which may be more cost effective and relevant in a given context.

Recently I came across a news item which said that they are looking at solving Mumbai’s traffic problems by making Mumbai roads “electronic intelligent roads.” I don’t have the slightest doubt that it would involve huge outlays to the tune of millions of dollars and lots of people will make lots of money up and down the line providing expertise and hardware and software for this hi-tech venture. I am also convinced that it will not make the slightest effect on the congested Mumbai roads because it is not the roads that need the intelligence but the people designing the roads that need to be intelligent.

Close to where I live in Kandivali, a suburb in North Mumbai, there is an intersection that is almost always caught in a grid-lock. The intersection is like an “H” with bi-direction flow of traffic along all the sections and it has one traffic signal at one of the points where the horizontal section meets the vertical sections. Traffic gets log-jammed around 300 meters of this intersection and it takes about a half hour to cross this bit every evening. Hundreds of autorickshaws, buses, cars, trucks, two-wheelers, and whatnots spew exhaust fumes and honk continually and people suffer. It is astonishing that the traffic people have not figured out that the simplest thing to do would be to paint some part of this intersection with the “KEEP CLEAR — DO NOT BLOCK” sections and put a couple of traffic cops to teach the people to keep off these sections. It would be a simple effective system which would cost very little compared to the enormous price that everyone pays throughout the day due to the congestion.

Instead, the Mumbai municipal corporation is investigating ways of using electronics. Why not better road markings and so on? Because there is not much money involved in a simpler but more effective system. Simpler may be better but there is not much profit in it. A blackboard, a teacher, and a dozen slates and some chalk may be simpler and better for adult education, but there is not as much profit as in putting PCs with literacy programs to teach adults how to read in rural areas.

PCs have powerful lobbies to promote their use. Chalkboards, radios, TVs, etc, don’t have that. Put it this way: the manufacturers of expensive shiny new hammers need people to be convinced that every problem is a nail and that everyone should have a shiny new expensive hammer. Never mind that sometimes a rusty screwdriver is better at a particular task than a shiny new expensive hammer.

HP, Microsoft, Intel and others of its tribe have to keep pushing their products. For impoverished people who can barely afford food, finding the most cost-effective solution is more important. But doing that involves much hard thinking and for those who make the decisions, there is not as much money in it. So the poor get saddled with expensive but ineffective solutions.

I should hasten to add that I am not a Luddite. I don’t need to be convinced of the extreme utility of computers and connectivity. Not only am I a user of these technologies, I have studied computer science and have worked for computer corporations. Some of my best friends are computer geeks (there but for the grace of god go I.) My concern is that PCs and the internet are crowding out the other more effective technologies that could help India develop.

The Amazing Ogallala Aquifer

I have been neglecting this blog because I have been traveling to places exotic. Well, maybe not all that exotic since it was just Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh. I had gone there to speak at a conference on ICT and development.

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Continue reading “The Amazing Ogallala Aquifer”