“One could make this argument [with TRAI]“, says my friend Dr Arun Mehta, “that the people who need it most are being denied mobile phone value added services.” We have been discussing, on the India-GII mail list, the enabling of money transfers through mobile devices.

But TRAI cannot act in this matter, unfortunately, and that’s to do with the implementation of the capital system (not political, I mean the nuts and bolts of the system). This blogpost looks at why, but (since it is difficult to shut me up once I have got started) it goes further, to chalking out a scenario where virtual cash rules.
In order to maintain the economic/fiscal situation, the government mandates RBI to make the rules. RBI in turn authorises two kinds of entities, [specific] banking and non-banking financial institutions, to handle financial transactions. Banking, in this context, is primarily retail banking. Any transaction that does not involve either of these kinds of entities is a cash transaction, unrecorded and not contributing to estimates/measures of the financial health of the economy.

As with any other kind of structures we create, the power implicit in these structures means that they act in accordance with the holding and exercise of power itself, rather than for their intended purpose. Meaning, of course they achieve their purpose as well, but they tend to do so only to the extent they consolidate or validate their power.

Now, virtual cash of the kind discussed here, transacted through a system entirely contained within the mobile network, is currently considered a transaction of the second kind, unless a linkage is built into the existing banking/non-banking [but the non-banking FIs are prima facie not authorised to handle retail banking, remember] network.

Is there any reason to continue with the existing regime? Well, the checks and balances built into the banking system have been built for a purpose, that of protecting the financial system. This works pretty well, as we have seen during bank collapses, when the larger system has not failed. These checks and balances are not at all convenient for a telco, which has no reason in particular to safeguard public money (ie money belonging to someone else, not invested in the company itself).

Telcos and their network operations are governed by the IT&T ministry, whereas banks are managed [largely] by the Finance ministry. This structure, in the Indian context, pretty well seals off the possibility of any chunk of the business moving away lock, stock and barrel from the FM [which has, by framing the rules about bank-telco cooperation, ensured they are kept in the picture].

So that pretty well answers Arun’s query. But is the real question answered, and why should we even care?

Our conversation on India-GII began when someone made the observation that the reach of the telco network is already significantly larger than that of the banking network. Not just the reach, but the quality of that reach, ought to indicate that the time is ripe for positive change. The penetration of mobile connectivity to poorer and more non-urban people is a reality, intuited from the fact that the installed base of telephones has already gone up too high, it is beyond the possibility that only the urban elite have, exclusively, bought up all the phones in the market.

Why should the economy seek to restrict those who are authorised to handle money? Why not throw open the doors to all and sundry to handle banking [retail banking]?

Oddly enough, (in my more cynical moments, I may think, not at all oddly) the answer to this question lies in greed, and power.

Not individual greed, and not individual power, but the dog-in-the-manger attitude of vested interests.

Historically, the government’s planning of public expenditures has been based on revenues from direct and indirect taxation. The former depends on the generation of income, whereas the latter is merely skimmed off from different kinds of transactions.

The former kind of taxation historically did not pay for itself until the economy took off (the point of inflexion was about 2-3 years ago, when the income tax department actually turned net positive in direct taxation. I wonder if it has also succeeded in recovering its losses accumulated over the past 60 years). As the economy keeps growing, the numbers of people contributing direct taxes will carry on increasing, hence also the collection.

However, they will also be carrying out more transactions, hence collections of indirect taxes will also keep climbing. In fact, this kind of economy is fueled by the creation of demand, so this is axiomatic.

Naturally, there is a significant amount of rivalry and one-upmanship between collectors of direct and indirect taxes. No way the direct tax folks are going to give up their noble heritage (well, it became noble only a couple of years back, when they began to pay their own way, but never mind). No way they are going to allow the suggestion at the end of this post to be institutionalised. None at all - unless public pressure brings about such a situation.

What has queered the pitch for such ideas to gain acceptance in the past is the fact that there is no physical aspect to mobile cash (or any other kind of smart cash). Fear of the unknown, and (lest you think I am totally naive) the need for some people to constantly generate unrecorded transactions. Since such people prominently include politicians, the way ahead is not all that smooth.

It is actually very possible to create a direct link between any smart cash transaction and the person to whom the cash device is issued. This is convenient for the collection of direct taxes, since the accumulated differences between a person’s (a taxable person) purchases and sales transactions is income.

It has no impact on the collection of indirect taxes, because there is no reason to believe that the appearance of cash convenience is going to increase the amount of wealth in the economy by itself.

One of the big problems with indirect cash collection is the fact that there is no way to automate the recording of every cash transaction. It needs the voluntary compliance of both buyer and seller, neither of whom, given the presence of direct taxes, is particularly interested. With non-electronic systems, it is extremely difficult to persuade people to overcome their reluctance to document their transactions, when this almost certainly means that some of the amount will be skimmed off by taxes.

With electronic systems, it is easy to build in some incentive or disincentive, say a minimum deduction on every transaction between non-person entities, that encourages people to correctly register the details of the transaction. Without this detail, only small transactions will be allowed (and a single device will have a limit of successive small transactions) between persons, and none at all between non-person entities.

This will push up collections on the indirect revenue front to near 100% (I do concede that there will be some smart cookies around who can subvert the best of the best), and obviate the need to collect direct taxes completely. Since the collection of indirect taxes is also automated, the need for managing the physical aspect of collections will be considerably reduced (oops! there went a lot of government jobs!).

Continuing the regime of physical money, when electronic alternatives exist, is therefore anti-economy - anti-national, if you prefer, although that doesn’t attract me as much, as an argument, since I have little desire to follow in Mr Hitler’s footsteps.

Let us turn this upside down.

While it is very convenient and definitely more equitable to use cash in place of barter, there is no particular reason for that cash to be in the form of currency notes or coinage. Such material matters are a function of technology, and metal or paper (plastic fibers, mostly, these days) is all we had as a [secure] means of exchange until the development of cheap flash memory.

What if we trashed the idea of paper and metal currency, and switched over to virtual money?

It would be quite simple to make it available everywhere, smart devices (starting with smartcards and moving up in complexity from there), together with ubiquitous readers in the kinds of shapes and sizes that shops need (in fact, ‘exchange’ could be a microbusiness in itself, just as mobile handsets found a valuable secondary use as public call booths).

Why isn’t it happening already? Every effort by the government, in recent times, has been to try and link smart communication devices to specific beings (I mean here in India). Aside from the threat of conspiracy to commit terrorism, there really is no reason to link phones to people. Mobile phones are sold in many countries without any such linkage (in Europe, I know for sure). Of course, mobile phones aren’t the only purveyors of smart cash, but they are already here, so it makes sense to liberalise their ownership wherever possible.

In fact, other issuers of virtual money, such as stores with special value cards, do it as a kind of loyalty management program, strategies to track customer preferences, so they have no interest in supporting the unlinkage of money and individuals.

Current cash has no such linkage, and is handed about freely, without any possibility of tracking (until the sums get large, for which every bank is mandated to report cash deposits and withdrawals above Rs 20,000). As long as the cash stays outside the system, it remains untraceable.

