India’s deep divide

With the Indian economy growing at a breaktaking speed, it’s no wonder that India’s mobile phone market is one of the fastest growing in the world. Still, as a recent story on the GTF site points out, mobile penetration in India is forecast to hit just 33% by 2011 - well below the forecasts for China (46%), Brazil (69%) and Russia (111%).

These numbers show that, once again, technology doesn’t do much to erase the huge gaps between the haves and the have-nots. These figures also show that India, despite it’s white-hot economy, will still be home to millions of people living in subsistence-level poverty in five years time. Dispursing the country’s new wealth needs to be a priority, and fast.

Many thanks, Jochen!

Nice to have fans at the European Commission. As mentioned not long ago, GTF recently published the EIU’s e-readiness rankings for 2007, which separates the digital leaders from the laggers among 69 countries worldwide.

Well, a few days ago, we heard from Jochen Jesinghaus, who works in Italy in an EC unit which specialises in the aggregation of complex indicator systems. In other words, Jochen and his colleagues transform Excel spreadsheets into something that the rest of us, including MEPs and EC bureaucrats, can easily read and interpret.

Jochen wanted our permission to weave some of his magic with our rankings, putting them into a dashboard format.

The result can be seen here, in glorious colour. Go ahead and click on your country or the countries you are interested in.  The results are dramatic. And thanks again, Jochen.

E-ready or not

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2007 e-readiness ranking is released today and it makes very interesting reading. Scandanavia’s e-powerhouse, Denmark, tops the list for the second year running while the US and Sweden tie for second place. No big surprises there.

What grabs my attention are the huge gains made by countries with governments that are leading the digitial intiative. Singapore, for example, has jumped 7 places from 13th to 6th place in this year’s ranking. Hong Kong has leapt from 10th to 4th. Taiwan puts in a similar show - vaulting from 23rd to 17th place. All of these countries are pushing e-initiatives  - from cheap broadband to e-government services and anti-cybercrime legislation.

Meanwhile the old world is showing its age. Germany has sunk 7 places to 19th on the rankings, Belgium has slipped from 17th to 20th place, Switzerland is down from 3rd to 5th place and the Netherlands at 8th place from 6th. Australia, Finland, Norway and Canada have also slipped.

 Tiny Bermuda, meanwhile, up five places to 15th, shows what a determined government can achieve when it sets its mind to something. The holiday island now outranks South Korea in terms of its e-business environment and how amenable it is to internet-based opportunities -largely to do with its ability to keep cyber-crime at bay and provide a safe, secure place for e-commerce activities.

How do you say that in Sinhala?

Our thread on e-villages in rural Asia has attracted two more comments from Sri Lanka . One of them points out that all the computers in the world won’t make Sri Lankan farmers literate in English. The answer, his web site argues, is not to bring English lessons to more Sri Lankans. This will  threaten local languages, history and culture. Instead, he says, Sinhala and Tamil need to be updated through the implementation of “character allocation tables.” 

Or perhaps IT aid programmes could include a budget for language translation software? This appears to be widely available.

We’ve also had an update from the Sri Lankan government’s side of the debate. It’s clear that English lessons are key to its push to bring IT literacy to the country. Does that need to be so? It’s certainly not the case in China.

IT happens in Mahavilachchiya

Will mobile phone networks go the way of fixed line networks? In the poorest parts of the world - where no phones exist - wireless makes a lot of sense. Take Mahavilachchiya, Sri Lanka, a village on the edge of the Vilpattu jungle. Thanks to wireless technology, it now calls itself the first model e-village in the country.    

This little miracle has happened thanks to the Horizon Lanka Foundation and Sri Lanka’s Information and Communication Technology Agency. Will other villages be so lucky? Possibly. In Nepal, a local teacher has pulled off a similar project for Yak farmers eager to keep in touch with their families while tending their herds.

For the world’s poorest, wireless makes sense. Longer term, could the same be true for the rest of us?