Mobiles can save Indian women

Women at the bottom of the pyramid need health, education and empowerment information, but they are likely to need subsidized service, voice-based apps and training in using VAS

Digital World | Osama Manzar

India ranks 122 out of 138 nations in the United Nations Development Programme’s gender equality index—and for good reason. Only 65% of Indian women are literate, compared with nearly 83% men. A third of the married Indian women are underweight. Maternal mortality rate is high (450 per 100,000 live births) in part due to inadequate antenatal care coverage. Women now account for 39% of HIV infections, and awareness of prevention and treatment still lags.

Can any technological or communication tool help change the scenario? The answer is the mobile phone. Mobiles are cheap, oral—they do not require users to be literate—and are already in the hands of more than 300 million Indian women.

“Women in India suffer from pervasive inequality and have distinct health, education, and economic needs not being addressed by current institutions and media,” says a research report prepared by Vital Wave Consulting for Vodafone India Foundation with which we work closely. “Mobile phones represent the largest opportunity to address these needs, with 225 million women owning phones and the female VAS (value-added services) market worth $1 billion and growing.”

These numbers are from the first quarter of 2011. There are far more women with access to mobile phones than to the Internet (60 million active women Internet users) or landline phones (50 million women with landline access).

Vital Wave further elaborates: “Female mobile phone owners generally prefer voice and use SMS less frequently than their male counterparts, but female subscribers already send more than 6.8 billion SMS per month.”

An average woman mobile subscriber in India sends 30 SMSes per month, uses voice service of 300 minutes per month and about 40% of women subscribers have found employment opportunities with their mobile phones. According to Vital Wave, “The most basic aspects of mobile phone ownership are already empowering Indian women, with over 90% saying they feel safer and more connected just owning a phone.”

Thankfully, we have several torch bearers to show us how mobiles are already being used in the hinterland for empowering women and, in effect, achieving gender equality with equitable economic opportunity. Barefoot College at Ajmer in Rajasthan has been using mobiles along with community radio to serve 25,000 women from 200 villages in training, livelihood programmes and health services—50% of these women have their own mobiles that they are using to interact and convert opportunities into economic gains. Members of the well-known organisation SEWA (Self Employed Women Association) in Gujarat use voice-based system and symbol-based SMS system providing them access to market information.

India’s number one VAS provider, IMIMobile, realizing the scale of women mobile subscribers, has created a suite of services targeting women, including health information that is specifically tailored for women and children’s health issues and information related to career opportunities, including entertainment. Mobile operator Uninor partnered with the department of telecommunication to launch the Sanchar Shakti voice-based service for women to deliver information, expert advice and news alerts on health, education, self employment and finance, in cooperation with self help groups (SHGs), NGOs, and educational institutions.

Catholic Relief Services and Dimagi are using mobile phones to enable Asha workers to collect information on pregnant women and their communities and improve coverage of pre-natal and neo-natal services and convey information on healthy practices directly to expecting mothers and their families. The Commonwealth of Learning and the Vidiyal SHG created 500 audio messages on a variety of topics that were sent to women on a daily basis to promote lifelong learning, with the specific aim of supporting their businesses. In Jeend in Haryana, Kisan Sanchar has been serving women farmers group through mobile for agriculture extension services and they use voice-based as well as SMS-based platform to reach out. In Konark in Orissa, Young India has achieved 100% attendance of girl students in Gop Block schools through the integrated use of Mobile and community radio.

These are some examples we have received in the nomination process for Women & Innovation in Mobile Award, under which funding will be provided to the three best initiatives with support and mentoring for two years. The award is supported by the Vodafone Foundation and is being conducted under the framework of Manthan Awards. What we need is extensive scaling up of these projects, nationwide adoption by government and private sector and active participation of the social institutions to integrate mobile into their daily operations across all sectors targeting women.

Women at the bottom of the pyramid need health, education and empowerment information, but they are likely to need subsidized service, voice-based apps and training in using VAS, because 25 million mobile phone owners belong to the poorest income brackets and all use low-cost basic handsets. Similarly, we can target women at home, schools and colleges, offices and agricultural fields. Some 60% of all women in rural areas already own mobiles, but almost all of them are low-cost phones. Half of all women who live in homes, irrespective of urban or rural settings, own mobile phones. Also, 80% of all women in colleges and schools use mobile phones and 50% of all women in jobs in urban areas own smartphones and spend Rs.3,000 per month on usage. Let me know how we can be of any help to accelerate your idea to give a better life to the better halves of India.