But cash outside the system is of no use to an economy, which is why India’s large black economy, variously estimated to range between 60 and 100% of the recorded economy, is of no use when judging India’s economic size in comparison with other major economic centers. Therefore every effort should be made to bring cash (and cash transactions) into the system. Nuisances like additional tracking and people-linking add - artificially - friction to the flow of money. When friction designed for large transactions is added to small transactions, such transactions are discouraged, and their volume, and therefore value too, remains nothing to write home about.

In simple terms, the poor remain poor and out of the system, the rich remain unaffected (and in fact, are so brainwashed into the sanctity of cash, that few people seem to think about the means of it). Bringing the poor into the economic system remains at the very core of the global development paradigm, and this is stymied by current fiscal structures.

Now, if the structures are to change, we need (doubtless more than this shortlist, but it’s a fairly complete starting point):

* New banking entities enabled, who can use ICT exclusively (which would truly add meaning to the proud banner “we have no branches”) for managing cash transactions (it would include issuers of standalone cash cards, telcos and oil companies),
* Abolition of personal income tax (and as a corollary, dismantling direct tax entirely), with harmonisation of indirect tax rates to compensate in the short term for the loss of direct tax collection,
* Design and popularisation of smart cash readers and exchange devices, featuring simple commandsets that enable cash transfers to link individually with particular exchanges of goods and services, and automated deduction of indirect (transaction) taxes at source,
* Linking electronic transactions together in a national Economy database (with transactions made between individuals anonymously lumped into one miscellaneous category).

I think it is important to keep cash the way it is today, anonymous, because removing the stigma of economic crimes from cash transactions immediately saves the country the most significant source of friction in slowing the velocity of money. While the size of the economy is doubtless important at some level (the per capita size, naturally, but even the overall size really pumps up the testosterone of some people who, apparently, matter), the health of the economy is directly related on the velocity of money within the system.

Now, when cash dominates a system uncontrollably, we have a situation called inflation. With current inflation rates in India hitting 12%, anything hinting of looser controls will naturally be dumped without so much as a how-de-do.

And here’s the value of smart cash - it is too smart to get added anonymously into the system, it won’t allow clever cheats to ‘forge’ money into the system. The less time (and money) wasted on tracking every person transacting and generally being paid-up members of the economy, the more intelligence can be built into avoiding abuse and forgery.

It is rather tiresome to me, to find investigative forces (police etc) seeking ways to increase the amount of citizen surveillance in form or another, on the grounds of national security/terrorism. But it really insults my intelligence when I find it being justified on the grounds of revenue collection.

Guaranteeing free citizens the freedom to do business and communicate effectively, is fundamentally at the core of democracy. We need the maturity to recognise this at the national level, to demonstrate the value of freedom, in a world that seems to have lost track of this goal.

An interesting new study has kicked off in Belfast, Ireland, says this news item. Under the broad aegis of the Queen’s College project called SEMAINE, SAL, the Sensitive Artificial Listener, will be designed to sense the unspoken (ie non-verbal) signals that characterise what most humans use whilst communicating. I haven’t found out just what the longer acronym means yet, but it possibly derives from ‘SEnsory MAchine Interaction Network on Emotion’, since its earlier counterpart HUMAINE, led by the same Belfast researcher, apparently means ‘HUman MAchine Interaction Network on Emotion’.

The news appears in another magazine also, curiously similar, veritably identical in fact. What does that say about human communication, eh?However, I didn’t write this only to snipe at someone’s press release, regurgitated in different magazines. I can say this with a straight face, since I have already done my sniping in the previous paragraph.

What I am concerned about are the assumptions inherent in the statement of direction for SAL, as expressed by its leader. To whit: “A basic feature of human communication is that it is coloured by emotion. When we talk to another person, the words are carried on an undercurrent of signs that show them what attracts us, what bores us and so on. The fact that computers do not currently do this is one of the main reasons why communicating with them is so unlike interacting with a human. It is also one of the reasons we can find them so frustrating.”

Take a look at the picture embedded in both the magazine items. I mean, look at the young lady - not the one smiling at the wall, that’s one of the researchers, but the rather frustrated looking GRETA. Seems a bit of a two-dimensional creature, even though she apparently lacks the other attributes of her paparazzi-attracting counterparts, or even Ananova.

Why do I find the research statement questionable? It seems very reasonable, and obvious, and I must admit, that I would have nothing but admiration to express, were this me a couple of years back. But we live and learn, apparently, notwithstanding nasty comments from the wings, stage left.

One of the things that led me to think some more about communication is this statement from an extraordinary young lady, Amanda Baggs. She is autistic, and although we haven’t met, I would guess fairly severely, in a clinical sort of way. She can’t speak, and needs a special computer interface to make words, which the computer can then speak. She lives on her own, but in an assisted community building, designed for the elderly, because she needs some help to cope with mundane human needs.

Still, the video in the link above was made by her, working on her own. It is her own communication, as much as anything humans do can be their own, and perhaps more than this blogpost is my own. She makes a very powerful statement, but one that is strikingly familiar to many people from the Indian subcontinent. Not that I feel in any way that the familiarity is exclusive to us subcontinentals, but it strikes a chord quite resoundingly.

As she expresses, her normal communication is with the world around her, by sound, touch, colour, and many other senses. She finds it hard to limit her sense of communication to the merely verbal. Even the “undercurrent of signs”, quoted above, are but a fraction of her needs, and are indeed, a different subset. Many of those signs are not useful to her, either for ‘listening’ or ’speaking’.

What use is a mere verbal inflection, for instance, to someone who has incredibly sensitive hearing, and perfect pitch, to boot, yet cannot speak?

She takes it further: what is the use of merely communicating with humans, when she has a whole world to communicate with, to enjoy communicating with, and to need communicating with?

Can a computer be used to deliver such a sense of communication, in an interactive manner?

I don’t see why not, as long as someone is asking the question. Is anyone waiting for the answer?

Why should we want such holistic communication? Part of the reason must surely be that many - perhaps most - young children are born with this facility, but are quickly taught to limit themselves to the kinds of communications that the parents and teachers can comprehend. Don’t fidget, don’t shout, don’t dance, don’t stick your fingers in your food/that dirt (etc, etc), da da, da da, da da, and all that jazz.

Is there a better way? Probably, and I won’t be surprised if that way can be done ‘better’, in the sense that it be done for all, not just the privileged few of the ancient ‘guru-shishya’ paradigm, by designing the right computers to be our teaching aids. “I know we’ve come a long way,” sang one my latter-day idols, but he ended that with an ominous, “where do the children play?”

A Little Energy Goes a Long Way

Somehow the concepts of ‘less is more’ and ’small is beautiful’ do not ring out loud and clear in the community networking environment. Perhaps they are just too obvious: however, I suspect that for urban-focused networks, with their routers and access points dangling from eaves and out of windows, drawing energy from house utility connections, it is really irrelevant.

