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October 2000 (Page 1) COVER STORY - Time Magazine What gives India the high-tech edge over China? Wiring the Villages - Computers among the sugarcane India's IT Bonanza
Let's return to the Olympics. China appears to have inherited the East German mantle, using force-fed, massively financed sports academies concentrating on medal-rich events to make winning a focus of national pride and proof of the system's success. Xenophobia plus communism makes a powerful sporting force. India, on the other hand, with its chaotic but pluralistic political system and weak central government, has neither the money, the will nor the competence to achieve official sports success. If India can (rarely these days) win at cricket, that's fine. But academies of weight lifting, badminton, gymnastics, diving? Forget it. India's hands-off approach to sport is akin to that of many rich and technologically advanced countries. How many medals for Taiwan? Or Denmark? As for a free and united Germany, it finished far down the list of winners at Sydney. Consider, again, the cities. Shanghai's excellent roads and high-rise offices are largely a product of central government subsidies and grossly inefficient investment by loss-making state enterprises. Its streets are beggarless because the authorities keep strict control on residency rights, excluding the great unwashed from the interior provinces who are accustomed to incomes a fraction of those of the residents of Shanghai. In India, the rural poor are free to move around their own country, even when that inconveniences the established residents of Bombay. So just as peasants from Bihar can get a foothold up the ladder, so Indians with talent can start almost any kind of small business without much fuss. Yes, as in any other nation, there are corrupt bureaucrats and vested interests. There are also the obstacles of caste, absent in China. But India's brand of socialism runs only skin deep and applies mainly to big national enterprises. In China, while the ideology and ethics of socialism are in steep decline, the political structure that binds the Communist Party to the economy (and party leaders to enterprise heads) is still intact. So, too, is a fear of another IT essential: the free flow of ideas. The result is that China is capable of delivering results which, like the Olympics, require official organization and direction—such as the roads, dams and power stations that in India are ever delayed by legal and political squabbles and bureaucratic inertia. In India the business-politics link is much looser, and the power of the state minimal. Entrepreneurs have more scope to do their own thing, whether wiring villages with pirated cable TV systems, setting up a software outfit in Bangalore or running a phone-answering business in Delhi to serve card holders in, say, Denver. China may yet capitalize on its fascination with the Web and spawn a world-class software industry. It has many potential New Economy assets. Incomes, especially in the cities, are far higher than in India, which means more citizens can afford PCs. China enjoys a greater phone density, especially in mobiles, and is united by a single language—albeit one that isn't ideal for the Web—which India, with its mix of English, Hindi, Tamil and others, lacks. But for now India's weaknesses—"a million mutinies now," to use V.S. Naipaul's words—are its strengths. China's centralized organizational muscle is its weakness. Wiring
the Villages - Computers among the sugarcane Shantappa Ghewari understands that the future can come in many disguises, even to a remote village like Pokhale. In 1997, satellite TV came to the sugarcane-growing region of Maharashtra state, some 400 km southeast of Bombay, and "even one-year-olds started shaking their hips like those MTV girls," he says. More than a year later, another magical, illuminated box was installed in the village, holding the promise of a much more radical transformation: Pokhale became one of 70 villages in the Warana region participating in an ambitious $600,000 information-technology project initiated by the federal government. All the villages in the area now have computers linked to a central network, while training centers have been opened in six villages to impart computer education to rural youth and to provide access to the Internet. Connectivity promises to transform a way of life that could be mistaken for timeless. With computer kiosks in every village, Warana's "Wired Village" project already provides farmers access to essential information. The network keeps detailed records of all their transactions with the local sugar and milk cooperatives; it lists prices of farm produce in the region's agricultural markets (to help farmers decide what to plant or where to sell their produce); and it offers a daily weather forecast. The network also helps reduce a major anxiety plaguing farmers in the region. Once a sugarcane crop is ready, each day's delay in harvesting reduces its sugar content, and therefore the money the farmer gets from the cooperative for his crop. The cooperative owns only one harvester, which is usually monopolized by the bigger, more influential farmers. But now the harvesting dates for every village and farm are available on the network, and the farmers can use the computers to complain to the cooperative chief if the harvester fails to arrive at the appointed hour. No wonder Ghewari, 63, who grows cane in a two-hectare field, was quick to realize the new technology's potential—he made his only son Bhalchandra give up a tire-company job to become Pokhale's first computer operator. Says the peasant, as he sits outside the computer kiosk next to the village temple: "The sky and the earth are changing." India hopes eventually to replicate those transformations in other parts of the country. Similar projects have already been launched in other states. "The basic objective is to use IT as a tool for development, and to bring government to your doorstep," says N. Vijayaditya, of the New Delhi-based National Informatics Center, the state-owned technical agency behind the project. The hardest part, though, may be mobilizing India's notoriously inefficient bureaucracy. Nearly two years after the project was launched at Warana, the local state government has yet to transfer onto computer the region's land record data, necessary for simplifying land transactions and revenue collection. The villagers of Warana have nevertheless embraced the opportunity to play pioneers. Farmer Balu Jadhav owns less than a hectare of land, plus a buffalo and a cow. Once he worried about how his son, whose legs are atrophied by polio, would earn a living. Now he feels there's hope for him beyond the land. Says Jadhav: "I will teach him computers."
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