Entrepreneurs, philanthropists and established computer firms have for the better part of a decade invested millions of dollars to lower the cost of a desktop PC and develop cheaper alternatives. Intel has made its Eduwise laptop; AMD, a Personal Internet Communicator; Microsoft, the FonePlus. MIT computer guru Nicholas Negroponte’s Children’s Machine, now called the XO, is the most publicized recent attempt at converting the poor into computer users. But Negroponte’s idea is to spread computers to the poor, with the help of heavy subsidies from private and public philanthropy. His price is still about $140, too high for India. Indeed India rejected Negroponte’s offer of a million for cost reasons. Jain’s motive is different: he wants to make money.

And he knows India. Despite the country’s rise as an outsourcing hub, PCs are selling slowly—far more slowly than mobile phones or motorbikes—because they are too expensive, too complicated to use and too difficult to maintain. What people have been waiting for, some experts think, is a new approach to computing that boils the essence of Internet access down to its lowest cost—and lowest risk. Jain plans to offer all this in lease deals that include easy-to-use hardware, Internet connection, application software and service—for $10 a month.

Read it all.

Since the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) proposal is being considered here, we have to have alternate proposals which can be considered in contradistinction to it. I propose, for arguments sake, the “One Blackboard Per School” (OBPS), “One Teacher Per School” (OTPS), and “One Set of Basic Facilities Per School” (OSOBFPS) schemes out of many potential candidates. First, we will consider how they stack up against the OLPC proposition. The next thing we do is to figure out which of the alternates is the one that is “perfect” and which therefore poses the threat to the achievement of the “good.”

It is almost common knowledge that hundreds of thousands of schools in India, especially in rural areas, don’t have blackboards and sometimes even chalk. I say “almost” because some people in positions of influence are apparently not fully aware of this ground reality. Some schools have student to teacher ratio approaching infinity (because the denominator tends to zero due to teacher absenteeism). Some schools are so strapped for resources that they cannot provide basic facilities such as toilets. It would be good to have schools where at a minimum the students are guaranteed a teacher who is present, a black board or two, some chalk, and a toilet if you please so that girls don’t suffer.

Proposing high tech tools such as laptops for education in light of the missing basic facilities is wonderfully surreal like the Cheshire cat’s disembodied smile. Alice in her adventures in Wonderland comes across the Cheshire cat and remarks that she has seen a cat without a smile before but never a smile without a cat. I have seen schools which have teachers and blackboards, and which also use laptops, but I have difficulty imagining a school where there are laptops but don’t have teachers, blackboards, chalk, and toilets. Perhaps I have not had much practice imagining impossible things.

There is a sort of hierarchy of needs when it comes to providing the basic infrastructure for education. You need, at a minimum, a trained teacher, a good place to learn in, and some teaching aids such as blackboard and chalk. Slates for the children is also a good idea if notebooks are too expensive. Next, it would be good to have books. If after providing those basics to all who need it (irrespective of their ability to pay), if we are still awash in funds, perhaps computers with internet connectivity for those who cannot afford them on their own should be provided.

Time for me to take a brief digression with tin-foil hat firmly atop my head. Why is it that you find billion dollar projects such as the OLPC but never hear of even million dollar proposals such as OBPS? The answer, I believe, lies in the nature and structure of the computer industry. Broadly it is oligopolistic. The major players can be counted on the digits of your hands. Heard of Intel, AMD, Microsoft, HP, Dell, etc? Of course you have. They have deep pockets and concentrated interests in pushing their wares on whichever market they can serve. Can you name any blackboard and chalk manufacturers? Nope. They are many, small, and barely eek out a living. So there are no OBPS schemes hitting the headlines screaming “The Blackboard Divide” unlike the OLPC and their wonderfully alliterative “Digital Divide” which strikes terror in the hearts of the do-gooders who are convinced that empowering children means giving them an expensive gizmo that neither they nor the economy can afford. (see Why Telephones, Radios, and TVs Don’t Make the Conference Circuits, Seduced by ICT, and Milking the Digital Divide.)

Well, never mind the tin-foil hat. Even non-wearers of tin-foil hats should recognize that there are commercial imperatives that motivate high-technology firms to push for adoption of expensive solutions to impoverished people. There doesn’t have to be a cabal hatching schemes with an evil glint in their eyes. If the developed economies’ markets are saturated, manufacturers of high-tech gizmos will seek out greener pastures to graze upon. When it comes to spending, educational or otherwise, it is a matter of choosing the most appropriate among several alternatives. And one has to be suitably grateful that one has the option of using laptops in school. My gripe is not that laptops are not a good idea; it is that in our case it is not appropriate because the sequencing is wrong and the cost is prohibitive.