In the countryside, things are different. Networks stretch across the kilometers, lonely towers in remote spots relaying signals between clusters of homes, over jungle and desert, from hilltop to distant peak and down to the shaded valley below. In this scenario, efficient power solutions mean less money spent on expensive solar power, generated locally and guarded from the depredations of monkeys and men.

Needless to say, the deliverable goes further. In older systems of information delivery, mankind sought to create efficiency by centralising content creation in one place, transmitting across the world with megawatt transmitters, pumping powerful shortwave signals across the world. What price such efficiency, focusing on the packaging till the words became meaningless, the songs capsuled till the music couldn’t be heard.

How many times have I heard techies and engineers shake their heads and mutter, “There has to be a better way“? In the world of information exchange, evolved and transforming the age-old traditions of information dissemination, we find a semantic that neatly divides the e-Generation from its elders and [not-so-?]betters.

But the issues of communication, for a country as large as India, for rural areas that, almost by definition, occupy far greater spaces than the urban, go well beyond decentralisation. Many parts of the world have extensive electricity distribution networks in place, and energy generation systems to match. Among other reasons (but this is a major one), the people who live in such places are considered advanced societies.

That leaves the rest of the world, to some extent unpowered, silent and hungry for a better way of life. Also unempowered, ruled by despots, no matter what garb they wear. To add to the fun, a debate rages in polite society on global warming, of possible human contributions to climate change. All of this directly argues against the increased use of electricity by four billion people, already left behind the ‘advancements’ of the post-industrial information age.

From Amory Lovins to RK Pachauri, scientists and technologists have counseled energy conservation rather than efficient generation as an effective means of avoiding further worsening the runaway effect of climate change. It seems hard to believe, but hardly anyone is listening.

Some examples (from India): a move to nuclear cooperation with the US, whose own nuclear power industry has been at a standstill for about 3 decades; a rush by carmakers to produce very cheap small cars, affordable to such an extent that the fuel burn will skyrocket, and most bizarre of all, a drive by the Indian I&B ministry to force small community groups - they expect 5,000 to respond within a year - to use powerful transmitters.

Since it is only the last that directly impacts communication issues, I focus here on the alternatives to power-guzzling distance transmission. According to the policy guidelines, each community (represented by an ‘accredited’ non-government organisation) may only set up a single transmitter. This sounds reasonable, until one notices that, by definition, such transmitters will be the sole alternate communication for entire small geographies.

Almost certainly (and my friend Sajan Veniyoor, currently with UNESCO and a member of the special “vetting NGOs” panel set up by the Ministry, will bear me out) this results in each applicant for a license demanding the maximum power possible. In fact, the wording of the guidelines with regard to exceptions means that some want even more powerful transmission than the maximum 100 watts.

For the People, Of consultants, By Consultants: A more perverse situation can hardly be imagined. The command areas of these new radio stations will naturally include some of the poorest of the poor areas of the country, short of water and electricity, bereft both of external guidance and access to information for self-guidance - in many cases short of food, even though our agricultural production is more than enough to go around more than once. While 100 watts does not seem like a large number, that is only the defined output power. Even the most efficient design of solid-state transmitter draws several times that amount in order to function properly. Add to that the need for a production studio, and the bill keeps totting up.

In fact, it is the size of the bill that brings in a domino effect, fountaining costs in a vicious whirl of unsustainability. Not only are 100W transmitters quite expensive, the Ministry has, in its infinite wisdom (it took an eternity to liberalise the broadcast policy to this point) prepared a secret list of pre-approved vendors for this hardware. Curiously, the agents for these vendors also (coincidence!) represent peripheral hardware needed by radio stations, and I have seen estimates adding up to Rs 2 cr for a station of this nature. What amount of this gets secreted as consulting charges is anybody’s guess.

At this point, the bill for training and maintenance hasn’t even entered the picture.

In 2002, my friend and colleague, Dr Arun Mehta, and I assisted a self-help group of women in a small village (pop 3,000) in Andhra Pradesh to set up and run their own station - at a cost of less than Rs 30,000, which included portable digital recording/editing players. The station, transmitting all of 50 mW, could be picked up throughout the village. It was shut down by the government on the grounds of being a security hazard a year later.

Around this time, a young electrical repairer in an equally remote village in Bihar set up his own transmitter, made by modifying a wireless microphone, which costs Rs 100. Adding bits and pieces as he went along, he eventually had a station with a reach of 15 km. These are the only two examples of true grassroots community media initiatives from a nation of a billion people, perhaps illustrating how a gently repressive ‘democratic’ regime can be much more corrosively effective than others, that are more infamous and far more violently anti-people.

I am sure that not every station can be set up so cheaply, nor as simply, but it just shows what can be done with a little willpower and ingenuity.

There are, of course, ways to leverage high technology in an equally innovative fashion. While simple analogue radio stations can be set up for as little as Rs 2-2,500, using 50 year old cassette tape recorder technology, they only do radio, and the opportunities for the station to earn its way are limited. The synergy comes from using digital computing technology, powered by alternate sources of energy, providing opportunities for synergies that cross over the ’silo’ mentalities of traditional managers and administrators.

Data signaling: Modern computers are designed for collaborative working, many people working on many computers that communicate with each other. Since 1995, when the International Electrical and Electronic Engineering standards body approved IEEE802.11 (since accepted as a group of standards called 802.11x), with subsets in a, b, g and n already in effect, plus a related standard 802.16 in the works, this communication has been wireless. By the beginning of this decade, the prices of the hardware made to use these standards was dropping remarkably fast, and d-i-y enthusiasts had found that the principles of effective radio technologies and techniques, honed by decades of ham radio individuals (’ham’ is the term used by amateur radio persons), worked quite well.

Substituting jerry-built dish and other sophisticated high-gain antennae for the factory made and fitted variety, they found it was possible to maintain high data throughput rates over substantial distances. In fact, the real limitation was the data packet verification protocol, where the sender dropped the signal if acknowledgments from the receiver weren’t fast and furious enough (even electromagnetic waves need a finite amount of time to travel). What this means is that radio communication between computers as far apart as 10-15 kilometers can be and is done with data throughputs of up to 11 Mbps (it works at microwave frequencies, and is therefore line-of-sight only). In contrast, data signaling using telephone modems cannot exceed 56Kbps, and those of mobile telephones do not exceed 115 Kbps, about a hundred times slower.

Higher speeds are of course possible with modern telephone systems, using pure digital signaling, and with sophisticated new mobile systems, but they rarely reach 11 Mbps. They also are highly skewed, with downloading normally set for much higher speeds than uploading, which is fine for consumer applications, but terrible for working online.

However, for audio, this hardly matters. Excellent voice modulation to digital systems needs bandwidth of only 11 Kbps, with about 44 Kbps needed for high-quality audio (ie, music, etc). A typical WLAN (wireless local area network) will therefore allow a large number of live audio exchanges simultaneously, before it begins to affect collaborative computing.

