Very few households digitally connected in India, President

New Delhi, Dec 14 (UNI) India is lagging far behind in Asia in digital connectivity index compared to 80 to 60 per cent in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, President A P J Abdul Kalam today said.

Four of the top ten broadband economies of the world are in Asia.

South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore have the distinction of achieving highest broadband household digital connectivity index of 80 to 60 per cent.

India is lagging far behind with very few households being digitally connected. It appears that the above four Asian countries have excelled and grown faster than the rest of the world because of significant utilisation of local languages in the generation of software and content on the internet.

Large scale utilisation of local languages will enable people to create content with ease and authenticity which, when shared, will have a positive effect in the growth of economy through the benefits of telecom revolution and related internet and multimedia tools.

''The Indian e-Governance and e-Commerce initiatives should become the drivers for the rural population to seek information in their local language and thus give a push to telecom penetration in the rural areas'' the President said at his inaugural speech at ''India Telecom 2006 Mapping the Road Ahead''.

The bandwidth is the demolisher of imbalances and a great leveler in the knowledge society. Making the bandwidth available is like the Government laying the roads. Movement of materials through these roads creates wealth in the industrial economy and the government recovers more than the investment on the roads by way taxes and enhanced prosperity of its people.

In the modern digital economy driven by knowledge products, bits and bytes traverse the network and create wealth and this will recover the cost of investments in the bandwidth. Thus a singular action of making the bandwidth available will bridge the perceived divide.

The free bandwidth will make an economic sense ''if we cost the services offered using the bandwidth. We have the fiber infrastructure ready up to block level, last mile wireless technologies are being implemented and the VSAT technologies for the unreachable are in place in the form of EDUSAT and other Satellite services. Hence, we are well on our path to bridge the gap,'' said the President.

The more educated one is, the less bandwidth would be used for communication.

''Many of us may communicate very easily by an asynchronous text based email system, which requires the least bandwidth. Lesser endowed persons may require slightly higher bandwidth like for example synchronous voice communication. A person who is less informed may require the high bandwidth video conferencing system.

In case, we are trying to be inclusive, making the bandwidth available on demand in an unhindered way to the rural areas would be the first action required,'' he said.

Data traffic will soon exceed voice traffic, so much so that voice and data would merge to such an extent that independent reference to voice as a communication mode may not be relevant.

India and its people should leap frog, jumping to the most efficient, most cost effective and most useful tools and technologies at the earliest opportunity.

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