Osama Manzar is founder and director of Digital Empowerment Foundation and chairman of the Manthan award. He is also a member of the Working Group for Internet Governance Forum at the ministry of communications and information technology. Tweet him @osamamanzar

http://www.livemint.com/2011/10/30205407/Mobiles-can-save-India8217s.html?h=B

Ubiquitous Pakistan

By Muhammad Ali Siddiqi

“KARACHI, India” was a talking point and a source of tremendous national hurt and humiliation when my generation was at school — letters written by foreigners often carried an address which ended with “Karachi, India”.

The government of the day would come under harsh attack for not making the world know that Karachi was in Pakistan and not India. Hearts choked and people hit the ceiling when an address ended with “Karachi, Pakistan, India”. Those were heady days, and we lived under the spell of the euphoria over Pakistan’s emergence. Those who had opposed
Pakistan had no face to show and were hiding in rat holes.

Look, patriots would say, the country was two and a half years old, and the world still thought Pakistan was in India. What was the government doing? Harsh words for the government were rare. A British paper, taking note of this controversy, added fuel to the fire by remarking that “Pakistan will always remain part of India”. In spite of Radcliffe and Mountbatten, Britain still had some admirers, thanks to Claude Auchinleck and Beverly Nichols. But even they vowed never to purchase a Morris minor and to remain jobless rather than work in a British firm, of which many were household names with the middle class — Burmah Shell, Glaxo, BOAC, Standard and Chartered, Mackinnon Mackenzie, etc

A forceful pain provider every year was the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London. Pakistan and India were the only non-white members of the Commonwealth (CW) and occupied the place of pride, because the rest of Afro-Asia was still groaning under colonialism.

In the photograph, the British prime minister sat to the monarch’s right; Nehru to the left. Liaquat Ali Khan was seated — or as we believed was humiliated and made to sit — next to the British prime minister. This was a tremendous source of national grief. Why wasn’t Liaquat next to the monarch? Shouldn’t we quit the Commonwealth? This was a matter of national honour.

Much later, when Pakistan had come of age, Bhutto in the 1960s made the issue clear. Neither Pakistan nor India would ever quit the CW, because the withdrawal by one would swing the CW members’ sympathies to the other. So, that I suppose continues to be the guiding philosophy in a zero-sum game even today when the CW membership has gone up to 54.

The shift from the British-centric attitude came with the advent of Uncle Sam on the Pakistani scene. A major event was the ‘Thank You America’ signs dangling from the camels’ necks as the carts carried American wheat from the harbour through Bunder Road, Karachi’s only artery then. Only the leftist elements — more powerful and well organised than they should have been in Pakistan’s formative years — made an issue of it. It was a humiliation, they insisted. For the majority, however, the American gesture of rushing wheat to Pakistan in a food-deficit year was timely and friendly. Anti-Americanism was decades away.

Gradually, the world started waking up to the reality of Pakistan, less from its membership of the US-led military pacts and more because — in spite of being America’s most ‘allied ally’ — it drew closer to China, especially after the India-China war. The 1965 war with India, the burning of the American embassy in November 1979 for no fault of America’s, Abdus Salam winning the Nobel prize in physics, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US-led jihad that once again made Pakistan America’s blue-eyed boy, and the entry of words ‘jihad’ and ‘mujahideen’ in popular lexicon and media jargon turned the world focus on Pakistan.

There were three eventful decades — pictures in the world media about the obscenity that was whipping by Zia’s lash men, Pakistan’s monopoly of the world squash championship — thanks to icons Jahangir and Jansher — hockey’s Olympic, World and Asian titles coming to Pakistan; Imran Khan holding the cricket World Cup, a charismatic Pakistani becoming the Islamic world’s first woman prime minister, Pakistan going nuclear, 9/11, the Taliban, the flames of the Marriott shooting into Islamabad’s night sky in Ramazan, the Bush-Mush honeymoon, BB’s return and assassination, the black coats, 7/7, Mumbai, the drones, the earthquake, the flood, Raymond Davis, Bin Laden-
Abbottabad, ‘safe havens’, Mike Mullen and the ISI. Well, it is Pakistan and Pakistan on the world’s front pages and TV screens. Even the New York Times and Washington Post can’t help it — for the wrong reasons.

Tossing between hope and despair, the Pakistani people’s world is a mix of triumphs and tragedies — accolades mixed with slurs; insinuations tempered with hidden admiration; bombed-out mosques and schools; a beautiful face smeared with blood and soot and contorted by pain, like Afia’s; an unceasing struggle between harsh realities and self-delusions; a nation’s soul crying and craving for normality.

Nevertheless, Pakistan has arrived. Nobody writes, “Karachi, India” anymore, nor does anybody care which side of Elizabeth a prime minister sits; BOAC and Burmah Shell have been replaced by Citibank and KFC; and the closure of the News of the World has been attributed to divine wrath, some solace for our match fixers.