Each of the transmitters needed to achieve such superb results only draws 100 or 200 mW (different manufacturers make slightly different equipment, depending on the regulations applied in their markets, but for India, the upper limit stands at 4 W EIRP, which is a factor larger. They draw about 5 W each, which is not much at all, an energy need that can easily be met with inexpensive solar panels, or through a mix of alternate energy sources chosen from all the alternatives practical in the geophysical area. By and large, a low-power generations system tied to a storage battery does the job, providing 24×7 electrical energy.

However, since such signals need digital receivers aligned to computers in order to communicate, they are not practical by themselves for community stations that want to reach households.

The all-new, singing, dancing, hybrid micropower digital multimedia station: Instead, the data signaling should be used for micro-production centers and slave transmission centers to communicate.

A slave transmitter is nothing but a powered (the kind of setup described above works fine and is cheap enough) SBC (single board computer) with the audio output fed directly to a low-power (micropower is fine in nearly every situation) FM transmitter. If the slave needs to be placed many kilometers away from the production center (which may happen, although it is not likely), then its receiver capabilities can and probably should be enhanced with a suitable high-gain antenna pointed directly at the transmitter. Once put in place, such equipment probably needs no attention for years at a time. A micropowered transmitter linked to an SBC and power source of this nature can easily be mounted near the top of a tree in a village, and be quite inconspicuous. While ordinary FM receivers will pick up the signal reliably, such hardware is almost impossible to locate using triangulation, since the signal is so weak, and the ‘box’ so small.

The production center is actually the interesting development. While analogue productions units can be built for peanuts, the capabilities of digital audio editing are simply outstandingly superior. It will be hard to find anyone recommending analogue editing nowadays, unless budget is a severe constraint, or where government permission for a radio station is awaited and community workers want to gain experience of editing and production without risking higher investments on hardware (there are about 90 such ‘pending unlicensed’ stations in India at the moment, I understand). In short, for training and/or learning.

However, once the decision to go digital is made, the hardware part is almost deliriously simple. If the need is for live editing, it helps to have a digital mixer also, otherwise hardly any special peripheral devices are needed. The digital mixer allows a voice-over from a live microphone to be easily ‘mixed’ into the recorded broadcast signal. Of course the studio will probably need a range of recorders, microphones and archival resources, as well as a reasonably soundproof room for studio recordings. Most of this stuff can be built from second-hand hardware, and given the rate of change of digital technology, this is not a bad idea, actually.

The central, most critical, device is a computer. Given the fact that the computer is synergistically more powerful and useful when it is networked, serious thought should be given to acquiring a set of computers, rather than one only, right from the beginning. This may not be a significant advantage in advanced economies, hence one doesn’t see this kind of recommendation often, but the fact is that in rural locations in India and similar nations, this may be the first time a computer is seen at all. A network of local computers makes for a very useful cyber-center, which can be located in or near the traditional community center of the village.

A functioning cybercenter is a place that the literate can begin to communicate, whereas a functioning radio station is the starting point for the illiterate as well. Such communication can and will be multimedia in nature, with learning and production tools abounding (an amazing number of them free, as in beer, and also in usage). To some extent, even the illiterate can use multimedia tools to communicate, given sufficiently sympathetic situations. Unfortunately, there are very few examples of practising centers of this kind in India, but the famous ‘hole-in-the-wall‘ learning environments have validated the practicality of such innovations.

Here’s a (fairly accurate, actually) rough and ready roundup of costs for such a functioning media center, that will operate independently of external energy, and allow hundreds of people to acquire training in useful skills over a amazingly short period - the most important skill of all being the ability to communicate. Costs will vary of course, depending on the strengths of the nearest markets for such things.

Learning/production computers: 5 (low power computers, preferably laptops) @ Rs 25,000 each = Rs 1,25,000

Microphones, recorders etc: 5 sets @ Rs 1,000 each = Rs 5,000

Wireless networking: 5 units (assuming 5 sets of outlying clusters per station) @ Rs 10,000 each = Rs 50,000

Self-powered slave transmitters: 5 @ Rs 5,000 (3k for the board and 2k for electricity) = Rs 25,000

Additional expenses on above (assuming towers needed): 6 (one for the center) @ Rs 15,000 each = Rs 90,000

Total cost (not including transmitters and antennae, which will be built for peanuts locally) = Rs 2,95,000.
As we say in India, this is Bata pricing of less than Rs 3,00,000, which is about US$7,500 at current rates of exchange. Without towers, subtract Rs 90,000, or US$ 2,000 roughly.

This is of course, only the projected hardware cost, and there will be other expenses. However, nearly all those expenses will be necessary for running any kind of radio station. The difference is that the training imparted in this center will include so-called ‘high-end’ network management and computer maintenance, as well as low power energy generation, thus aiming to ensure the people in the region around the station will take the first steps to reducing the digital divide for themselves.

And, of course, such stations will not be free of energy generation, and will continue to contribute to energy imbalances in the atmosphere. I strongly believe that an understanding of the risks being run will inevitably be part and parcel of the learnings of such community media centers, and we will find humanity beginning to transform itself from the grassroots.

It is well-nigh impossible to reverse the slide towards a fully industrialised world. What we can do is work to ensure that future decisions and directions are made in a far more participatory fashion than possible today. In attempting to hold back the billions while a few continue to enjoy restricted access, the entire applecart will get upset, and terrible chaos prevail.

To a large extent, living in balance with nature is something that rural India has done for aeons, apparently without the need for industrialised sophistication. However, It is simply foolish to advocate some kind of noble savage environment of the pre-industrial kind. This is no longer possible, the influence of urban populations and their needs is inexorably tipping the planet as a whole. To avoid chaos, we need information understood at a much grainier level than even possible earlier. Self-sustaining community media communication centers are an integral part of achieving this goal.

Reading over my shoulder?

People who do a lot of email (I don’t do a lot, not by corporate standards, but I’m not exactly an online recluse), are increasingly concerned by the lack of privacy in this area of communication.

Some of us are keen to see the modes of communication used on the Internet become commonplace for all (hence the title of this blog, in case you just landed up here and are still wondering), and now it is necessary to study how best to handle questions of privacy, when setting up email services on wide area intranets.

Intranets are more or less the same thing as local area networks, but the term refers more to the services running on the network, rather than to its physical infrastructure. The terrific advantage of such services is that they can be set up in a manner that avoids centralised control. In fact, they need not have a centralised structure to begin with.

So what can one do with a decentralised network? The sky’s the limit, almost, and new applications and services emerge almost every day.

Here’s a brief little list: email (well, of course, that’s what this note is about), telephony, teleconferencing, videoconferencing, document sharing (documents can be text, graphic, animated, aural or video too, not to mention permutations and combinations of each of them together) and many more. Within each list item there are subdivisions in terms of user experience, for example one popular objective of videoconferencing is telemedicine.

Running such applications over an intranet is substantially different from running it over the Internet. The most significant difference is that the data traffic does not go outside the network. If the network is made up of small local networks, the traffic still remains local. This is very important, because there is no international link needed. That really cuts down on the cost of being connected, and even more substantially on the cost of exchanging data (each application involves nothing more than data exchange, at a fundamental level).