Now we get back to my OBPS, OTPS, and OSOBFPS schemes. Let’s just reduce it to OBPS and let the headlines scream “OBPS to Bridge the Blackboard Divide.” Nope, it does not have the same zing to it as “OLPC to Bridge the Digital Divide.” Not high-tech enough; not much money in there; doesn’t make good advertising copy; doesn’t involve high-flying overpaid executives of multinationals corporations making breathless Powerpoint presentations on LCD projectors to developing economy government officials.

When I went to school, we were not on the wrong side of the blackboard divide (BD) although the digital divide (DD) was something astounding. None of us had even heard of laptops, leave alone own one. We had teachers, blackboards, chalk, slates, notebooks, books, and toilets, however. We sat in our simple classrooms, and did our sums. We (at least some of the time) paid attention to what was being taught and even did our homework. A few years later, we found ourselves proficient in the three R’s and went on to college. Moral of the story: it is possible to become educated without laptops.

Question: would we have become better educated if we had access to laptops and the internet? Arguably yes. At least some of us would have had a richer educational experience. Strictly speaking for myself, I would have probably flunked. I would have surfed the web for god alone knows what, I would have played computer games (I once spent an entire year playing Solitaire on my laptop), I would have wasted all my time socializing on the web. In short, I am grateful that I got access to the internet only after my basic education was complete. Even now, as a grown up and presumed responsible person, I find that my work suffers when I start surfing the web. I am sure that if my internet privileges are not restricted, I will probably never finish the work I am supposed to do and I fear that I will get fired.

If you have not read the overwhelming evidence about the dismal state of the Indian educational system, then take it from me for now: something like half the 7th standard students cannot read nor write and do arithmetic. Position that fact against the fact (mentioned earlier) that a large percentage of schools lack even the most basic of facilities. See the correlation? It is strongly suggestive of causation. Moral of the story: lack of basic facilities hinder basic education.

At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseum, it is not a lack of laptops that is at the root of our illiterate and innumerate children; it is the “Blackboard Divide.” Giving children laptops will not achieve anything if they cannot illiterate and innumerate. Here is an illustrative personal anecdote.

A few weeks ago, I was staying at a Tata Chemicals guest house in New Delhi. For internet access, the guest house had a room with a couple of connected PCs. The housekeeper was a young Nepali who turned on a PC and told me the password. He watched intently as I checked my mail and did other sundry stuff. I then offered to teach him how to use the PC and the web, since his job left him with lots of free time. With great enthusiasm, I told him that all he has to do was to open a browser, and then type in the address and . . . That is when he blurted out that, aside from writing down phone numbers and taking down names, he does not read nor write. Yes, he had 24-hour access to connected PCs which he could use to his heart’s content, but the PCs were as useful to him as a bicycle to a fish. Moral of the story: bridge the literacy divide if you wish to have a hope of ever bridging the digital divide.

Now it is time to do the numbers. Allow me to compare the OLPC against the OBPS (“one blackboard per school”) proposals. In a previous post (“The OLPC – Rest in Peace”) I did some back of the envelope calculations. For one million children, the cost was estimated to be US$ 200 million for the first year. Assuming that the laptops have a working life of three years, the total cost of ownership of one million laptops works out to be US$ 320 million ($200 million for the first year, and $60 million each subsequent years for “use costs”). That is approximately, $100 per child per year.

A brief note on the numbers. These are educated guesses and are suggestive of the magnitude rather than exact numbers. I believe that the argument is sufficiently robust that minor deviations from actual numbers will not affect it materially.

The $100 per child per year cost of OLPC is not instead of the other costs of teaching but rather in addition to it. You still need teachers, blackboards, and other facilities. The OLPC assumes that these are a given. I contend that there are hundreds of thousands of schools with tens of millions of children who don’t have the basics, and giving them OLPC will be about as useful as throwing both ends of the rope to a drowning person—a grand-looking gesture but of no utility. The available funds have alternate uses. Let’s examine one alternative use for a bit.

Consider a small rural school with 300 children. Ten teachers, 10 classrooms, and a few other basic amenities. From our experience, the operating cost of the school is around $12,000 per year, which includes teacher salaries ($1,000 per year). Additionally, books and other teaching and learning material add another $3,000. Total cost per year (neglecting land and building costs): $15,000, or $50 per student per year. Note that two-thirds of the operating costs of the school is allocated to teacher salaries. This has important consequences.

If we consider about 100 million children in the age group 4 through 15 need to be in school in rural India, then the total cost is of the order of US$5 billion per year. Given the student/teacher ratio of 30, we will employ about 3.33 million teachers at an annual wage cost of around $3.33 billion. The two important words in there are “employ” and “wages.” We are employing educated people as teachers and they are earning wages which they spend in the rural areas. The forward and backward linkages of this wage spending affect the entire economy more positively than the spending on buying high-cost high-technology gadgets. I posit that the multiplier effect of employing teachers in schools is greater than that of buying OLPC for India.

