More than two-thirds of the villages in India have already been covered with
telephone facility.
Answers
Answer:
I was born in 1942 and raised in a poor village in one of the poorest areas of rural India, a place with kerosene lamps and no running water. In 1980, at 38, I was a U.S. citizen and a self-made telecommunications millionaire. By 1990, I was 47 years old and nearing the end of nearly a decade back in India as leader of a controversial but largely successful effort to build an Indian information industry and begin the immense task of extending digital telecommunications to every corner of my native country, even to villages like the one where I was born.
That effort persists today at an increased pace, but it remains controversial. Some of the controversy has centered on me and my methods. Most of it focuses on the efficacy and logic of bringing information technology to people who are in global terms the poorest of the poor.
Common sense and accepted thinking about economic development have long held it ridiculous to supply Third-World villages with state-of-the-art technology. What subsistence farmers need is not high-tech science and complex systems, the argument goes, but immunizations, basic literacy, disease-and drought-resistant cereals and oilseeds, simple pumps, deep-drop toilets, two-phase electrification—all the “appropriate” technologies that the unsophisticated rural poor can use and understand.