What it amounts to is communication that can be intensely meaningful, that compares in many ways with the quality of interpersonal face-to-face communication, but has the ineffable quality of remote communication that brings together people from different communities and walks of life. Seems a bit too wonderful to believe, and indeed much of this is merely science fiction, until people of goodwill and knowledge get together to make such networks come alive in all parts of our world.

The hysteria around the Internet and the very high commercial values endemic to it, tends to downplay this vital new possibility. When something is new, the first flush of interest in it is very intensely commercial, but after a while it becomes commonplace. Later, it starts evoking new possibilities that create their own commercial excitement.

Thus with telegraphy, which evolved into telephony, which evolved into the Internet. Now we have many examples of powerful intranets serving communities around the world, where communication to remote external networks, via the Internet, is secondary.

To most people, email is closely linked to the Internet, and perhaps within that, to the highly visual Web. From a technological viewpoint, however, it can work just as well, just as usefully, on local networks.

These day, governments, even democratic governments, find it very convenient to adopt intrusions into personal privacy as a matter of state policy. They lean heavily on commercial service providers to snoop on customers, an then it becomes quite interesting to see how such intrusions are avoided, as a matter of commercial policy.

A recent article by Erik Larkin in PCWorld examines the three top email service providers in the world. The purpose is to find out policies that best safeguard the personal privacy of users, who must surrender some personal rights to the provider, but do so in the hope that this will not be used against them.

The article weighs the different policies adopted by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (Hotmail), and concludes that each has its strengths and weaknesses. Google asks customers the least amount of personal information in exchange for providing a free service, but also extends users the maximum opportunity (60 days) to reconsider email deletions. Storing such information opens the company to possible revelation of such content to nationally or internationally authorised snooping, however.

As we evangelise the spread of grassroots community movements, especially in developing countries, it is important to be aware of the possibilities of future corrosive and intrusive policies by nation-states, that can serve to weaken the personal rights of community members. It is possible, and perhaps necessary, to adopt suitable precautions right from the beginning, at the stage of network planning and subsequent service planning and deployment.

India is such an interesting country, as far as the media is concerned (well, admittedly, for many more reasons, but they don’t really relate to this note). It simply explodes with publications, thousands of them in print, tens of television channels, hundreds of radio channels.Why then, is the situation so parlous as far as community media is concerned? And more to the point, how can we emerge from this morass?

All over the world, there has been a refreshing wave of positive change, as far as the media is concerned. From the 80s, pervasively ‘corporate’ media was the norm, being chronicled in later novels like Jeffrey Archer’s “The Fourth Estate”. From the days of Radio Caroline to the angst of Seattle, there has been a palpable and spontaneous outpouring of desire for media unfettered by hidden agenda.

India is such an interesting country, as far as the media is concerned (well, admittedly, for many more reasons, but they don’t really relate to this note). It simply explodes with publications, thousands of them in print, hundreds of radio and television channels. Yes, hundreds.

Radio is the odd one out, actually. The Indian government was always amazingly open to the print media, conceptually, honouring Gandhiji’s tremendous leadership and tireless writing. Much later, it repeated its proactive attitude to the revolutionary impact of television, which took only a short time to become incredibly pervasive.

While print is widely visible, it has a limited reach, since it demands literacy. Television doesn’t, but the medium is terribly expensive, and that defines its creative quality. Sadly, in a very constricted fashion.

And that leaves radio. For many decades, radio was totally controlled by the government. The manner in which this happened inevitably led to a perception that radio was a pretty big deal, but the reality was that during the same period, radio had become almost child’s play in other parts of the world.

Unlike television, terrestrial radio comes in several ‘flavours’, due to the different technologies in use. One kind is ’shortwave’ (SW), which (given enough power) can be reliably broadcast across the world. Another is ‘mediumwave’ (MW), which doesn’t go very far. Both these technologies were enthusiastically backed by the government for the decades immediately following Independence, but finally, in the ’90s, the third technology commonly in use elsewhere was activated here.

This is also a low-range solution, needing ‘line-of-sight’ for reliable reception, like MW. It is called frequency modulation, or FM, because its adaptation of audio to a radio frequency (RF) carrier wave uses that means, unlike the other two forms, which use AM, or amplitude modulation.

After trying controlled broadcasting for a few more years, in the early ’90s, leasing out shared time to private broadcasters on the government stations in a few major cities, and prompted by a Supreme Court judgment that declared the airwaves as public property, the medium was liberalised, very slowly and carefully.

It began in 2000, by empowering the Indira Gandhi National Open University, awarding them 40 licenses. It took several years for the licenses to be operationalised. Some regard this as a failure of policy, but the reality is that it merely points to the genuine difficulty of involving people who are totally unfamiliar with the media. Without involvement (the management jargon for this is ‘passion’), no venture can succeed. It doesn’t actually take advanced management thinking to realise this, although there is a lot of money floating around some highly visible management schools, for purveyors of such trivia.

In 2003, however, the government began to feel a little pressured, and opened up the sector a little more. Now, other educational institutions were also allowed to apply for their own stations. By doing so, the government got an excuse to close down the village stations that had already started work. [Disclaimer: I was personally involved, together with several other dedicated techies, in helping Mana Radio in Oravakal, a small village in Andhra, source the technology for their station]. The situation was not helped by the intense sectoral rivalry between the ministry of Communications and Information Technology, and its counterpart, the ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

However, announcing a policy and making it work are two different things. After a four-year hiatus of public denial (including several Parliamentary assertions that “the policy is successful”), punctuated by the sporadic launch of a few scattered university and school radio stations, a new policy became effective in February 2007. The government of course, in keeping with its desire to seem proactive, claims the policy was announced in November 2006, but that was when the Cabinet acquiesced with the ministry proposal, not when it was promulgated, pragmatically, with a set of rules and processes.

The situation now, September 2007, is so far from hopeful that one really must looking for viable alternatives.

First, the policy itself. In a spirit of kindness and generosity, let us simply say it is full of holes. By attempting to define technological boundaries and cheesily declare support for ‘people’s’, ‘community’, media, the process of getting and operationalising licenses has been made difficult. So much so that not a single application has yet been cleared. Insult upon injury, the government has set up a special panel to vet the organisations who claim to have community support for such stations, although no such layering exists in the clearance process for commercial and educational radio station licenses.

Then, the technology. There are so many bounds that it is easy to unwittingly slip out of consideration. Tower heights, transmitter power, and even a ‘hidden agenda’ (perhaps even the minister doesn’t know, but only a cosy little number of vendors have carte blanche, no other choice is possible).

And lastly, the funding. Again, huge complications and contradictions, with different ministries setting opposing standards. Foreign funds, local funds, revenue streams, commercial funding - a plethora of restrictions designed to ensure that this media form has as difficult a birth as possible.

With midwives like this, evolution itself stands threatened.

How about retrogression, in that case?

