What are the key issues related to bridging the digital divide?

First, I don’t really like the term “digital divide” very much. I prefer to talk about digital opportunities. The major problem in the world actually is of a socioeconomic divide. There’s a growing gap between rich and poor within countries and between countries. If you take the premise that information and communications technologies can make a real difference to help issues, that premise goes on to say that the communities or countries that don’t have good access, knowledge, understanding, or the ability to use necessary technologies are going to fall further and further behind.

We have enough examples of wonderful applications of IT: health applications with remote diagnosis, education and promotion of productivity in schools for remote learning, the role of communications technology in enterprise development, and so on. If we can consistently find the right triggers to bring together the kind of conditions required to take this off, then that will close these gaps faster than if we don’t.

New technologies are coming up, including faster and cheaper bandwidth. What we need to do is to get the right conditions in place for making investments. Looking at this problem two years ago, it was all about people saying we should have greater subsidies for governments, or international agencies to enable the private sector to bring connectivity to every home, and so on. I don’t think that’s the essence of it. We need to get to a sustainable dynamic of the use of technology. There are several initiatives possible that could stimulate that. In India for instance, one of the extraordinary things you see in every village is the STD/ISD centers. The challenge in such initiatives is to make them sustainable, which means there needs to be a strong enough economy around to sustain them.

One of the things in all the global movements is to concentrate on the fundamentals. These are: enabling an open policy and regulation; enabling the human capability, i.e. having well-educated people able to understand IT in enough critical mass to serve the entire country; getting the infrastructure right, i.e., bandwidth, access centers, and so on; developing critical content (here it’s important to get local content off the ground); and, lastly, enabling stable enterprises on the ground, both within the IT sector and other sectors using IT. That includes everything from agricultural production to textiles for overseas markets, without which you won’t have the wealth creation to enable to pay for other developments that may be led by government.

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