World powers continue to come to Pakistan, focus on it, help it, abuse it, and betray it (we Pakistanis are very fond of being betrayed, because we ourselves do not hesitate to betray). As defined by Paul Kennedy, Robert Case and Emily Hill in The Pivotal States: Policy in Developing World, Pakistan is among the world’s nine “pivotal countries”. Mike Mullen, while parting, told his successor “to remember the importance of Pakistan. …There is no solution in the region without Pakistan”. This affirmation of Pakistan’s
importance makes some people very jealous.

So, Pakistanis, carry on! Irrespective of what you are, irrespective of your misdeeds and crimes against yourselves, rejoice, for Pakistan, your country, remains “important”, “pivotal” and — unfortunately — ubiquitous.

SOURCE: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/27/ubiquitous-pakistan.html

Indian firms & R&D

If you have been lucky enough to travel across Africa you would have noticed a rising Indian entrepreneurial footprint across the continent. TATA, Ashok Leyland, Bajaj, TVS, Airtel all have made significant roadways into Africa & these are just the visible brands which you see on the streets and or on television. The invisible small and medium scale entrepreneurs too have made major contribution towards soft Indian diplomacy. I feel proud to spot home grown businesses abroad. As Indian economy gains steam in this decade I expect more and more Indianess to spread across the world & not just Africa. Unlike other counties (CHINA) who promote their companies abroad Indian businesses are promoting Indian agenda on behalf of the government.

India already is one of the biggest exporters of brain but still lacks world class engineering and non engineering products to compete with Western and Japanese goods. We are not able to pioneer new technologies like the Americans, British, Germans and Japanese. I hope our major brands will increase their R&D and prepare themselves to compete with the international majors.

India Journal: Overpopulation? I’ll Buy That

By Ranjani Iyer Mohanty

In the 1980s, before India’s economic revolution, there used to be ubiquitous billboards showing the ideal Indian family–a father, a mother and two children–in order to encourage family planning. By the 2000s, these ads had been replaced by ones for Nokia, Coke and “India’s Got Talent.” We seem to have solved our overpopulation issue by using the philosophy “if you have lemons, make lemonade,” or, if you have a heck of a lot of people, make them consumers.

Dibyangshu Sarkar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Indian commuters travel along a congested street on World Population Day in Kolkata, July 11.

In 1952, when India’s population was less than 400 million, the government initiated a family planning program, one of the first of its kind in the world. By the 80s, India’s population had grown to 700 million. Today, India is the world’s second-most populous country at 1.2 billion. By 2025, it is expected to surpass China and become the most populous country with 1.4 billion, and some predict that figure may reach two billion by the year 2100. To put the growth into perspective, over the past 40 years, the population of the U.K. has increased by seven million while the population of India has increased by 700 million. We proudly call ourselves the world’s largest democracy, but that “largest” bit might not be something to strive for.

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Economist Thomas Malthus first warned of the dangers of overpopulation back in 1798. In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich rang the alarm bells again with his bestseller “The Population Bomb.” The 90s brought population scientist’s Joel Cohen’s book “How many people can the world support?” and ecologist Garrett James Hardin’s “Living within Limits.” But over the last few years, apart from some scientists, academics, NGO-types and concerned individuals shouting into the wind, there seems to have been little mainstream concern about the issue.

The United Nations used to organize a World Population Conference every decade, but the last one was in 1994. The UNFPA is currently promoting a program called ‘7 Billion Actions’ but it seems more like a celebratory event to commemorate in story and song the world population crossing seven billion at the end of this month.

In fact, media and business now largely view demography as one of India’s biggest assets; every Indian is seen as a potential source of talent and labor, and more importantly, a potential consumer of manufactured goods. The more people, the better. The Economist recently said, “India’s population will stay young and energetic for years to come.” This decidedly optimistic shift in perspective from a stance of “Oh-Oh, Overpopulation” to “Duh! Demographic Dividend” may be due to several reasons.

Firstly, the last century saw incredible advances in farming technology and substantial increase in crop yields, leading many to assume that with proper distribution we can feed an unlimited number. Secondly, Indians still remember the forced sterilization clinics of the 1970s – since then, no self-preserving politician is prepared to even bring up the topic of overpopulation.

Thirdly, many adhere hopefully – and perhaps out of sheer laziness – to the prevalent theory that the problem will solve itself. As education and living standards rise, the fertility rate will automatically drop–just like it has already done in many developed countries–and India’s population will plateau. Then again, experts have also said that as education and living standards improve, the sex ratio will equalize. But this hasn’t happened, at least not in India. In fact, a recent study showed that in subject groups of greater affluence and where mothers had more than 10 years of education, the sex ratio was actually more skewed. For reasons of supposed decorum, sex education is not taught in Indian schools. Despite the Indra Nooyis and the Kiran Mazumdar-Shaws, women are generally still seen as subservient to men at home, and therefore may not have control over how many children they have. But even if we accept the thesis of a decreasing fertility rate, India’s population is expected to plateau around the year 2060 at 1.7 billion. Is that a sustainable or ideal level?