Simply put, when broadcasting over RF is well-nigh impossible, the options open to communities are either not to intercommunicate, or to explore broadcasting by other means. In their very new publication (Alternate Voices, Sage Publications, 2007), my friends Dr Vinod Pavarala and Kanchan Malik have explored the phenomenon of ‘narrowcasting’ in India. The experiments of Kolar (Namma Dhwani), KMVS in Kutch, DDS in Medak and communities in Jharkhand (Challa Ho Gaon Mein) show, in Vinod’s words (reported by Fred Noronha), how they had to “come up with creative ways to do audio production in the absence of the right to broadcast themselves.”

Of the four examples of sustainable community media, one (Namma Dhwani) borrowed from a technological innovation evangelised by my good friend and colleague, Dr Arun Mehta, way back in 1998. The regular radio programmes produced by the community in Kolar are transmitted to households by simple television cable as a carrier, instead of wireless broadcasting over RF. Arun had suggested that, given sufficiently low quality cable, some amount of wireless broadcasting will take place anyway under such circumstances. If exploited properly, some amount of mobile listening becomes possible.

The other community media groups either use narrowcasting, recording audio programmes to tape or CD and then playing them back to groups of people for listening and discussion, or lease/borrow airtime from local AIR stations. The former technique is actually very interesting, but it does impose a certain amount of deliberation into the radio listening paradigm. Ordinary radio is of course very liberating, in that listeners can do simple routine tasks while the radio is on, unlike television, which demands complete attention. Reading, of course, demands attention as well as literacy.

I have been researching a different innovation, that of distributed sound, something I learned about by experience while doing all this practical work in wireless. It is not only not in the textbooks, but acoustic specialists seem to hate the idea, maybe because it costs peanuts and involves no esoterics. I found that actually it is not difficult to distribute to many multiples of acoustic radiators using a single powered source device.

In a home system (or any PA system), this is normally considered a little difficult, because adding speaker units adds uncertain amounts of ‘impedance’ (electrical resistance, when the current and voltage are both fluctuating). This can mess up a power device in a major way, as it happens.

But there is a workaround, and it works quite well. This workaround is used for outdoor public functions, and PA system companies actually make readymade devices for the purpose.

What this means, in simple English, is that sound can be broadcast over wires faithfully. Of course, it may cost a little more than broadcasting wirelessly, but one thing I have learned from my years on the fringes of the IT industry is that the only thing that really matters is the total cost of ownership, never the equipment cost.

In the Indian broadcast environment, community wireless radio costs too much, because it is either entirely illegal or impossible for regulatory reasons.

Broadcasting over cable is not only legal, it is very simple. Licenses cost only Rs 100, and are issued by the local post office. There are no overwhelmingly obnoxious provisions on content, and in fact common sense should prevail.

Doing this will enable local communities to focus on the important things, namely the activities of creating content and interacting within the community.

Here’s what Vinod points out, “In order to be good citizens in democratic societies, one needs to participate in the larger democratic sphere. In terms of both information consumption and information production and transition.”

We need to critique the layers of opacity that have constrained the use of accessible community media in the past, and that purpose is being served by the forum set up by supporters of community media.

As importantly, however, we need many, many more examples of working, participatory governance, not just of the people, but by the people. Only then can it ever hope to be for the people.

At this point in time, technology is being used as a barrier to achieving such a result. It only takes a little thought to find ways to use it wisely and well, instead.

Broadband and Governance: Empowerment or Illusion?

Proponents of ICT4D, roaming the corridors of power restlessly, find reasoned arguments for the support of the rapid dissemination of broadband connectivity in India seem to bounce endlessly off the walls. In the meantime, the doors of decision makers seem ever more open to the blandishments of commercial technology providers, whose bulging balance sheets reflect their seductive views on where the demand really lies: in the ready pockets of the arrivistes.
Do alternate technologies exist in reality, and can they really provide meaningful leverage for development? Here’s a quick look at the choices for India.

Smart connectivity, a sea change from the analogue technologies ubiquitously deployed in the developed economies of the 20th century, appears to be a powerful argument for the spread of equitable governance. Proponents of these technologies argue persuasively that a “knowledge society” is one armed with more information (and by corollary, better information): better information enables better choices.

Paradoxically, despite the apparently liberalised economy now prevailing, the overwhelming thrust of technology deployments in fact continue to be ‘dumb’ solutions. Some admittedly wear a digital guise: GSM and CDMA and the newer, digitally enhanced, landline switched circuit technologies of the last decade. However, like wolves in sheep’s clothing, these solutions conceal their capacity to take more than they give: the illusion of information transformation, when the reality is barely more than a mere conveyance of ephemeral data.

All data transfers take place through centralised ’switches’, currently powerful microprocessor controlled devices demanding enormous infrastructure in terms of building and electricity to perform. Any interruption in the ability of these switches to function results in total breakdown of service. This data exchange therefore comes at a huge, yet mostly hidden, cost.

The picture of the Indian ship of state racing through the ocean of economic development, with the skyline stippled by the awesome beauty of icebergs, comes irresistibly to mind. The dependence of ordinary people on faceless and occasionally unresponsive commercial entities for basic telecommunications, representing a paradigm shift from an earlier, exceedingly inadequate but state-supported, system is clear. It was necessitated by an unfortunate belief that communication was a luxury: this fallacy is completely discredited today, with telecommunications the very backbone of grassroots-driven development.

Traditional telecommunication solutions, both landline (wired or fiber, the concept is the same) and mobile, use the principle of circuit switching. In this model, an exclusive circuit is reserved for each conversation, or exchange of data. In effect, a portion of the entire connectivity infrastructure is devoted entirely to this particular dialogue. Digital enhancements to this model enable such sophisticated features as the sharing of multiple conversations in the same space, in the form of conference calls, but each additional participant actually occupies an additional circuit.

At this point, I think it is important to note that the apparent exclusivity of the circuit by no means assures personal privacy: the nature of the solution in fact leaves immense scope for the subtle content transfer of such exchanges to third parties, with or without the knowledge or consent of the conversationalists.

This is equally true of both GSM and CDMA as well, although being digital, these technologies are inherently capable of powerful encryption. There is little doubt that both protocols are compromised by design, provided with backdoor approaches to decryption.

Quite apart from these characteristics, this kind of communication network also features the need to reserve a complete end-to-end circuit for each call. GSM and CDMA technology networks also ‘poll’ devices and switches frequently, using reserved frequencies in order to achieve this activity. These frequencies are also used for ‘handshaking’, the mutual exchange of identification needed to correctly place the call, prior to allocating the dedicated network resource needed to maintain it until conclusion.

To summarise, circuit-switched telecommunications have a history of over a century of existence, and have progressed from electromechanical, completely analogue servo-mechanised switchgear, to electronic, largely digitally operated solid-state mechanisms. They are characterised by dependence on intermediate expensive and resource-hungry devices for proper functioning of the system.