Let us now consider the OLPC. I am assuming that the intent is to give the laptops to children who already are going to schools which have the basic infrastructure and who have the support of teachers and parents. That is, I cannot imagine giving laptops to children who have no schools to go to. So in effect, those who lack even a basic school, don’t get laptops. The much lamented “digital divide” is being increased rather than decreased when seen from the point of view of the tens of millions who don’t even see the insides of a school. So therefore, giving an already “privileged” child a laptop at the cost of $100 per year is depriving two children of a basic education for a year (which as we estimated costs $50 per child per year.)

Imagine the government of India spending $100 a year on a relatively privileged one million children and depriving two million children of going to school. Let’s leave aside the thorny question of who gets to get the goodies; no doubt vote bank politics will figure centrally in the decision and go to further pitch one caste/religion/linguistic group against another. The immorality of arbitrarily deciding to favor one group over another is odious and abhorrent.

I absolutely agree that meritocracies fuel the engine of growth upon which pluralistic heterogeneous societies depend for economic growth and development. The issue is one of identifying the constituent elements of these meritocracies. I also admit that innate talent and abilities are endogenously determined, as Dr Banerjee pointed out in the previous post. This endogenous determination must be catalyzed through making opportunities available to as large a population as possible. The net must be cast wide to identify those who would be most able to benefit from an education. In this respect, while the OLPC has the potential to help a percentage of those who get them, it will also assuredly deny twice as many an opportunity to advance.

Now on to the point we began our deliberations with. Which of the two—the OLPC or the OBPS—is the “perfect” and which the “good”? If OLPC is the prefect solution, then clearly it will impair the good solution of providing basic educational opportunities to many; if the OBPS is the perfect solution, then the OLPC, as the good solution, may be prevented. My position is the former: in an ideal world, where all children have the opportunity to gain a basic education irrespective of the accident of birth, giving all children laptops will be an unalloyed blessing. An ideal world, which in our case we have not got, would admit the perfect solution and no trade offs will be required. The imperfect world, which is what we have, requires we trade off the potential benefit of the few for the guaranteed benefit of the many.

In conclusion, allow me to stress that I am not a Luddite. I have a deep and abiding faith in the ability of technology to solve technical problems. Today I find it inconceivable providing higher education without the aid of PCs, laptops, and the internet. Even for certain aspects of basic education, I am convinced that we have to use the power of the advances in information and communications technologies if we have to fix our educational system. In fact, I am betting my future on the use of computers for providing effective and relevant education efficiently. My proposal, however, does not depend on spending public monies on selectively providing laptops to some school children while denying some others even the opportunity for basic education.

[Previous parts: Part 1, Part 2. See also, "Formula for Milking the Digital Divide."]

The Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry of the government of India recently decided to just say no to the $100 laptop that Prof Negroponte of MIT Media Lab has been furiously peddling. He wanted the government to buy, oh, about 1,000,000 of those at the modest cost of $100,000,000 and give it to school children. Mind you, noble intentions motivate this: so that no child is left behind and the digital divide is bridged and all the kids will become computer savvy and what not.

The HRD explained that according to some American psychologist “any sustained use of computers may lead to a disembodied brain and bring about isolationist tendencies in social behaviour” and that the “pedagogic effectiveness of this initiative is not known.”

Not just that, it went on to warn that “Both physical and psychological effects of children’s intensive exposure implicit in OLPC are worrisome. Health problems of our rural children are well known; personalised intensity of computer-use could easily exacerbate some of these problems”.

I bet the good folks at the HRD ministry are not as careful when it comes to their own children playing with laptops and PCs in their government provided flats in New Delhi. The reasoning behind promoting OLPC in poor countries is flawed (as I had written earlier: Formula for milking the digital divide); but the reasoning behind the HRD ministry’s rejection of the OLPC is worse. I am not surprised.

However, the Secretary to the Ministry, Sudeep Banerjee wrote to the Planning Commission and argued that instead of spending on laptops, funds should be allocated to univeralizing secondary education. Good point, Mr Banerjee. Still, Banerjee said that OLPC “may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and analytical abilities of the child”. Not at all convincing.

My opposition to the OLPC revolves around the notion of opportunity cost. First, let’s briefly consider the total cost. There’s the direct cost of a laptop, which was first advertized to be $100 but now has been pegged at $140. Add to that the operational costs. They will include the cost of maintenance. Assume that over its lifetime, given that it is a new piece of hardware, it is a conservative 25 percent, or $35. Then there are the “use costs.”

