Today, we often come across jargons such as ‘knowledge economy’, ‘information explosion’, ‘world at your fingertips’. These are not alien terms, as they had become an indispensible part of our regular vocabulary. Rewind a decade ago and a totally different picture would have surfaced. The dichotomy exists even today, translated by economists as ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’. While urban India has taken IT for granted, there is a mammoth demographic segment who doesn’t know how technology touches their lives, if at all they do.
In this two words ‘Information’ and ‘technology’, the aspect to be noticed is the fact that Information always precedes technology. Information existed, technology made it accessible, thereby building a society knowledge rich, aware and discerning. With time, the fact got proven that IT is an enabler of social inclusivity, by the sheer truth that it can bring information to the masses, educate them and make them live a life of quality.
However, though technology has made inroads into areas hitherto inaccessible, still there is a major chunk of the population who cannot take advantage of the possibilities because of obvious constraints, ‘cost’ being one. Several organizations are undertaking initiatives to negate those constraints and time testifies the fact that we have come a long way in doing so. Numerous grass-root innovations are happening to bridge the glaring digital divide. For example, HP’s Lab-in-box, a unique initiative where a fully equipped mobile class room can provide secondary education content designed by NCERT, to reach students in remote areas who cannot afford school education. The biggest challenge in India undoubtedly is that of infrastructure. Setting up a school is a cumbersome process necessitating very high costs in terms of building materials, municipality permits, electricity, remuneration for teachers, and maintenance. As a corollary, this acts as a hurdle to many bright students who cannot afford that kind of money. HP’s solutions brought education at the doorstep.
Similarly, HCL Infosystems is providing end-to-end turnkey advanced education solutions to schools, institutions and universities across the country in the government and private sector. HCL DigiSchool’s key feature is that this solution offers digital multimedia asset library, covering all major aspects in K12 category. Also, solutions such as Campus Infrastructure Solution, University Resource Planning, Online Distance Learning/e-Learning Programme and Tele Education. Many IT behemoths are also developing low cost laptops and encouraging broadband connectivity, engineered to reach masses uninitiated to the ramified opportunities that technology can provide.
Keeping in perspective the fact that today, out of approximately 200 million children in the age group of 6-14 years only 120 million ever going to school, these initiatives will pave a long way in fostering an inclusive atmosphere for socio economic growth. As part of its Vision 2020 plan, the Government is looking to increase the number of school going children to 30 per cent by 2020.
Information technology industry has already ushered in a catalytic change in the Indian society by collaborating with the government to increase accessibility, affordability and accountability of essential services. Technology has brought about effective alterations in administrative functions in terms of public services and e-governance projects, to eliminate avoidable inefficiencies, reduce corruption and guaranteeing ease of collaboration amongst diverse departments. Some case in point is the much appreciated UID project, National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), or establishing State Wide Area Networks (SWAN) scheme in 27 states and 6 union territories (UTs) on a pan India level.
In the healthcare segment, Telemedicine, a forerunner to ‘in absentia care’, is a rapidly developing application of clinical medicine, where medical information is transferred through interactive audiovisual media for the purpose of consulting. Telemedicine can also be used to conduct examinations and remote medical procedures. Thus, as a corollary, telemedicine can be extremely beneficial for people living in isolated communities and remote regions and now this is currently being applied in virtually all medical domains.
The industry itself has accelerated technology-adoption across various sectors including real-estate, BFSI, tourism and retail, thereby improving quality of life of the citizens of India. Constraints still exists in terms of cost and awareness. As these dissolve with time, technology will make its presence felt even more assertively and act as building blocks for social inclusivity.
By Soham Majumdar
IMPRIMIS Delhi
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