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Business

Taking IT to rural communities
Ever since leaving Hayleys in the mid-1970s, Mohamed V. Mushin's career has zoomed from being an advisor on state enterprise reform to President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia to a director at the World Bank's information technology services division.

Now comfortably ensconced as vice president and chief information officer (CIO) at the bank, Muhsin - who started off as a professional accountant - talks with ease about the IT revolution sweeping the globe and the need for Sri Lanka to join the bandwagon or "miss the bus".

"We should stop studying the number of reports on IT and get down to brass tacks," he says in an interview during a recent visit to Sri Lanka. On a sentimental note, he misses the regular rugby column he wrote for the Times newspaper in the early 1970s along with writers of the calibre of T.M.K. Samat and M.B. Marjan. "I was what you would call a pseudo journalist," he laughs, "but I enjoyed writing. The need to keep to deadlines provided me with the discipline required in my other work."

Excerpts of the interview:

There have been a lot of studies on IT with 60 to 80 studies and reports done over the past four-five years. The government wanted some convergence on this to move forward and requested the World Bank to help rationalise the programme.

I met Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and IT Minister Milinda Moragoda on June 15 to discuss these matters. We brought down a multi-sector team of six with experts drawn from Silicon Valley with expertise in software, human resources development, implementation and policy, promotions and partnerships, mass communications and one expert had worked with Chandrababu Naidu's IT reforms programme in Andhra Pradesh.

We met 200 to 300 people from IT and the private sector. Although I am heavily involved in IT, I feel people of my generation are history.

How do you rate Sri Lankan talent in the IT field?

Sri Lankans are innovative and know the niches that can take the country forward. You have the talent but lack the enabling environment.

Our advice to the government is that you should now stop studying this anymore. The prime minister himself said "Enough of studies. We need to act now". We need to act not in a disorganised manner but have a method and learn lessons from the dotcom, dot-bomb revolution when people rushed in and made mistakes.

What do we need to do to get the country into the IT field? We need to use technology for the development of the country and do it in a concerted manner to be successful.

Because of the new generation, IT is moving much faster than any other developments.

The government needs to realise that IT could be used in a strategic manner to achieve the development objectives of the country.

Our literacy rates are 90 percent against India at 50 percent and Pakistan at 40 percent which puts Sri Lanka at a tremendous advantage in human resources. English has been a constraint but if we look at the Internet and the languages in the world, the English-speaking population in the world is less than 10 percent.

Don't think language is a barrier. What indeed would be a barrier is for governments not to create the enabling environment.

What about the lack of financial resources to take IT to rural communities?

The government should view information technology as a foundation that cuts across all sectors of the economy and connects up these sectors … be it economic, health, finance, business, etc.

Most people see IT as just a computer … not as a foundation for development.

There is a huge digital divide in Sri Lanka. Our technology is essentially Colombo centric. Just like the Mahaweli flowed to most parts of the country, we need knowledge and information to flow to at all parts of the country.

How do you convince rural communities that a computer is useful?

Coco farmers in the Ivory Coast go to the local community centre where there is a computer and check the prices. They know today's prices. Intermediation is reduced and the middleman is eliminated. In Andhra Pradesh there are similar interventions. I was impressed with the level of IT literacy in some schools here. The modern situation is where learning takes place regardless of the classroom. There are no boundaries to learning. It is a virtual classroom.

In China, there is an amazing development in IT. The Chinese leadership have decided the way to reach children is through the electronic media.

I went to China to organise a programme for computing and distance learning to far flung areas in the country. In Andhra Pradesh, citizen services have been organised where citizens are able to do their business through IT with the central government. It may be highly unlikely to have something similar in Sri Lanka given the kind of bureaucracy here. But it is happening in neighbouring India.

That enables the citizen to interact with the government and make the government accountable. Take the issue of tenders. There is a lot of influence. If you have electronic tendering and access to information on tenders, there is transparency and the power play that intermediaries get into and corruption is eliminated to some extent.

Most countries are now into electronic tendering.

If Sri Lanka wants to get into IT-enabled development, government servants need to be aware of the power and advantages of IT. Teachers also need to know the power of the computer and encourage their students.

You need infrastructure to take IT to the countryside but you also have some infrastructure. Sri Lanka has post offices all over the country and each has a telephone. Have a computer in each post office.

If you want growth and equity in Sri Lanka combined with peace, connectivity is essential. Because we are in a global market products have to be of a high quality.

The entire revival of the economy is productivity-based. Investors will not come to Sri Lanka because of tax breaks. Production needs to be nimble and human resources should be competent. It is only then that Sri Lanka would become competitive.

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