Use costs are incurred because the laptops are used by people. Predictably, people–especially children–drop things, misplace things, get things stolen. So what happens then? Does the government replace those laptops? Who pays?

Then who gets those laptops? There are, I estimate, about 100 million school-going children in India. Can we afford to buy laptops for them all? If not, who then will be favored? Will there be “reservations” for laptops so that favored religious and caste groups be given preference? Who decides? Will those in charge of handing out the laptops make a bit on the side, either directly or indirectly, through their power to deny or grant a shiny new gizmo to thousands of people. Power in the hands of people invariably corrupts them.

Who owns the laptop? The child or the parent? What does ownership mean? Will the parent be held liable for the cost of the laptop if the laptop is “lost”? Will a very poor family be able to shoulder that liability? Remember that the cost is $140, which is about 30 percent of the per capita income in India. Who pays for routine maintenance? If the user is not responsible, then there is the problem of moral hazard: the user will not be sufficiently diligent in caring for the object.

The total costs then is the sum of the direct costs ($140), the maintenance costs ($35), the use costs ($25, say): $200. Let’s say that India buys only 2 million of those cute green machines. The cost: $400,000,000.

Now on to the reason why I oppose the OLPC: opportunity costs. Some time ago, I had explore the notion of opportunity costs in “Casting Spells to Fix a Broken Car.”

The proponents of OLPC argue that spending hundreds of millions of dollars on laptops will empower many children, educate them, make them cross the digital divide. You will not get any argument from me against that. Some unknown percentage of those who use those laptops will benefit from them; some unpredictable percentage will get computer literate. Those things will happen because of the OLPC. My concern is with things that will not happen because of OLPC.

This point is worth stressing. It is not just that we make A happen; we have to also recognize that we have to forego the opportunity of making B happen. The important thing is to weigh the benefits of A against the benefits of B. Only if the former out weighs the latter, can we convincingly argue for making A happen.

Spending a few hundred million dollars will help some children, and also enrich the manufacturers of the laptops (Chinese manufacturing), and all the middle-layers that will be invovled in the selling, maintenance, and support. Compare that to the alternative use of the same money.

Tens of millions of children don’t go to school, and of the many who do, they end up in schools that lack blackboards and in some cases even chalk. Government schools — especially in rural areas — are plagued with teacher absenteeism. The schools lack even the most rudimentary of facilities such as toilets (the lack of which is a major barrier to girl children.)

Attention and funds need to be directed to those issues first before one starts buying laptops by the millions. Fact is that we need basic education (literacy, numeracy, etc) and secondary education. These have been provided very successfully without computers around the world. Every one who went to school and became educated more than a mere 30 years ago–in the entire history of human civilization, billions of people in all–did so without having ever seen a computer. What they had was much less expensive than PCs: they had teachers and an environment conducive to learning.

Here is an analogy. By pushing OLPC, what they are trying to do is to increase the capacity of a tub made of staves of different lengths. How much water the tub can hold is then dictated by the length of the shortest stave. If one were to pour water into the tub, the water level will continue to rise but only uptil the level reaches that of the shortest stave, when it starts overflowing. To increase the capacity of the tub, you will have to lengthen the staves. But lengthening any of the staves except the shortest stave will not increase the tub capacity. And even lengthening the shortest stave beyond the length of the next shortest stave is wasted. So the strategy for increasing the tub capacity is this: lengthen the shortest stave(s) first to match the length of the next shortest stave(s), and repeat.

The shortest stave in our tub is the will and commitment of our policy makers.

[Continued in Part 2. See also "Formula for Milking the Digital Divide."]

Well, I don’t really know.

Infant or baby formula was developed in the developed world when women began to join the work force and did not have the time to breast-feed their babies. What a wonderful great invention it was. Convenience for the mother, and great nutrition for the baby.

Developed as an alternative to breast-feeding, the industry promoted it aggressively in the developed world. On the way back from the hospital after the birth of a baby, the industry gave as a “gift” all that you need to feed the baby formula—the bottles and the bottle bag–and gave just enough “free” formula so that the mother stops lactating because of lack of nursing. Once the mother goes down that formula road, there is no turning back.

Babies are important when it comes to profits for the peddlers of formula. But there are only so many babies in the developed world. For real profit, they have to tap into the babies of the under-developed world. All with the best of intentions, of course: to help the babies of the poor parts of the world because there is a “formula divide.” Why should only the rich “gain” from the wonderful benefits of baby formula?

So they aggressively began marketing it to the third world. The World Health organization estimates that around 1.5 million infants die because they are not breast fed and instead fed formula. How? Breastfeeding not only provides nutrition, but also provides immunity to the babies. Of course, for a baby whose mother cannot produce milk, formula is better than starvation. But often the mothers stop producing milk only after getting started on formula. The initial amount is given free to the mothers in the poor parts of the world and they are told that formula is much much better than breast milk. So when the free amount is over and the mother is no longer lactating, the formula has to be bought. Since it is expensive, soon the formula is severely diluted until the infant is receiving practically no nutrition and is slowly starving to death.