The predominant reason for optimism is that we seem to have moved to an era of “the market uber alles.” Where India is concerned, the world and we ourselves have adopted a Panglossian attitude: all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as long as we have 8% growth.

But Indians are not only consumers of mobile phones and credit cards; we are also consumers of food, water and sheer physical space. Food prices are rising. Water tables are dropping. Daily power cuts are common. Land conflicts are frequently featured on the news. The streets are clogged with automobiles, and the Nano isn’t even out in full force yet. Competition is intense in all walks of life. Getting admission to academic institutes from kindergarten upwards is a source of worry for parents. One woman whose daughter scored a 93% average in her grade-12 final exams was very upset, asking how she would ever get into the Indian colleges of her choice with such a low mark. Many who feel they don’t have the natural ability to succeed or feel the system isn’t fair resort to approaching influential contacts for help and, if needed, paying bribes. Add to this scenario of resource constraints ecological impacts such as deforestation, over-fishing, and rising levels of pollution. Even the benefits of our economic revolution are eroded as they are spread out over an ever-increasing number of people.

While Thomas Malthus may have been worried well before his time and Paul Ehrlich a touch sensationalist, they may not have been totally off-base. Concern about the population issue is neither quaint nor quixotic. If we take a home built for five people and put 50 in it, we can expect things to go wrong.

Obviously, there are no easy solutions. No one wants to go the way of China on this and have a forced one child policy, particularly now that we are starting to see its dangers, such as a skewed sex ratio and a rising dependency ratio. Of course, even if it were desirable, such a policy would be impossible in a democratic India and political suicide for any politician who even mentioned the matter. However, there may be more gentle measures, like raising the issue of overpopulation in the media as a source of concern, discussing the benefits of population control both in high-profile platforms (similar to Davos) and public forums, and informing people about related government and NGO programs. Maybe those lovely ads of yore, jazzed up a bit to suit modern fashion, could be brought back. We could also have a population clock put up in city centers, similar to the debt clock in New York City. It may be just as ineffective, but at least we would be constantly reminded of the problem. And each time we cross yet another milestone population number (1.3 billion, 1.4 billion, ….) we should go through a national soul-searching process that is broadcast by the media worldwide before we consciously, and with full knowledge of what we are giving up, raise our mentally acceptable population ceiling.

For now though, there just seems to be a quiet and imperceptible rising of the tide, as we frolic in the waters. Very similar to the naive attitude that the U.S. can spend its way out of a slump, India hopes to procreate its way out of poverty. We have lots of bright young sparks in the pipeline to supply talent and labor, but most importantly to assume the mantle of consumer.

Ironically, the only thing I’ve seen in India lately that addresses overpopulation or even acknowledges it as an issue is an advertisement. Tongue planted in cheek, actor Abhishek Bachchan attributes India’s overpopulation to the numerous power cuts, which leave people with nothing to do but procreate. However, once people have Birla’s 3G enabled smartphone, they are too busy being entertained by it to … do anything else. And therefore, the population drops. What an idea Sir-ji, and perhaps our best one yet.

Ranjani Iyer Mohanty is an editor, working with business, academics, and NGOs.

Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/10/07/india-journal-overpopulation-i%E2%80%99ll-buy-that/

My cat bit me

Have you been bitten by a cat? It is an awesome feeling – the pain when the canine sinks piercing the skin, fear of rabies resulting in sleepless nights and if you are vaccinophobic you are in for a treat.

My cat bit me. He’s semi stray non vaccinated white devil. Phunk!!! Bit me while I was asleep. This is not my first animal bite. I have been bitten & scratched by dogs, cats stung by wasps, bees. I probably am the most anti rabies vaccinated person in my town. The good thing is that advanced, small anti rabies have replaced those 1 litre each 14 injections. I had fortune of experiencing those painful old classics.

Anyone who has underwent the trauma of being bitten by rabid animal will truly thank the brilliant scientists who have developed the state of the art anti rabies vaccines. Scientists at Rabipur & Bharatbiotech save hundreds of lives daily. Unfortunately there is not drug available today to treat rabies in its final stage. That will be the day when such a drug is invented or a drug similar to polio drops which will guarantee immunity for life.

FYI: My cat is alive and well. It survived the 10 day incubation period. I have stopped the treatment