The logistics of delivering call fulfilment also demands enormous resource allocation from the network, with complete end-to-end circuits locked up exclusively for the entire duration of the call, and additional spectrum reserved for ‘handshaking’ and ‘polling’.

Interestingly, the lengthy history of this exclusively dedicated resource paradigm makes it difficult for many users in India to even conceive of alternates. However, they do exist, and have come about from the diametrically opposite direction of digital computer technology development.

While microprocessors are heavily used in modern switched circuit telecommunications, they are mainly used to control the switching function, and play little role in subsequent activity. Microprocessors have, on the other hand, been central to the development of low-cost, so-called ‘personal’ computing, systems built on relatively inexpensive general purpose computers that enable a variety of applications from games to heavy-duty scientific calculations.

At the very early stages of the development process of microcomputers, it became an obvious advantage to be able to link them together in digital networks, harnessing the power of both devices and human users to work together collaboratively. Until 1995, such networks were largely connected physically, using various sophisticated cabling techniques to enhance the quality and throughput of data interchange.

However, that year, IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the standards body for electronics, issued the 802.11 standard for wireless data networking. It had been under discussion for several years, and finally all the participating manufacturers agreed to settle on a specification that all could meet. Almost immediately, the new standard became known as Wi-Fi, a play on the acoustic home audio quality standards known colloquially as Hi-Fi.

The new standard allowed suitably equipped computers to exchange data wirelessly, using tiny RF transceivers built on circuit boards with the necessary computer serial communication interfaces. Current interfaces include fast USB; this opens innovative possibilities that are the subject of enthusiastic research and development, about which more follows.

A fundamental difference between ‘mobile’ telephony (actually, ‘cellular’ telephony is a more accurate description) and the 802.11x standards is the fact that the latter operate on the exchange of self-addressed ‘packets’ of data, rather than the exclusive switching of entire end-to-end circuits. Essentially, any slice of spectrum in any physical geographical segment of the network is only used for the time it takes to transfer a single packet from one node to the next.

The specifications were designed to enable wireless connectivity at relatively close range, mimicking LAN standards that use UTP cable, and using industry standard Internet Protocol (IP). For this reason, such wireless networks are nicknamed WLAN (wireless local area network), and offer data throughput rates that parallel those available in wired/cabled networks.

Very quickly, do-it-yourself enthusiasts found that by tweaking the hardware with improved antennae, it was very easy (and with home-built antennae, very cheap) to extend the distance between wireless points, from the original 100 meters to hundreds, then thousands of meters. While effective communications need line of sight between points (nodes), this can (and has been shown to) extend till hundreds of kilometers. Recent advances such as the USB Wi-Fi dongle have been adapted to build even more sophisticated and reliable high-gain antennae, almost literally in kitchens, using cheap and convenient kitchen gear.

Commercial hardware manufacturers also began producing devices and antennae that exploited this feature, thus adding public credibility to the development. Since the devices are commonly sold for domestic use by a multiplicity of vendors, they exploit competitive market forces, especially with regard to costs: for example, the street price of a USB 802.11 b/g mini-device (external) has dropped in price from about Rs 1,000 a year back to Rs 200 currently.

An important factor is that spectrum regulators across the world (including in India) have allowed unlicensed outdoor use of the frequency band for this purpose. Actually, the original spectrum (nominally 2.4 GHz) was unlicensed to begin with, under international agreement, as ‘junk’, or unreserved, spectrum available for domestic use in microwave ovens, cordless phones and so on, but it is important to specifically allow its unrestricted outdoor use.

Modern variations of the standard (labeled ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘g’ and the latest ‘n’, released in September 2007) use other frequencies, but the unlicensed use of such frequencies is not universal (in India, one such band, nominally called 5.1 GHz, is restricted for indoor and campus use only).

As pointed out above, the development of this ‘industry’ was shared between the corporate sector and do-it-yourself enthusiasts, with much of the fruits of research being available in the public domain. This allowed the growth of public ‘free’ networks (ie, free of proprietary access): importantly from the point of view of this article, such networks have been very crucial to the provision and sustenance of rural networks.

Perhaps the most impressive of these ‘community’ networks is in Djursland, a rural district of Denmark. As of date, some 20,000 rural homes are connected across several hundred square kilometers. This area was a dying rural farming community, where modern societal services such as telecom, health and transport were being discontinued. This situation prevailed until 2003, when the network was initiated. Some 35 commercial telecom providers had either outright refused service or proposed nonviable pricing plans at that point. The Djursland network, in contrast, is maintained and physically grown by its own community members.

In India, several scientific and technological institutions have demonstrated the practical utility of such networks, including IIT Kanpur. However, the only very large network in existence locally is the 2,000 plus nodes of the AirJaldi network run by the Tibetan Technology Center in and around Dharamsala, in Himachal. There are many other smaller networks, run by NGOs and local communities, scattered across the country.

Following the development of WLAN, commercial companies have been researching other ‘business models’ using wireless. The emerging standard, called WiMax, promises to deliver broadband across medium distances using a cellular distribution. It is currently under commercial testing in several regions, including India.

While this protocol also involves packet-switched data exchanges, all packets must be transacted through central servers rather than being self-addressed. Obviously, it is possible to rationalise some amount of packet size between the address and information components, an this account for the increased data throughput capability. However, increases in capacity in the new 802.11 ‘n’ standard makes some of this advantage moot. Cost (total cost of installation) comparisons between Wi-Fi and WiMax indicate a twenty-fold increase in the case of the latter.

To summarise, it is economically and technologically possible for communities to set up and run their own very wide area data networks, primarily using industry-standard devices sold for domestic use and thereby taking advantage of economies of scale in their manufacture and marketing. It is also possible that new commercial wireless distribution of broadband data services will become commonplace in the future.

Since the exchange of data packets is entirely digital, digitally processed functions such as audio, video and multimedia simply represent resource allocations in the total data packet interchange, and given sufficient bandwidth can be served effortlessly within and through the network. Network applications such as VoIP, videoconferencing and so on are ubiquitous, with innovative variations possible in education, healthcare and other useful socially desirable possibilities are daily transforming service deliveries in these sectors.

Importantly, the technology inherently allows users to merge relatively seamlessly between data (common) and dedicated content streams such as telephony and television. This means that it is possible, in theory, to substitute traditional content access technologies with wireless data networks. Of course, in the interest of efficiency and minimising gross network utilisation, some applications, such as access to archives, are better run from servers that are deliberately kept as local as possible.

As it happens, such access is interestingly different, conceptually, from their parallels in the historical telecommunication paradigm. Continuous audio and video, for instance, arise from ‘streaming’ content delivered from storage servers, just as audio and television is delivered from storage media. The fundamental difference lies in the way that the storage can be accessed, which is by deliberate selecting the preferred choice. This can be as particular as a single ‘track’, or file.

In traditional media, radio and television, this is done by ‘tuning’ the receiver to a particular station, and further ‘drill-down’ is not possible. Interactive multimedia isn’t even possible. And telephony is a completely different arena from the push media.

Naturally, this dynamic has significant (and not unexpectedly, a positive) influence and impact on the efficiency of network resource allocation and utilisation.

