Mohan, here's an interesting on Net in India! Enjoy!!
I'm surprised to see SIFY drifting to the low 80's.
Any comments?
businessweek.com
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
BY THANE PETERSON MARCH 8, 2000
Now, India Has Another Hunger -- for the Net
Amid scenes of incredible beauty and depressing squalor, evidence of the Internet is ubiquitous. In most respects, Birender Singh, who operates bicycle rickshaw No. 84 in India's Keoladeo Ghana National Park, doesn't lead a very 21st century sort of existence. He lives in a tiny nearby village of about 100 souls that has no phone service. His marriage was arranged by his parents four years ago, when he was 21, and he gripes that he never even got to see his veiled, 14-year-old bride's face until two days after the ceremony. A diminutive 5 feet, 5 inches or so, and weighing perhaps 125 lbs. with his hiking shoes on, Singh makes his living hauling much heavier tourists such as myself around in his rickshaw, helping them catch glimpses of the hundreds of rare and beautiful birds that take refuge in the park's sanctuary. It's hardly an easy or very remunerative job by Western standards.
But for his time and place in the world, Birender Singh is as technologically resourceful and up-to-date as any dot-com entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He's already using his uncle's phone in Bharatpur, the nearest big city, to nab clients before they arrive at the park. That's how he tracked me down when I was staying with friends in New Delhi, several hours away by car.
Now, as we hike out to the back reaches of the park, where I get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see two rare Siberian Cranes (only seven are believed to still be alive worldwide), he starts quizzing me about the Internet. He pulls business cards out of his wallet -- previous clients include a professor at Arizona State University and a fashion executive in Laguna Beach, all of whom have e-mail.
His plan, he says, is to get an e-mail address himself through a friend in Bharatpur who has a computer. Then he can contact previous clients and nail down their business on return trips in advance of their arrival India. There's getting a leg up on unwired rickshaw rivals!
STAYING CONNECTED. This is just one tiny example of how the Internet is starting to wend its way into the poorest, most remote corners of the world. When I left my Evanston (Ill.) home on Feb. 15 for my first trip to India, I deliberately left my IBM ThinkPad behind. It would do me good to be out of e-mail reach for a couple of weeks, I reasoned. Little did I know that tiny Internet shops are springing up everywhere in India. I ended up checking my mail almost everywhere I went, at rates that averaged about 80 rupees, or about $2, per hour. The signs of Internet frenzy were inescapable.
This isn't to say, of course, that India is yet a technologically modern nation. With a population of around 1 billion, the average annual household income is estimated at about $1,500, and my guess is that estimate is high. Phone lines are scarce and computers even scarcer. Business Week has reported that only 4 in 1,000 citizens has computer access -- and, again, my guess is that's being optimistic.
Power outages are so common that when I had a brief chat with Rajendra Pawar, founder of the New Delhi education and software outfit NIIT, the lights went off, and he just kept on talking in pitch black, as if nothing had happened. We were still locked in eye contact when the lights came back on. No one but me even seemed to notice.
The overwhelming first impression of India, at least for me, is still of tragic, crushing poverty -- horrible packing-case slums all over New Delhi and along the road in from the airport at Bombay. When your car or taxi stops at a red light, beggars instantly spring to the windows. The same thing happens at train stations, airports, museums, and just about anywhere else where foreigners with money are forced to stop and wait. Many of the beggars are filthy waifs, or women with sickly babies on their hips. Others have been deliberately maimed -- limbs hacked off, eyes gouged out -- to elicit sympathy.
Once, a man thrust his nearly digitless hands into my cab window and pleaded for money. The cab driver made that little rocking motion with his hand when I asked if the man really had leprosy. The message: "Maybe, maybe not."
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Even the beer ads have a computer theme. "Keybored?" asks one. "Have a Kingfisher"
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But if you're attuned to it, evidence is everywhere that Internet frenzy is hitting India at about the same time and with the same force as it's sweeping across Europe. The billboards over the slums lining the road in from the Bombay airport include lots of ads for new Internet startups, in addition to pitches for Maggi Tomato Catsup, Nescaf‚, and All Clear Dandruff Shampoo. A sampling: "Budget Trading [at] www.myiris.com;" "Internet e-mail only on BPC Mobil [phones];" "www.indiamarkets.com: Double Your Profits in Half the Time;" and "Rediff.com is discount shopping online."
In the city, the distinctive red doubledecker buses are festooned with ads for everything from "automartIndia.com" to "www.capitalmarket.com." Even the beer ads have a Net theme. "Keybored?" queries a billboard on a viaduct over one of Bombay's main drags. "Have a Kingfisher," a popular Indian beer.