But even if formula were given free, there is still a problem. In the poor parts of the world, clean drinking water is a luxury. Dirty water used in preparing the formula lead to deaths through diarrhea. Feeding formula to third world infants exposes them to all sorts of diseases that arise from inadequately sterilized bottles and nipples.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

About 30 years ago, there were no personal computers in the world. Anyone reading this will find it hard to imagine life now in a world without computers and the world wide web. One wonders how one could get along in those ancient times when there were no laptops and cell phones? Yet, the world developed well enough. If you think that there is a digital divide now, what do you think the digital divide was like 50 years ago when only a few research corporations and US government agencies had computers? Yet 50 years ago, people got educated, built productive economies, conducted business and got on with their lives.

The computers and the internet are wonderful things to have. They make life absolutely wonderful for those who can afford them. Actually, you have to be able to not just afford them and also be able to afford what it takes to make them useful, such as reliable power, broadband connectivity, good useful applications, a real world to which the applications are relevant, etc. And on top of all that, you have to be sufficiently trained to use them. It is really no use if you have a computer but there is nothing that you can do with it. But if for some reason, marketing hype convinces you that you need a computer to solve all your problems, you could end up spending money you cannot afford on things that are of no value to you.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

One Laptop Per Child is a MIT Media Lab project that is getting immense amounts of press. A sub-$100 laptop for every child in the third world and the digital divide will be a thing of the past, we hear. Sure it will. Just as formula will make malnutrition a thing of the past in the third world.

Given the perverse incentives, the peddlers of these laptops will make billions of dollars selling them to third world governments. As the MIT site says, “The laptops will only be distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives.” Large government initiatives, you bet. Why? Because people who have no money will not waste their money on laptops. Only government bureaucrats with large public purses at their disposal will buy these. The Media Lab people are not stupid.

The government officials will be handsomely rewarded for spending limited public resources in buying hundreds of thousands of these to make villages into “fully computerized” villages. A few trips to the US, a chance to speak at huge conferences on “Bridging the Digital Divide” sponsored by Microsoft, HP, Intel, and the Ministry of IT. Hundreds of millions of dollars which could have been more useful in providing primary education would instead end up in the pockets of hardware manufacturers and software giants. Sure a few children will become computer-savvy, but the cost of this will be borne by the millions of children who will suffer from a lack of education.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I know that one should not ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained as stupidity. Not everyone involved in the “laptop for every child” is motivated by greed; some are motivated by a zeal that comes from an inability to figure out what the problem is and how it can be most effectively solved. The operative word is “effectively.” You can always use a cannon where a fly-swatter is sufficient. But for the cost of a cannon, you can get a million fly-swatters which will be more effective than one cannon. Cannons are more impressive then fly-swatters, however, and that may explain their fascination with some people.

A blackboard and chalk is not as sexy as a laptop. In fact, a TV and a media player is pretty much all the hardware that you need to provide basic education to a village full of children. That hardware (and some free software) would cost all of $200 a year, and if you pay about $2000 a year as salaries to a couple of village school teachers, you can educate a 100 kids for about $20 per child per year. Compare that to just buying $100 laptops for each kid.

I am confident that the One Laptop Per Child will have the effect which is the educational equivalent of the nutritional disaster that imported formula has had on the poor parts of the world.

Yes, they do kill babies in search of profits. And yes, they will not care that millions of children will be denied primary education because they are focused on the profits to be made from selling laptops.

[There's much more here on the OLPC.

See this informative article "Breast milk or formula: making the right choice for your baby" from the Swedish Medical Center.]

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 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.}

But the opinion that ICT will magically transform economically backward regions is widely held. In fact, I am persuaded that precisely because it is a widely held belief that one should start to suspect it. Bertrand Russell warned:

[T]he fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

Anyway, I struggle on. It is a futile endeavor, like mud-wrestling with a pig — it is a waste of time because you cannot win and the pig enjoys it. Or even, to put it another way, like trying to teach a pig to sing: it cannot be done and it annoys the pig.

I subscribe to an email list where matters relating to India’s progress down the information highway is discussed. One member, Mr. S.N.Rao, wrote in response to the postal department’s scheme. I find Rao’s comments very pertinent and with his permission I quote him for the record.

I can see that this is a very useful thing to have and that it benefits large numbers of poor people who cannot afford to own computers or learn how to operate them or speak/write English.

