[Assam] Northeast Echoes-PATRICIA MUKHIM ( The Telegraph, Monday, September1, 2008 )

[Buljit Buragohain]

Northeast Echoes

PATRICIA MUKHIM 





 

DoNER minister Mani Shankar Aiyar speaks at NICT 2008 in Guwahati on Friday. Picture by Eastern Projections 
Class & mental divide 
The fourth edition of the annual Northeast Information and Communication Technology (NICT) conference organised by The Telegraph concluded in Guwahati recently. In these four years much has happened in the field of information technology (IT). 
  
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the IT giant, has begun operations through IIT Guwahati. Statistically, Assam has made great strides in taking IT to the rural populace through the setting up of over 4,000 rural IT hubs in the form of community service centres which earlier went by the nomenclature of community information centres and did not actually take off at the desired tempo. 
  
Information technology, however, still gives an inferiority complex to a lot of people who cannot converse in the set language of the trade and juggle with its myriad jargons. Think of an illiterate farmer in the village. What could IT mean to her if it does not improve her livelihood? This is where IT creates a huge class divide. Moreover, IT professionals belong to an exclusive club. 
Like academics, they believe that the more convoluted their language, the better they sound. Technical language has, in fact, become the singlemost difficult barrier between people. So, those who do not understand these common professional cues are immediately excluded from the conversation and are willy-nilly eliminated from the radar of the computer savvy IT elite. 
  

Aiyarspeak 
  
It is not without reason that the special guest at one of the biggest ICT powwows in the Northeast, Mani Shankar Aiyar, spoke of the “elitist” mindset of the IT industry. As panchayati raj minister, Aiyar would be more than clued in to the fact that IT, which is termed as a revolution by the educated, urban elite of the Indian populace, has failed to make any impact on the last woman in the village. 
  
There are many hurdles that stand between rural India and the IT sector. First, literacy is still very low. But even the literate have little access to computer education. 
  
Secondly, computers are still beyond the reach of about 95 per cent of the Indian population. Mobile telephony or the use of ATM swipe card is by no means an indicator or a qualification of having joined the IT league. 
If large swathes of India are still unaffected by the IT revolution, then the Northeast can be said to be way behind the finishing line. 
  
This region has been afflicted for decades by what psychologists call the deficiency motivation syndrome. We have become experts in defining our victim-hood. We have set goals that we seldom reach. And this is because the processes of development have hardly ever been documented. 

No fault-finding 
  
There is a feeling that we are reinventing the wheel every time. Each seminar and workshop is a repetition of what India has not done rather than what India has facilitated, but we have messed up. 
  
Maybe if we prefaced our seminars by a cautionary phrase that fault-finding is not permitted, then we might be forced to search our souls and find answers to problems that confront us. Indeed the way forward is to move from deficiency motivation to growth motivation. We need IT to promote this engine of progress. But we need IT professionals of a different breed and a different mindset. 
  
They must be the types who see opportunities in starting rural BPOs and taking IT to the village and the farming population. These must be home-grown IT professionals who will not make the kind of demands that IT honchos like Narayanmurthy of Infosys fame have done, namely a five-star hotel and a state-of-the-art infrastructure. 
  
While this sort of high-profile IT infrastructure is something we can aspire to, it is important that we move forward with what we have rather than prepare for the big launch of Infosys. 
  
Assam’s IT minister Himanta Biswa Sarma made an excellent observation during his speech at the ICT meet. He said Assam would stop begging IT companies to come to the state. These companies, he said, operate on the basis of what makes good economic sense. 
  
Once their balance sheet dictates that it makes sense for them to kickstart business in the Northeast they will do it with or without invitation. Sarma also highlighted that the North East Industrial Investment Promotion Policy (NEIIPP), 2007, offers incredible sops ranging from capital investment subsidy, power and transport subsidy and income tax exemptions. If these do not attract investors then he wondered what else would. 
  
But the street-smart Biswa Sarma also saw the flip side of the IT industry. He said Assam should not merely be setting up call centres but must build the manpower resource to develop appropriate software and hardware and for that engineering colleges are imperative. 
  

Global mindset 
  
Assam proposes to set up 15 engineering colleges over the next four years and would have 20 to 25 engineering colleges by 2012. Listening to Biswa Sarma, anyone coming from the other states of this region would develop an inferiority complex. Meghalaya does not have a single engineering college. Nor do Mizoram and Nagaland. So where will our IT dreams take us? Is it enough to have back offices of multinational IT giants? Well, maybe this is one small step in that giant stride. 
  
However, it is a well established fact that the first and second IT waves have come and gone without any benefits accruing to the Northeast primarily because we are not ready for the gold rush. 
  
But was Karnataka ready when the Silicon-valley experience touched its grounds? Karnataka was not ready and waiting. It still is not ready. What it has perhaps is the global mindset which comes from education and the growth motivation of its citizens. 
  
The Northeast, on the other hand, is a paradox. Its governments have used policy models that do not stress knowledge utilisation. 
The models adopted by governments here are the “muddle through model“ and the “crises response model” both of which are fuelled by the circumstances of unrest prevailing here. 
  
There is need to change tack at this juncture. Knowledge utilisation requires a voracious appetite for education. 
  
And sound education for all round social and professional development is what motivates growth. One thing that the information technology revolution has done is to create job markets for anyone who has the skill and fits the bill. Reservation is a word alien to the IT sector. It is a cut-throat business where people must perform or perish. 
  
This sort of do-or-die attitude is yet to be inculcated in our youth. These are the harsh divides that need to be bridged. 
  
(The author can be contacted at patricia17 at rediffmail.com) 
  
 ( The Telegraph,Monday,September1,2008 ) 
  
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080901/jsp/northeast/story_9767240.jsp 



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