It is not the intention here, given limited space, to exhaustively explain these philosophical differences, that arise primarily from the technological underpinnings. The interest here is to understand the ‘business models’ that dictate how such technologies are actually deployed.

Since the traditional media are conceptually end-to-end, the infrastructure for delivery must necessarily be created in detail, from the point of content creation to the ‘last mile’ delivery to the end-user. This is not required in the case of IP based digital data transactional systems, where individual ‘lakes’ of information resources are ‘pooled’ together through interconnection.

Extraordinarily, the ‘lakes’ are actually created by the users themselves, thus transforming the ‘last mile’ into the ‘first mile’. From the developmental viewpoint (and of course, a society that is not developing is stagnating), the difference is staggering.

Do the interconnects (regional, national, international) still remain as part of the infrastructure resources that society needs to externally (ie, through complexes of public, private or joint sector services) provide?

Until the development of IP-based wireless, this was the case, but is no longer so. To a large extent, IP based (cable) networks grew out of shared infrastructure, although there has been a stream of propaganda that a single US armed forces research program was responsible for the growth of the Internet. As the popular expression goes, such statements are rather economical with the truth.

While not pretending to argue that this kind of community exercise can be repeated at the global level, at the fine-grained - and even national - level, the situation is different. Many metropolitan areas around the world are choosing to set up their own, public, networks today. The ability to attract the sort of intelligent and hardworking people who typically need access to interconnected networks far outweighs the cost of setting up and maintaining free to access wireless interconnectivity. Urban conglomerations need high value, high revenue generating citizenry, in order to offset their costs and remain good places to work and live.

Rural areas are no different, although nearly everywhere in the world, the population density needed for society to exist is far lower, and the revenue generating potential even more so. This low economic density actually discourages providers of commercial services from investing in the level of switched network resources that assure high-quality connectivity. Poor connectivity, in turn, discourages high-value citizenry from staying rural. The problem of people emigrating from rural to urban centers is huge: both areas suffer almost insoluble difficulties as a result.

As far as rural telecom goes in India, the performance of the corporate sector is almost as dismal as that of the public sector, that once held the Indian telecom service as a monopoly. Recent astounding growth levels in total telecom density, almost entirely due solely to the mobile sector, and in fact quite possibly, more than offsetting the dropout rate of the landline segment (figures on true telecom penetration are unfortunately skewed badly for reasons well known to many, although not germane to this article) are sadly confined to the urban sector.

The digital enhancements of the traditional (if that is the right word) interpersonal telecommunication media - text messaging, caller identification, etc - have opened up new possibilities for increasing their relevance to economically poor areas. These are characterised by extraordinarily low teledensity (even by Indian standards - overall density is in the low double digits, but rural density is still in single digits).

There has therefore been a frisson of recent interest in maximising the usage of such media.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine that this is nothing more than a chimera. While it is entirely true that modern smartphones, the enduser device of choice, are quite open to the development of specialised software applications, there are issues.

For instance, the operating systems used for these devices are supposed to hew to a standard. In reality, the implementations of individual manufacturers are sufficiently different that each application needs to be individually tweaked. Thus a user organisation (such as a micro-bank) is forced to buy exactly the same telephone to actualise a synergising technology deployment. Compared to parallel devices emerging from the computer sector, this is a major limitation.

The problem of connectivity is far more serious. At this point in time, only the public sector company (BSNL) has a presence in most rural areas, and it has a policy of refusing service (roaming) to other service providers. The company is subject to external ministerial supervision, and has been in the public eye for its 2 year delay in the purchase of new switchgear compatible to enhanced data services (so-called 3G equipment). The decision was finally made in September 2007 - and it was for a money-saving investment in more 2G equipment, thus effectively blocking several categories of data services for the foreseeable future.

Frankly, this would be a good thing, had the government actually followed a practice of technology neutral decision making. This turns out not to be the case. Whether it is spectrum availability, or hardware, or governance, decisions are nearly always skewed towards favouring particular technologies or vendors. In the case of telecommunications, the two are often synonymous, because commercial vendors overwhelmingly bank on technology differentiation in a complex and competitive global market.

To some extent, the situation in the personal computing sector is quite different. There are only three major varieties of operating systems, and only two vendor-specific hardware platforms on which they are deployed. Application compilation for each system is also largely a done deal.

It is true that device development in the handheld segment is not quite as far along as in the telephone segment. The proprietary environment surrounding telephony is largely responsible for this situation. Handhelds acquired acceptability simultaneously with cellular deployment. However, wireless ‘desktops’, devices that mimic the look and feel of older landline telephones, also exist, and are deployed in India within the designated Fixed Wireless Local Loop telephony license.

This year, the introduction of the Apple (a major US IT company) iPhone signals the first serious salvo in the Cold War for the handheld telecommunications device space. It also uses the proprietary Mac OS X operating system developed for personal desktop computers, but since this is built on the Mach kernel (derived from Unix, a minicomputer OS, whose functioning and enhanced features draw heavily from the Open Source and Free Software movements), it is fairly easy for ordinary people to program special applications.

The device is intended to break existing paradigms in the telecommunications space, and has already sold over 1 million pieces since its introduction in June. The company has also dropped its introductory price between $100 to $200, a staggering 40% reduction, making it exceedingly competitive with comparable devices from the telecommunication sector.

Since it is primarily a computer cum media device, with GSM telephony as a special feature, it inherently uses Wi-Fi (and Bluetooth, a very short distance wireless protocol) for connectivity.

Alternates from other vendors in the computer sector include mini-laptops, devices with screen sizes of under 15 cm (diagonally measured, the usual nomenclature) and keyboards with largish buttons. These are much lighter than typical laptops, and offer much longer battery operation, the critical factor for handheld devices. The standard laptop-sized ‘notepad’ could also become a significant device in this space, being a thin, touch-screen format, with no inconvenient bulky keyboard. However, it has not found major market acceptance so far.

To summarise, therefore, in the Indian context, rural telecommunication choices are at a cusp. Intriguingly, perhaps for the first time in the nation’s history, the choice is not between particular technologies, but rather between particular technologies and a completely hands-off, technology-neutral approach.

On the one hand, the government can continue to support individual telecom players, at least three of whom are already financial behemoths, having benefited enormously from the present licensing regime. On the other, the telecommunications sector can be opened up to community-led, grassroots driven growth, with the connectivity paradigm shifting from the view that spectrum is a scarce resource, to one where radio frequency spectrum is regarded as a true public resource, a commons, with no special reservations or allocations to vendors of either technology or devices.

The government needs to take hard realistic look at the development paradigm. Technology choices may continue to be driven from the top, but decisions that take years of deliberation (necessary partly because of their long-term implications, inherent because of the overweening responsibility, but where accountability is not a hallmark, at least not in our recent history) tend to fall short of the need.

The alternate is to trust citizens to make the best choices for themselves. Given the oft-expressed desire to create a Knowledge Society, this might be a good place to start.