That brings me to the frighteningly palliative nature of this kind of solution. It attempts to provide a workaround – causing the real problems to be ignored along the way. I hope I am not the only one to see the striking parallels between this solution and the “good old days” solution to illiteracy where the postman often read out incoming letters to his customers and scribed outgoing mail on their behalf!

The basic problems that need to be solved are

a. Computers and technology are still bewildering and sometimes threatening in their cost and complexity of use. The platform that is used to develop and test software is basically the same as the platform that is used as a home PC…with all the attendant disadvantages of a user interface geared for essentially production/office environments.

There are some products that make sending email simpler by providing a dedicated email station that does nothing else – but that again is a point solution. There is a sorely felt need for a home platform. Sending email/voice/photos via the internet should be at least as easy as turning on the TV and switching between Z-TV and CNN (if not as easy as switching on a light).

b. Local language support is nearly non-existent despite large cumbersome frameworks and customisation options being built into operating systems. As a result it is almost imperative that the user be comfortably familiar with English. Oh! wait – that’s only true for India and a few other countries – in Japan, the computers, UI, keyboards are all in Japanese (I think you might be even able to select between two different scripts – kanji and the more common mix of katagana and hiragana). Now wouldn’t it be nice for the old man in Alleppy if we had a computer with an interface and markings entirely in, for example – Malayalam?

Band-aids, palliatives, patches, workarounds — are dangerous when they mask underlying problems. They work in the short-run and appear to solve the problem but in the long-run, they indirectly contribute to the persistence of the problem. They often address symptoms rather than causes. I am not advocating the abandonment of band-aids. My insistence is on making sure that even as we are busy putting on band-aids, we should spare some time and effort to address underlying causes.

Computers are complex beasts because of the evolutionary pathway they have traveled. Made by techies for techies. For them to be useful for the unwashed masses (such as yours truly), they have to be transformed into easy to manage domesticated animals. Some people are working on that domestication.

The availability of computers for the masses is of course increasingly becoming a necessity. But that is far from sufficient. For us to have a reasonable shot at development, we need to have a literate population. Palliatives that mask that underlying deficiency should be considered dangerous.

Damn, now I know what was preventing me from bonding emotionally with people — my fear of technology. Now that Simputer is here, I will get over my fear of technology and bam! I will be bonding emotionally with people. Now I will finally get a life!

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My point is rather pedestrian. One should try to be somewhat realistic about the scope and nature of a technical product. Inflated rhetoric about how it can lead to god-realization and enlightenment is foolish. It is useful to remind ourselves that technology directly solves technical problems. A handheld computer’s utility is limited to storing, retrieving, managing, and communicating data. It will not solve an interpersonal relationship problem no matter how user-friendly an interface it has. If electronic gizmos could have solved ‘bonding’ issues, then the US would have been one of the most friendly societies on earth and not need the battalions of shrinks it has. If having a Palm-pilot clone is all that is preventing people from bonding, then we have all our problems licked.

Whether one likes it or not, solutions have to be consistent with the nature of the problem. Interpersonal problems cannot be addressed by technical solutions anymore than transportation problems can be addressed by cardiac surgery.

When bored I also become cynical. Selling hardware is hard in a world that can barely afford decent square meals. Roping in NGOs to push hardware seems like an excellent marketing strategy and so these conferences get funded. Almost every presentation in these sort of meetings is about PCs and internet. There is practically zero mention of radio and TV. Radio and TV make more sense in a lot of contexts for developing countries. Telephones, radio, and TV (TRTV, henceforth) are orders of magnitude cheaper, easy to use, and in many aspects more robust than PCs. So what explains the neglect of TRTVs?

Two factors explain the neglect of TRTVs as a solution to the information and communications needs of the poor. First, the TVTR industry is fragmented compared to the industry for computers. The computer industry is a virtual monopoly of the Intel-Microsoft behemoths. Monopolists have market power and therefore they capture all the profits (or, rents) that are generated by increased demand for their products. Compared to the computer industry, the TRTV market is more competitive. No single entity there controls any significant part of the market, and therefore economic profits are non-existent. Consequently, no entity has an incentive to push TRTVs as a solution for the information and communications needs of the poor.

The second factor for the neglect of TRTV is that TRTVs deliver services that have public goods characteristics and have major positive externalities that cannot be captured by the firms in the market. The market therefore underprovides the amount of TRTV as would be predicted by economic theory.

The classical response to the second factor is of course to subsidize TRTVs so that the socially optimal quantity is delivered and consumed. The first factor can only be confronted by regulation. Courts have been routinely trying to break Microsoft’s monopoly in the US an Europe. Perhaps one of these days with a little bit of luck, the stranglehold will be broken.

India has to adopt the most cost-effective means of delivering information and education. Computers and the internet are an expensive solution that most of India cannot afford. The money available for subsidizing the information and communications solutions can be more efficiently used in the TVTR sector than the computer/internet sector. Is anyone paying attention?

