huridocs-tech Recommendations at South Asia Internet Workshop

Edited/Distributed by HURINet - The Human Rights Information Network
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## author     : jagdish@igc.org
## date       : 03.05.99
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First South Asia Internet Workshop Recommends Rural
Infrastructure, Content Initiatives by Madanmohan Rao
(madanr@planetasia.com)

Can South Asia catch up in the Internet race?

Participants of a historic South Asian Internet workshop
which concluded recently in Dhaka certainly think so.

There will soon be close to one and a half billion people in
the Indian subcontinent, and the global Internet user
population is already close to 150 million. But the South
Asian diffusion and adoption of the Internet continues to
fall far short of the region's potential.

The key outcome of the four-day workshop - drawing
participants from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal -
has been a set of concrete policy recommendations as well as
five project proposals for increasing Internet diffusion in
the region and reducing inter- country and intra-country
imbalances.

Papers from each country focused on national variations as
well as regional similarities in rural access, Internet
service provider (ISP) policy, telecom tariffs, datacom
infrastructure, computer literacy, and local relevance of
online content.

"According to a recent World Bank study, the average waiting
period for a telephone line is 10-12 years in Nepal and
Bangladesh, 1.9 years in India, and 1.1 years in Pakistan,"
said professor Jamilur Reza Choudhury, a political advisor
who is generally credited with enacting legislation
favourable to the IT sector in Bangladesh.

In the region, India is strong in Internet capacity
(skillsets, training, IT workforce), but the Indian Internet
continues to be a largely urban, English-oriented
phenomenon. Bangladesh, on the other hand, has institutional
strength in quickly rolling out projects for the rural
sector (eg. Grameen Village Phones) - though it does not yet
have a formal Internet policy.

Pakistan, to its credit, does not enforce multiple metering
for dialup calls to ISPs (local phone call charges are not
added to the ISP's per-minute charges). Pakistan was also
the first South Asian country to open up its ISP market to
the private sector (in 1995), and now has close to 40 ISPs
in operation accounting for about 250,000 users.

There are 18 ISPs in Bangladesh and three in Nepal; each
country has about 40,000 Internet users. India has a dozen
ISPs, and close to 800,000 Internet users.

Part of the challenge is in creating regulatory environments
which nurture a proliferation of private ISPs, while also
ensuring that government monopoly telecom players do not
squeeze out the private ISP sector.

"It is tragic and ironic that more than 50 years after
independence from the British, most South Asian countries
are still enslaved by colonial-era legislation like the
Indian Telegraph Act of 1885," said Arun Mehta, an Internet
engineer and activist from New Delhi.

While British Telecommunications (BT) has shaken off such
pre-digital legislation and launched aggressive initiatives
in areas ranging from Internet telephony to global Internet
backbones, South Asian telecom monopolies are like dinosaurs
in the Internet age, said Mehta.

In the interests of fair competition, the workshop
recommended that a distinction be made between wholesale and
retail Internet access services, and that government telcos
with a monopoly in one area of access services (eg. phone
lines, international gateways) should not use this to wipe
out or threaten players in another sector (eg. dialup
Internet access).

Such concerns are being voiced by ISP associations in South
Asian countries like India and Bangladesh.

The workshop also called for greater cooperation in South
Asia between railway and power grid authorities of each
country for inter- linking national Internet backbones and
increasing regional bandwidth. A conference focusing on this
initiative is being planned.


Bandwidth to the international Internet is about 80 Mbps in
India, 10.5 Mbps in Pakistan, 512 Kbps in Bangladesh, and
320 Kbps in Nepal.

In terms of content, the number of Web sites focusing on
each country is estimated to be around 10,000 in the case of
India, 2,000 for Pakistan, 1,000 for Nepal, and 100 for
Bangladesh.

In addition to such quantitative measures of content,
qualitative measures like information utility for domestic
and international audiences are also important. Workshop
participants stressed the need to create more locally
relevant content, including in local languages.

Local infrastructure initiatives must therefore go hand in
hand with drives to create locally generated content, based
on local community needs and activities. This will require a
strong partnership between government, private, educational
and NGO sectors, with a special boost to local
entrepreneurs.

"Governments need to play a stronger supportive role in
enabling new technologies to help alleviate problems
relating to poverty, gender, environment and the like. While
the Internet brings people of diverse backgrounds together,
it has not yet bridged the gap between rich and poor," said
Egbert Pelinck, Director General of ICIMOD (International
Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) in Kathmandu.

The Internet workshop was sponsored by ICIMOD, and hosted in
Dhaka by the Local Government Engineering Department
(www.lged.org).

Expanding the focus beyond urban markets, participants
showed that the Internet has tremendous potential, like
other information and communication technologies, for rural
communities as well.

"With appropriate synergies in rural communities, we have
shown how environmentally-aware education among primary
school students can be coupled with the use of computers and
the Internet in villages," said Imran Rasheed, director of
the Learn Foundation in Sylhet.

A memorandum of understanding for a project involving
communication between rural schools via the Internet is
being signed by South Asian organisations including NGOs
PRIP, Drik, LEARN Foundation, South Asia Multi Media, Global
Amitech, and the ISP PraDeshta.

It will draw network professionals and students from across
South Asia, to develop and deploy low-lost Internet based
mass communication devices. The project will be scaled up as
appropriate across the region, and a set of best practices
will be evolved.

Other projects proposed at the workshop include a blueprint
for community tele-centres, an initiative for telemedicine,
and an agenda for regional e-commerce.

The explosive growth of the Internet has been unprecedented
in countries around the world. With appropriate policies,
infrastructure, capacity, and local creativity, this same
revolution may well become a reality in the countries of
South Asia as well.




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