[NetBehaviour] IT Giant India Has Feet of Chalk.

marc marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Tue Aug 9 17:24:12 CEST 2005


*IT Giant India Has Feet of Chalk.*
By Rajesh Kumar Sharma

Has information technology arrived in India? I doubt it has. 
Notwithstanding the booming software exports, burgeoning BPO services 
and mushrooming software parks.

Let us climb out of our fantasy balloons and do a reality check.

Information technology has not affected people's lives in any 
significant way. Apart from a small e-lite segment of the digirati, most 
people have no access to a PC and the internet. Nor has information 
technology enhanced the quality of their lives. Other than remix music, 
Bollywood stunts and special effects, online train reservations and a 
few pilot projects in telemedicine, precious little has happened that 
touches people's lives. E-governance has just not taken off. Public 
servants and services remain as inaccessible as they were two decades 
ago. Information still lies hidden behind a wall of red tape.

The gloomiest scenario is afforded by our institutions of higher 
education. It is ludicrous but true that in most of these institutions 
information technology integration has stopped at word-processing, 
web-surfing and e-mail. At the level of their structure and functioning, 
these institutions have not really assimilated the technology in a way 
that would enable them to develop futuristically and contribute more 
substantially to the enrichment of people's lives. One obvious reason is 
the apathy of a proverbially conservative academia and the want of 
incentives to prompt it to explore the potential of information technology.

more...
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=142
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/attachments/20050809/eb331fbe/attachment.htm>


More information about the NetBehaviour mailing list