How much to allocate to investment and how much to consumption depends on the objective function of the policymakers. The private objective function of the policymakers may be quite different from the publicly stated objective function, however. After all, the Indian Government did not declare sometime after independence that their objective function was to strangle the economy and retard growth so as to extract as much rent as they could from a small set of large business houses by instituting a licence-permit-quota regime. What they said was that their objective function was to maximize growth, the eradication of poverty, the development of rural areas, the emancipation of women, the removal of caste barriers, et cetera. In short, their stated goal was little short of unleashing peace and prosperity for all and sundry, all done through the benevolence of the babus that were at the helm of affairs intent on climbing the commanding heights of the economy.

I get a feeling of impending doom every time I see yet another utopian objective function being declared and mega billions of rupees allocated for reaching that stated objective. Yet once more we will be spending huge amounts of public money. How much of it will actually be investment and how much of it will be consumption is the question. How much of it will be effectively used by the intended receipients and how much will leak out, is another question. Development is the stated goal but whose development is the critical question.

It is easy to spend $2.7 billion. Here is a break-up:

500,000 PCs (with power supplies etc.) at $1500 for a total of $750 million
MS Windows for 500,000 PCs at $300 for a total of $150 million
1 million Voice based information technology device at $500 for total of $500 million
Infrastructure for 500,000 kiosks at $2000 for a total of $1 billion
For high flying executives, for McKinsey to write fancy reports, for government kickbacks for the awarding of contracts, for old fashioned bribery, etc only $300,000,000 ($300 million).

There you have it. $2.7 already “invested” in IT to bridge the digital divide. I put invested in quote because I don’t believe that it does anything for the 700 million people it is supposed to benefit. The actual beneficiaries are Microsoft (software), HP (Hardware), some local companies making the “voice based technology device” (which probably will be as useful as the mythical Simputer), McKinsey with their highly paid consultants, government bureaucrats, and politicians. It will be a party. All, except the poor, will be invited.

About 10 years P. Sainath wrote a book with the catchy title “Everybody Loves a Good Drought”. He was traveling with poor migrant farm labor for some time trying to understand how they live and wrote dispatches for the Times of India. These migrant labor are the poorest of the poor. Government programs exist to help these people out — on paper of course. Monies are spent when a district is declared hit with drought. Everybody loves it — because the whole administrative structure can feed at the public trough. Everybody, that is, with the exception of the poor migrant laborers. They starve.

I think it is time to write one with the title “Everybody Loves a Good Digital Divide”. I don’t believe that there is a digital divide in India. Then why is it such a big hit in India? Perhaps if there is no digital divide, it is necessary to invent one so that resources can be mobilized to bridge it.

Over the past decade, the Internet has been touted as a powerful engine that could raise living standards in poor and remote communities of the Third World by opening up new avenues for education, commerce and participatory democracy.

So far so good. Then it goes into the usual whining about the digital divide.

But the reality is a growing digital divide that is preventing the poor from sharing in the benefits of the Information Age. The gap between digital haves and have-nots is especially wide in India, where a national survey last year revealed that fewer than 1 percent of adults had used the Internet in the preceding three months.

OK, let’s get one thing clear. It is not the digital divide that is preventing the poor from benefiting from ICT. It is the fact that they are poor that is preventing them from benefiting from ICT. Not just benefiting from the use of ICT, the poor also are not benefiting from the advances in medical technology, in cosmetic surgery, in plasma TV technology, ad nauseum. It is not the digital divide, stupid, it is an income divide, it is a wealth divide, it is an opportunity divide.

If the poor had money, they would not be poor, and like all non-poor, would be able to buy all sorts of stuff — including, but not limited to — digital gizmos. They would buy education, clothes, food, houses, cell phones, cd players, DVD players, plasma TVs, and computers. There would not be a digital divide. It bears repeating: the digital divide is not the cause of poverty nor is it the cause of the persistence of poverty. The digital divide is a result — an effect, a consequence — of poverty.

Now coming to India: India does not have a digital divide. Let me put that in bold.

India does not have a digital divide.

If a vanishingly small number of people have something, there is no divide. For instance, it is pointless to talk about a BMW divide: we are all in the same boat when it comes to having BMWs and therefore there is no divide. So also, to a first approximation, Indians don’t have access to the Internet, except for a few million people. And the few million who do have it, have to pay inordinate amounts of money to get a slow uncertain connection.

I hope that we can put that myth to rest one of these days.

You may ask, what is the goal? And how is the focus on ICT distracting us from recognizing the goal? Or, what is the real divide that we should be concerned about if not the digital divide? What is the reason for the apparent confusion of means and ends?

No one can argue that the digital divide does not exist, just as one cannot argue that the Rolls-Royce divide does not exist, or that numerous other divides don’t exist. (More on my view of the digital divide.) One is only arguing that bridging the digital divide is not the end, but it is a possible (and one of many possible) means to an end. I will argue here that the end is to bridge information divide and that the tool could be provided by digital ICT. In some applications, digital ICT could well be the answer, while in others, other technologies may be more appropriate. In some cases, ICT for development goals may be an entirely inappropriate tool. We need to think very carefully to avoid the pitfalls some of which I have identified in a previous post Misapprehansions, misconceptions, …

What is the information divide and why is it relevant? The information divide is important because it empowers people. It empowers people not just in the marketplace but also in the political arena. Vested interests are threatened by an informed citizenry. So you would not hear too much noise about bridging the information divide. Bridging the information divide is likely to run into political opposition. There is a hoary history to the deliberate maintenance of an information divide. That is another story that we can address in a separate entry in this blog.

The next time I see another e-scheme, I will be ready to e-scream.

Seriously, here are what I believe to be the reason for this fixation with the so-called digital divide, in no particular order. First, it is a simple case of ‘to a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’

Practically everyone involved with anything to do with development (except the direct beneficiaries of development) has some facility with ICT. So therefore they start to believe that every problem has a solution that is ICT related.

The next explanation is what I call the bank robber phenomenon. When some famous bank robber was asked why he robbed banks, he simply replied because that’s where the money was. ICT projects are the most lavishly funded. And therefore, it attracts the most attention from people who would like to get a piece of the action.

Another part of the explanation is what I call the drunk looking for his key scenario. A man evidently drunk was seen searching for something under a lamp post. When asked he said that he lost his keys under the trees over there. But why was he searching for them under the lamp post? “Because,” he said, “it is easier to look for it under the light.”

Definitely, part of the explanation has to involve simply not recognizing that the digital divide is merely symptomatic of some other underlying cause. But it is too bothersome to seek to understand that cause. And even if the cause is as plain as daylight, it may be too difficult to deal with the cause. So one gets busy addressing the symptom.

Addressing only one symptom (the digital divide) while neglecting to understand the causes leads to spectacles that are reminiscent of the south seas cargo cults.

During the war, the natives of some South Pacific islands had noticed a curious phenomena. They had witnessed some people prepare a long piece of land and mark it with flares and fires. Then someone with cups on his ears would talk into a device and soon planes would land in the clearing and disgorge cargo. When the war was over, the natives decided that they needed cargo. So they made headphones out of coconut shells and radio receivers out of bamboo and lit the fires around the clearings. They haven’t had much sucess in getting cargo yet, but they believe that the cargo would appear just as soon as they can duplicate the equipment better.

I do not believe that merely going through the motions, however sincerely, of bringing ICT to rural populations would magically transform the rural economy. Focusing on the digital divide could indeed be counter productive in that resources that could have been better employed would be wasted in inappropriate ventures.

I should hasten to add that there is indeed a digital divide. But we must also recognize that there are other divides as well, such as a nutritional divide, a gender divide, an income divide, an education divide, and so on. All these divides are interrelated and there are strong dependencies. It is a second best world out there and it is easy to fall into the trap of seeking first-best solutions in a second-best world.

I will discuss why I believe that ICT tools are most suited to address the complex set of problems which cause all the divides, including the digital divide. My contention is this: we need to focus on the understanding the underlying reasons for the underdevelopment of rural areas. Having done that, we then need to figure out the best use of our limited resources to bring to bear the most appropriate tools for addressing the causes. If we do that, then we would have bridged all the divides, including the much talked about digital divide. It may turn out that ICT tools are the most appropriate in many areas. But a priori assuming that ICT tools are always appropriate is silly and sometimes tragically too expensive.

For now, I cannot find a more succinct depiction of the misplaced emphasis on the digital divide than this cartoon by the incomparable R K Laxman.
“I am hungry … if we had a computer, we could have ordered food through a website.” }

The workshop was a great opportunity to meet many people from the goverment ranks, the private sector, and various NGOs. It was an honor to meet Prof. M.S.Swaminathan, of course. Two days is sufficient time to get to know at least a couple of people well. I was fortunate that I met many people who I would like to follow up with.

The information package for the workshop asked (among other questions):

Can ICTs be useful for rural and remote areas of developing countries, especially the poverty-stricken regions?

The two days gave me an opportunity to reflect on the issues that the participants raised. I think it would be useful for me to create a framework within which I can discuss the various specifics of debated by the participants of the workshop. I will do so in a seemingly roundabout way because what I would like to do is not what a journalist or a reporter would do. I am seeking to explain something that is not trivial, neither in its conception or its impact. So it may be many days before I can say that I have made the point that I have set out to make.