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.

The Hotel Lake View Ashok sounded a lot better than it turned out to be. Must have been nicer once upon a time but the Madhya Pradesh State Tourism Department now owns it and like all things governmental, it is rapidly going to seed. In any event, the hotel is located at the edge of the largest lake (18 kms circumference) in Bhopal and the view is not unpleasant. As I was checking in, I thought I was hallucinating. There in the lobby was CJ — or at least CJ’s identical twin, if he had one.

You see, CJ is an old friend of mine who lives in Berkeley, California. What the heck would he be doing in the lobby of a hotel in Bhopal, however nice the view of the lake? As it turned out, he too was attending the conference since he was in Delhi and Bhopal was just a short flight away.

CJ is a vagabond and what he uses for money has been a bit of a mystery to me. He likes the good life. If you have been following my scribblings, you may have already come across him in “Do the Taliban have Buddha Nature?”. I like hanging out with CJ because he is a contrarian.

We ended up having a beer at the restaurant that evening.

“So, CJ,” said I, “what’s new in New Delhi?”

“Nothing new. Same old crap. The fog is something terrible. Of course, the bunch of blinkered retards that rule India haven’t figured out that fog is an annual phenomenon. Otherwise they would have installed appropriate equipment at the airport for flights to operate.”

CJ is not a fan of politicians and bureaucrats.

“India has bigger worries than how to operate flights in the Delhi winter fog, you know,” I said. “All the politicians and bureaucrats and NGOs are worried about the digital divide. At this very conference, we are addressing the problem of development using ICT.”

“Digital divide is crap,” CJ responded.

“Well, the Minister for IT doesn’t seem to think so, for your information, CJ. In fact, they are going to make broadband available cheap for the common man,” I said.

“Digital divide is crap,” CJ repeated.

I pulled out a newspaper. “See this item here, CJ, The Broadband Village . It says here: “A village where everyone has easy access to information on agriculture, education, drinking water, electricity and health.” Thousands of such high tech villages will be the norm in two years. How? Through the magic of broadband and PCs. No more digital divide and no more underdevelopment.”

CJ read the article and declared, “That article is more full of crap than the toilets of an Air India jumbo after a transatlantic crossing.”

I was starting to realize that there was going to be a theme to our discussion. Crap. I have amazing powers of premonition, you see.

“Information is good, is it not? So if all villages have information easily accessible to them, surely it would help, wouldn’t it?” I countered.

“Sure, information is good. But what would you rather have? information on education, drinking water, electricity and health or the real thing — education, drinking water, electricity and health? These buffoons are probably stupid enough to think that handing out a menu card to a starving poor man is a great substitute for providing him a decent meal. What good will information about water do for them? It is not information on water they lack: they lack water. It is not information on electricity they lack: they lack electricity.”

I said, “Well, they are bridging the digital divide and once that divide is bridged, the rest will fall in place.”

“Perhaps there is a digital divide and maybe someday one should bridge the digital divide. But if you don’t bridge the real divides, no amount of bridging the digital divide will amount to squat. Remember that real resources diverted to bridging mythical divides are not available for bridging real divides.”

“Real divides such as what?” I asked.

“The Crap Gap,” he said. “Crossing the crap gap is more meaningful than bridging the digital divide.”

Like I said, I had a premonition. I allowed him to elaborate.

“Sanitation and clean drinking water are problems that are real and will have a greater impact on the lives of people in urban and rural India than giving them access to information and installing internet kiosks. If you provide them with just those two, you would improve their lives much more and they will suffer much less from diseases. A glass of clean drinking water will help them more than information on the internet about health. A decent place to crap in would help the women in urban and rural areas more than surfing the world wide web.

“Think about this. What would you rather have: access to clean drinking water or access to the internet? Would you rather have an internet kiosk or would you rather not have to go and take a crap on the train tracks in Mumbai? I bet you dollars to donuts that given the choice, every time you would choose a clean glass of water and a decent toilet.

“Drinking water and sanitation has been a greater divide than the digital divide and for much longer. No conferences are held on sanitation because it is not “high-tech” and those who attend these digital divide conferences don’t have the imagination to realize that human dignity is more important than the ability to surf the web.”

I was really not in the mood for more of this talk about crap. “Sure I would take a toilet over a cybercafe any day of the week. But the poor need information access as well,” I said.

“Yes, they do. But we must remember that people need health and dignity as well to live a decent human life. The sequencing of interventions is important. Do the most urgent thing first. Partly it is sheer greed that motivates the bureaucrats to try to bridge the digital divide because there is money in the purchasing of PCs. But partly it is also a basic failure of imagination. A failure to empathize with the lot of the poor. The people who attend these shindigs have toilets and they have PCs and they cannot imagine that toilets are more important than PCs. But give them a choice between WCs and PCs, and you know which one they would first run towards.”

Well, that was it then. The next day after the conference he went off to Delhi and I made my pitch on “The WC Divide Trumps the PC Divide: Why Crossing the Crap Gap is more Important than Bridging the Digital Divide.”

{ Acknowledgement: Originally I had used the phrase “crap chasm” but as Frank pointed out, “crap gap” is more appropriate. Thanks you, Frank, for the suggestion.}