Dynamic adopter Lanka ahead of India in IT report

NEW YORK - The United States is undoubtedly one of the most advanced nations in technological innovations — ranging from electronic mail and genetically modified food to ground-breaking new vaccines and state-of-the-art weapons systems.

In the field of information and communications technologies (ICT), the human voice is fast becoming an anachronism in a country obsessed with labour-saving devices and sophisticated electronic gadgetry.

Every phone call to any office in the US, not excluding the United Nations, is answered mostly by an electronic voice which provides you with a series of options at the touch of a button.

The syndicated cartoonist Gary Trudeau envisages a hypothetical scenario in a future White House in Washington DC.

One of the secure hotlines, apparently accessible only to heads of state, will perhaps have the following pre-recorded message dished out by an electronic voice:

"If you are the leader of an industrial nation, press one. If you are from the Third World, press two. If you are seeking US military aid, press three. If you want an increase in economic aid, press four..." And so it goes.

Perhaps an addition to it will be a final message from a future US president to technology — deficient Third World nations: "If you want me to respond to your message, please leave your e-mail address at the sound of the beep".

"And if you don't have an e-mail address, I am sorry both you — and your country — do not exist in this world any more."

Last week, the annual Human Development Report released by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) spelled out the benefits and perils of modern technologies, not excluding the telephone, the television, the fax machine and the electronic voice.

In the UNDP's Technology Achievement Index, Finland (0.744) clinched the number one spot, barely beating the US (0.733) into second place, with Sweden, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and the UK (0.606) trailing behind.

Sri Lanka (0.203), which was ranked 62 out of the 72 nations in the new index, was placed in a separate category described as "dynamic adopters."

The message in the report was clearly spelled out in a sub-text: "Making New Technologies Work for Human Development."

Mark Malloch Brown, the Administrator of the UNDP, says that it is time for a new partnership between technology and development — what with the growing power of the Internet, the agricultural biotechnology advances and new generations of pharmaceuticals.

While it is undeniable that many of the high-tech marvels that dazzle the rich North are inappropriate for the poor South, he argues, it is also true that research and development addressing specific problems facing poor people — from combating disease to developing distance education — have proved time and again how technology can be not just a reward for successful development but a critical tool for achieving it.

The report points out that some of the 20th century's unprecedented gains in advancing human development and eradicating poverty came largely from technological breakthroughs.

The reduction in undernutrition in South Asia from about 40 percent in the 1970s to about 23 percent in the 1997 — and the end of chronic famine — was made possible by plant breeding, fertilizers and pesticides that doubled world cereal yields in just 40 years. The Internet, the information superhighway which depends on faster and modern telecommunications networks, is one of the most astounding disseminators of knowledge worldwide.

The report singles out Sri Lanka as a country where competition among providers of information and communications technology has led to increased investment, increased connectivity and better service.

As the Internet spreads globally, the costs have been drastically reduced over the years.

According to the report, the cost of transmitting a trillion bits of information from Boston to Los Angeles has fallen from $150,000 in 1970 to 12 cents today.

A three-minute phone call from New York to London which cost more than $300 in 1930 (in today's prices) now costs less than 20 cents.

E-mailing a 40-page document from Chile in Latin America to Kenya in sub-Saharan Africa costs less than 10 cents, faxing it about $10 and sending it by courier about $50.

But still most developing nations, particularly in Africa, have failed to exploit the new technological advances primarily because of mounting debts, abject poverty, military conflicts — or just the lack of infrastructure.

The uneven diffusion of information and communications technology — the digital divide — is reflected in the UNDP's Technology Achievement Index where the bottom nine "marginalised" countries are mostly from Africa: Mozambique, Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal and Nicaragua, with the only two exceptions in this category being Pakistan and Nepal.

In the category of "dynamic adopters" India has been ranked 63 just below Sri Lanka despite the fact that Bangalore has been described as one of the most dynamic global hubs for information technologies.

The reason: the huge variations in technological achievement among Indian states in a country with over a billion people. India has the world's seventh largest number of scientists and engineers yet the mean years of schooling were only 5.1 years and adult illiteracy was 44 percent nation-wide.