As in the U.S., ambitious young professionals are busy launching companies. In New Delhi, upstairs from where I was staying, my friends' landlord was making feverish preparations for the wedding of one of his sons, an elaborate ceremony that was to last a week. My friends came down after a visit to report that the landlord's youngest son was also busy with a life-changing project: "Some sort of Internet startup, very hush-hush. Can't talk about the details for another month."
BEDROOM STARTUP. Another night, I dined out with a marvelous twenty-something Indian couple. The husband, I knew, was a reporter for some U.S. trade publications, so I politely inquired of his wife if she worked. "Oh yes," she replied breezily. She had launched a startup company in a spare bedroom, a Net-based news-clipping service. But it was getting a little crowded, she complained, because she already had six employees.
Tourists, and poorer Indians, will mainly encounter this revolution in the "Internet caf‚s" that are springing up everywhere. Bridget Dewar, Hong Kong-based marketing chief for Asiamoney magazine, reported to me via e-mail about one called Indiancybercafe that she found in February while vacationing in Udaipur, a beautiful city on the south end of the state of Rajasthan. "Really excellent facilities," she wrote. "Four high-speed computers [connected to] a printer and a really friendly, knowledgeable manager who is on hand to help with any questions or technical problems. He even stopped by to ask me whether I was having any problems (which I wasn't)."
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Next to a putrefying camel by the highway, I noticed a roadside hotel -- with a Web address below its name
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Most of the Internet caf‚s I encountered, however, were filthy hole-in-the-wall shops with a dingy computer or two. I spent four hours in one awful little shop off an alley in New Delhi, typing up an interview for Business Week Online. The first 90 minutes were passed checking my e-mail -- or rather watching the shop's no-name PC chugging to reload my e-mail again and again in tired little packets of data. "75% of 58K at 615 bytes per second" had already been loaded, the computer would lie. Then, "58% of 11K at 719 bytes per second," it would lie again. It took 17 minutes to read my first two e-mails. In the meantime, a mouse (not a computer one, a real one) kept wandering in from the alley and nibbling at my right sneaker.
Still, it's this kind of computer connection that's going to make the Internet ubiquitous in India very soon. Internet shops are turning up everywhere -- in travel agencies, phone shops, hotels, and convenience stores.
I was fearing for my life at one point during the four-hour drive from Bharatpur to Jaipur. My hired car, which fortunately came with a hired driver, was barreling down the highway, weaving in and out among the incredible profusion of bikes, mopeds, camel carts, transport trucks, buses, and ox-drawn wagons, when I noticed a dead camel putrefying by the highway. The animal, still in the harness of its mutilated cart, was the obvious victim of some horrible accident. Then I spied a roadside hotel, its name newly painted on its powder blue front wall -- and underneath an address that started "www." Imagine that, I thought. Even here, there's always e-mail. I felt reassured.
SELF-TAUGHT. At $2 per hour, the price of using these Net shops has come down considerably, at least judging from the rates cited in my guidebook, which was published last year. But that's still high for most Indians. I was visiting NIIT in south New Delhi because Sugata Mitra, the company's chief scientist, is promoting an idea for installing 100,000 free, Net-connected computers in schools in India's urban slums and poor rural regions (see BW Online, 3/02/00, "A Lesson in Computer Literacy from India's Poorest Kids.") If kids are allowed to play with the computers, Mitra contends, even the worst-off and least educated among them will soon teach themselves computer literacy.
You know, judging by my brief visit, he's right. There's a hunger in this country that has nothing to do with food. I went out to take a look at a Net PC NIIT has imbedded in a cement wall separating its headquarters from the slum across the way. It was late afternoon when I was there, which meant that the kids playing on the computer were relatively affluent kids, who stop by to log onto Disney.com after school and play games.
What struck me was the eagerness with which the kids jostled one another to get a better look at the screen, to be the one to control the PC for a moment or two. The company showed me a video taken with an infrared camera hidden in a nearby tree. It showed poor slum kids at the same PC in the middle of the night, jostling just as eagerly to get at the computer, if only for just a moment.
All in all, it was an extraordinary trip. You should consider a visit to India next winter, when summer's heat has died down again. If you want to visit the Taj Mahal, a friend of mine in Chicago recommends a guide in Agra named Rajiv Saxena. He's not only fluent in English, like most educated Indians, but also speaks German well. You could try phoning, but it's probably easier to just e-mail. He's at rajvsaxn@nde.vsnl.net.in.
World traveler Peterson, former Frankfurt bureau chief for Business Week, is a contributing editor for BW Online
EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT |
