Beyond the pale: Poverty in an era of cutting-edge communications. A view from India

Peter Montagon, Asia Editor at the Financial Times, in an article entitled ‘India on brink of tiger-like rapid annual growth’ (16 Feb. 2000: 13) had this to say on the country’s economic prospects for the year 2000. ‘India is within striking distance of achieving annual economic growth of 7.5% or more, which would be close to East Asian tiger levels and lead to a significant fall in poverty.’
Another news item, this time in the online version of the Times of India (31 May 2000: 1) cites the view of the agriculture secretary Bhaskar Barua that the ‘grain output projection’ for the year 1999-2000 is ‘fine despite the drought’.

There is nothing extraordinary about either news item. Both pieces fit into a particular discourse of expectations, of cause and effect, and of projections linked to progress, prosperity, global futures and India’s emergent role in this global economy. As up-beat pieces the two news items communicate resolve, assurance, achievement.
India can, to some extent, be justifiably happy with the results of ‘growth’ in the post-Independence period. Decreasing aggregate levels of poverty in rural India ‘from 58.8% in 1970-71 to 50.8% in 1983 and 48.7% in 1987-88’ and in the urban sector ‘from 46.2% (1970-71) to 39.7% (1983) and to 37.8% (1987-88)’ (Minhas, et, al, 1991: 1680); substantive increases in food grain production leading to food self sufficiency – from a situation characterised by starvation and the ignominy of PL-480 based wheat imports in the 50s and 60s, to the year 1980 when the country had 23.4 million tonnes of food grain stocks, enough to feed the entire nation (Desrochers & Joseph:1988); and the software industry which has grown from a turnover of US$20 million in 1988 to a turnover of US$4 billion in 1998-99 out of which US$2.6 billion was achieved through export earnings (Bajpai & Rajdou, 2000: 452). Considering the many odds, steady population growth, intermittent political instability and until very recently a top-heavy economy, the figures seem to indicate that India has turned the corner and its back on poverty. But has it?
Most IT-based solutions implicitly state that lack of information is a drag on development and that correct doses of information will make all the difference to rural and urban poverty. This way of conceptualising the role of information in development is merely the latest in a tradition of communication interventions in development that has long been characterised by an obsession with ‘inputs’ at the expense of context. It would seem that this transmission view of change recently enhanced by concepts such as ‘participation’ and ‘interactivity’ has paved the way for the greater integration of rural India into the economic grid of the global market. While integration in itself may not be such a bad idea, the question as to who benefits surely merits some attention.

Rural Indians may one day be classified as ‘information haves’ although it seems fairly certain that most, if not all of these people, will not know what to make of this new badge of identity. I am reminded of a story carried in one issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly on the use of IT in networking among indigenous groups in Latin America. The report from one of Latin America’s largest indigenous organisations, lamented the fact that while the world had got to know of their socio-economic realities from information shared through networking, their own situation had hardly changed for the better.

It is largely the case that poverty as an inter-linked, structural, endemic issue related to the politics of power, knowledge and access to material and cultural resources has hardly figured in the theories and practices of communications and development that have been employed within official circles in India. I say rarely, because there have been significant exceptions, for instance, the now defunct Kheda Project, an offshoot of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE). SITE was a distance learning project conducted from August 1975 to July 1976 in 2,330 villages in six states in India. The Kheda Project was a small-scale experiment conducted in a few villages in Kheda District, Gujarat in participatory communication. Although the findings of this project were not used to influence the direction of policies with respect to development communications, the literature on Kheda does deal with the practicalities of operationalising a participatory communications project in the context of real India and the many challenges arising from such interventions – these included ways to get around the cleavages along caste and class lines, social and cultural hierarchies, ways to deal with the reality of indebtedness, money lending, landlessness, etc.

Kheda was in a real sense a forerunner of the many communications-based interventions in transformative development carried out by NGOs in the 80s and 90s in India. In terms of objectives, methodology and content, Kheda was distinctly Freirean as this quotation conveys: ‘The whole rehearsal was allowed to develop with no holds barred as to the techniques of acting, technology of shooting or equipment constraints. It started dawning on many of us that the problem was theirs and the performance was theirs and finally whatever was captured on the video was going to be theirs. One got the feeling that “social relevance”, “credibility”, “identification”, and “comprehensibility” all existed – almost waiting for the camera to capture them and the video tape to record them’ (Vishwanath,1978: 22-23). Kheda enjoyed a certain autonomy for the brief period that it existed, something that is denied most other official communication and development projects in India. It is no secret that the government continues to exhibit a ‘control’ attitude towards the media despite its surrendering of media interests to a variety of global and national media poachers. In hindsight, it would seem that the cultures that sustained state monopoly capitalist structures in the past continue to persist in the present, despite many recent changes, in particular the country’s tryst with private, global capital.

Alternative frameworks
Outside the official framework of development, there have, of course, been numerous NGO-sponsored attempts at creating an alternative framework for communications interventions in development. Some of these interventions have been people and participation oriented. Local people have been involved in assessing the nature of the problem, determining priorities, understanding the role of communication and information in development, formulating solutions and managing the processes of change. While the structural basis of poverty continues to provide the rationale for some of these projects, it can be argued that such interventions have generally been discrete and isolated from the mainstream. The sheer effort involved, the commitment, the vagaries of funding, internal divides, the relative failures of networking, and less than supportive local environments have ensured the ghettoisation of this sector.

In other words it can be argued that these discrete attempts have not been able to shake the feudal constancy of traditional India or bring about larger, sustainable solidarities over time. As always there are exceptions and environmental groups, women’s organisations, Dalit organisations, etc. have used communications to both empower and effect changes to institutions and processes linked to the ‘base’ and ‘superstructures’ in rural India. One can argue that, given the local nature of poverty and its many variations and intensities, local interventions towards local solutions make better sense than any effort at extensive change. However, it is the case that local initiatives, however successful, do not necessarily lead to a multiplier effect or generate the momentum for a national movement.

Structural factors such as feudalism, casteism in its economic and cultural forms, the flows of power, knowledge and privilege, the many factors associated with the globalisation of poverty are responsible for myriad exclusions on a national scale.
If sustainable, extensive change is a national priority, then the state, given its broad remit in matters of policy and practice, remains the key player capable of effecting such change. While I believe that NGOs in communications have a vital role to play in extending public media space and the democratisation of communication at local levels, both governments and the mainstream media, given their reach, resources and power, have an equally important role in taking this agenda forward.

Poverty – the missing link?
Why is it the case that in spite of literally hundreds of official interventions in communications for development, that the structural basis for poverty in India has rarely figured in the conceptualisation of the problem or in terms of its solutions? There have of course been policies such as the PC Joshi report on broadcasting that came out in the1980s and dealt with the basis for another communications for another development in India, but this initiative, like the more recent Prashar Bharati Bill, was destined never to see the light of day! Even a brief chronology of key communications in development interventions in India seems to suggest that those who initiated each of these projects were aware, at least in hindsight, of the larger variables that curtailed the potential of each of these projects.
Rural broadcasting had started under imperial auspices in the 30s and 40s. This was followed by the UNESCO-supported Radio Rural Forums in the late 50s and mid-60s, experimental educational television in the 60s, followed by the Farmer’s Training and Functional Literacy Programme and SITE and Kheda in the 70s, support for numerous extension programmes in development such as the World Bank-based ‘Training and Visit System’ and pro-social soap operas in the 80s. Agricultural universities, extension centres and family planning agencies had churned out hundreds of diffusion and KAP studies that ostensibly dealt with change and development in the context of rural India. Surely, all these efforts ought to have amounted to something?

The evidence from the field suggests otherwise. In fact, warning bells had begun to be sounded from the early 1960s onwards – but it would seem that these were not heeded in the euphoria surrounding ‘growth’, ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’ and the efficacy of the ‘information fix’. An article by Neurath (1962: 277), the initiator of a UNESCO-based programme on radio rural forums, mentions that ‘Only about half the forums contained one or two Harijans’ and the Vidyalankar Committee Report on Five-Year Plan Publicity (1965: 152) mentions that in terms of the composition of these radio forums it was the advanced sections who figured ‘with the small farmers, landless cultivators, artisans, craftsmen and women having only a token inactive membership’.

Sondhi (1983: 115) after assessing communications interventions in development in the 70s reiterated earlier findings that ‘Farmer’s training courses and farmer’s discussion groups as well as production-cum-demonstration camps attract better-off farmers mainly.’ Srinivas (1976-77: 52), in a perceptive study of SITE producers, hints at the reasons for some of the failures of SITE’s programmes – reasons linked to their non-acknowledgement of rural political economy. ‘In the agricultural programmes it was pointless to discuss about methods of farming, pumps, insecticides and fertilisers, as a large chunk of the farmers were subsistence farmers… They did not have the financial resources to utilise sophisticated farm inputs, let alone experiment with them. Therefore bombarding new ideas… on the viewer without taking into account the environment in which he lives, and the limitations under which he functions, will not lead to any change’.

A number of these findings were replicated in the study that I conducted in Nilgiri District, Tamilnadu, in 1985 with the horticultural department. Their programmes had largely been subsumed under the World Bank-based Training and Visit System. A combination of factors including institutional constraints, the lack of credit facilities to marginal farmers, rising costs of horticultural production – pesticides, fertilisers, lack of storage and marketing facilities, price fixing and structural constraints – small land holdings, preferential treatment by the Village Extension Worker for the richer farmers, etc. were responsible for the situation that the poor farmers found themselves in.

It was evident, for example, that a number of the well-to-do farmers had land holdings that were far in excess of what is legitimately allowed under the Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Act, 1961, which was itself amended in 1971. The ceiling is fifteen acres. The poverty of these marginal farmers, in the circumstances, had very little to do with their access to information, or to the content or the information channels that were used. And while the last word on the efficacy or otherwise of pro-social soap operas has yet to be said, the jury would seem to be of the opinion that research in this area is generally dogged by an over-reliance on ‘positive’ statistics at the expense of context (Servaes,1999: 61).
The many exploitative reasons for poverty seem to have hardly been affected by all these interventions. This suggests that it will take more than a pious belief in the efficacy of the ‘trickle down’, the ‘information-fix’, etc., in a context in which entrenched attitudes and interests aligned to power structures continue to dictate the pace and nature of change.

It would be uncharitable of me and erroneous to assume that these interventions have been entirely worthless. It is quite obvious that some people and institutions have benefited from these programmes. Chandra and Karnik (1976) have said that SITE was a ‘gigantic case study to find answers to technical and programmatic problems in the planning, designing, organising and creating of a viable system of educational broadcasting satellite.’ It was a forerunner to the era of commercial satellite broadcasting that was initiated during the 90s. Surely there must have been lessons from that original experiment. And of course, undoubtedly, numerous farmers did benefit from these interventions as the Green Revolution amply demonstrates. But the poor, the landless labourers, rural artisans and the like – the communities who provided the justification for such interventions? That is an altogether different but familiar story. So how come they did not benefit from these interventions and why are they destined to remain beyond the pale of development?

Internal and external obstacles
Let me briefly deal with some of the reasons. These are both external and internal. The communications and development enterprise in India was largely based on concepts, objectives and methodologies that had been tried and tested outside of India, namely in the USA and a few countries in the South. Agricultural extension was organised in the Mid-West in the USA in the context of comparatively large farming establishments. The agricultural scenario in the USA with its integrated supply-demand structures is monumentally different from the scenario in rural India, characterised by dispersed holdings, caste-based social stratification and a rather traditional political economy.

The feudal constancy of many parts of rural India is rather unique – and science and technology have yet to figure ways around that particular conundrum. US influence via American aid for example through the Technical Cooperation Mission (TCM now USAID) was used to finance a number of technical and agricultural universities during the early years of Planned Growth (1952-74) in India. Aid was directed towards the setting up of agricultural universities in Hyderabad, Gauhati, Jorhat, Coimbatore, Hebbal, Bhubaneshwar, Kanpur,etc and towards Agricultural Extension and Information Projects in Vijaywada, Delhi, Poona, Bangalore, Pali and other centres. These institutions were to a large extent responsible for popularising the concepts and practices related to communications for development. In this way of thinking scientific communication would lead to increased productivity, to the trickle down of modern ideas that would, in turn, result in the creation of a qualitatively different rural Indian from the tradition-bound laggard whose belief systems and way of living were an obstacle to change.

There were hundreds of studies that explored the nuances of Rogers and Shoemaker’s (1971: 11) assertion that ‘Development is a type of social change in which new ideas are introduced into a social system in order to produce higher per capita income and levels of living through more modern production methods and improved social organisation.’ Typically they included such studies as Sinha & Prayag’s (1972), ‘Farmer’s Need for Achievement and Change Proneness in Acquisition of Information from a Farm Telecast’ and Chamala’s (1981) ‘Differential Source Utilisation Patterns at Awareness Stage in Progressive and Non-Progressive Villages in India’.

There were of course internal reasons as well and I am inclined to believe that these, rather than the external ones, are more to blame for the underdevelopment of increasingly large sectors of the Indian population. India does have the distinction of having more progressive pro-poor policies than any other country in the world and also of having the dubious distinction of not being able to implement most of these policies. After Independence, the government was involved in creating a nation-wide support system for the poor. It included directed programmes such as in employment creation – the National Rural Employment Programme; in integrated rural development – the Integrated Rural Development Programme; nutrition – the Public Distribution System the Mid-Day Meals Scheme and other programmes that were backed up by and linked to legislations that were ostensibly aimed at bringing about structural change – in the area of land reforms, minimum wages, rural indebtedness, market regulation, bonded labour, etc.

With the benefit of hindsight, the results of all these interventions has been tardy, to say the least. Access to growth opportunities, to nutrition, health, education and income, not to mention access to power and decision-making, remains a distant prospect for most of India’s poor. As always there have been exceptions to the rule – both West Bengal and Kerala have tackled issues related to rural poverty to a better extent than most other states in India although one could argue that this has been done to the neglect of other priorities. With no effective opposition, the Congress Party that ruled India from Independence onwards was the party of the elite as well as the poor. It provided subsidies to both the rich and the poor and ended up managing rural poverty rather than challenging or changing it.

In other words, the government of India was, in spite of all the rhetoric, congenitally incapable of effecting structural change. The labyrinthine administrative and political structure that reached out to rural India ensured that legislations passed in the city, remained there, to be amended or shelved but not to be put into effect. It would seem to be the case that the present coalition government is not by any means an improvement on previous ones and is merely presiding over the break-up of the variety of nations that make up India and trading the country to the many peddlers of globalisation (Thomas: 1999; 1999).

Some old truths regarding growth rates
It would seem that India has entered the 21st century with a coalition government, the very same development machinery along with a lower threshold for development as it relates to the poor in India. Montagnon’s and Barua’s projections (cited earlier) illustrate this change in priorities – although some ‘mining’ is called for in order to separate fact from fiction. Montagnon’s assertion that economic growth is correlated to a fall in poverty levels fails to account for the fact that both growth rates and poverty levels are value-laden terms linked to particular desirable levels of living. Growth may impact differently on different sectors. Unless it is linked to redistribution policies it remains a political rather than economic concept. The resignation of Prof. Ravi Kanbur who was in charge of writing the annual report of the World Bank because of internal and external opposition to his position that poverty strategies need to be based on growth with redistribution illustrates the power of the status quoists in curtailing real change (Atkinson: 2000).

The poverty line too is largely hypothetical. Its measurement is mainly based on income levels and consumer and calorific expenditure on an aggregate basis. In spite of the many National Sample Surveys conducted by the Central Statistical Institute in India, it would seem that it is close to impossible for these surveys to account for the many nuances of poverty, to differentiate temporary poverty from chronic poverty, to understand the relation between inflation and indebtedness or the many other factors that contribute to the persistence of chronic poverty in India. If, as it is argued, these surveys merely provide a yardstick, then it is an inaccurate one, open to manipulation, often for narrow political ends.

In fact the Indian government has played around with poverty statistics – higher statistics aimed at potential donors and lower figures to legitimise their record of growth while in office. In the Indian case, it is a good harvest rather than official statistics that provides a reliable estimate of poverty levels in any given year although distribution and access to food grain stocks often remain important variables for which data is rarely available. It is common knowledge today that a poor rainfall average during the last three years has led to a fall in food production. The information on the 7.5% growth rate is, as can be shown, rather economical with the truth. It is a figure reached largely by growth calculations in a particular sector. It is a well known fact that the contributions made by a single sector, Information Technology, are largely responsible for this growth rate. This is not surprising, given the global importance given to the Nasdaq Index and recently to e-commerce stocks. To give an example, the total market capitalisation of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) was Rs.100,000 crores (about US$24bn) in 1990. In 2000 the market capitalisation of the bluechip Indian software firm, Wipro, alone crossed Rs.100,000 crores and the aggregate capitalisation of the BSE today stands at Rs.1,100,000 crores (about US$2.6 trillion).

As Chandrasekhar (2000: 3) points out this huge increase in the aggregate market capitalisation of the BSE has been brought about by a few firms in the IT sector. ‘By mid-February, Wipro alone accounted for 15% of the market capitalisation of the BSE, and the combined market value of around 150 software companies accounts for 32%’ of BSE capitalisation. In other words, this growth rate has everything to do with market capitalisation and very little to do with real growth. But whatever the growth rates, the incidence of absolute poverty has increased rather than decreased. Ninan (1994) and Ghosh (2000) would seem to support the view put forward by Minhas, et.al, (1991), that ‘The absolute numbers of the rural poor (in million)… rose from 257.9 (1970-71) to 276.8 (1983) and further to 283.7 million (1987-88). In urban India the numbers of the poor rose from 50.4 (1970-71) to 69.2 (1983) and 77.5 million (1987-88)’.
These figures make sense in the light of the fact that urban India has seen an increase in the number of its poor over the last three decades. Delhi’s two growth areas East and Outer Delhi account for 59% of the city’s population and 65% of the city’s poor (Kumar, 1999: 73). Half of Mumbai’s population lives in slums (Swami: 2000). In Calcutta, there are people who have been living on the pavement for 25 years or more (Shah:1990).

Barua’s claims that ‘grain projection is fine despite the drought’ is an instance of media management. It hides the fact that food production in the Indian case has little to do with food security meaning stability in food prices and access to food stocks. In fact this sector is going through a major crisis as a result of the liberalisation of the agricultural sector in the context of the Structural Adjustment Programme and WTO policies, massive shortfall in government subsidies for irrigation, electricity, credit facilities, the deregulation of many cash crops including sugar and cotton, the consequent rise in food prices especially as it affects the Public Distribution Scheme (PDS). Between December 1991 and February 1994, the ‘issue prices of common rice and standard wheat were raised by 42.44% and 43.5% (Dev, 1995: 38). In fact today there is very little price difference between grain purchased under the PDS scheme and in the open market.

The failure of this food distribution system is especially glaring in some of the poorer states such as Orissa where the state government estimates that 66% of its population live and die below the poverty line. In April 2000 there was an increase in the price of rice available in Orissa through the PDS system from Rs. 4 per kg. to Rs. 6.50 per kg (Sridhar: 2000). In a state that had been adversely been affected by a cyclone and now by a drought, such price increases are bound to affect the most vulnerable, the landless labourers, small and marginal farmers, indigenous communities, rural artisans and others who make up the bulk of the rural poor. In fact, the government’s many hand outs on ‘record’ food stocks have failed to acknowledge that one reason for bumper food stocks is related to the fact that people have not been able to afford to buy grains on account of price rises. And so, rather ironically, the Food Corporation of India is left with large stocks that it cannot sell precisely at a time when the poor need it the most.

It is a situation that has come about because of the government’s hiking of food prices in the PDS system ‘in order to realise a 12% reduction in food subsidies’ (Chandrasekhar, 2000: 7). Shiva’s (1995: 15) remark on the consequences of the liberalisation of agriculture has a prophetic ring to it, in the light of the drought and famine affecting many parts of India. ‘When, as demanded by trade liberalisation, food will be available only at world market prices, starvation is the only certainty for the majority of the poor who were not even getting enough food prior to the reforms and famine the only inevitable future scenario for the country.’

Media coverage of poverty
Which brings us to the contemporary story of famine and drought in India. In April 2000, the government acknowledged that large parts of India were in a grip of a severe drought. Twelve states in India were affected by it – in Rajasthan, 26 out of 32 districts have been affected; in Gujerat 17 districts covering 9,421 villages. There were reports of starvation-related deaths of human beings and cattle. After more than a decade during which issues related to ‘poverty’ had largely been bypassed by the mainstream media in India, it was suddenly presented with poverty in all its starkness. It was, as Khare (2000) has pointed out, a rude awakening to an India that has been mesmerised by its growth rates and little else:

‘We have been rudely jolted out of our collective reverie about economic abundance, booming stock markets, cyber revolution and venture capitalism. Just when we had thought that we had entered the New Economy’s fast lane, we are suddenly being forced to come to terms with evidence of starvation, destitution and deprivation so familiar in the Old Economy.’

The mainstream media had, rather conspicuously, embraced the New Economic Policy popularised by the Rajiv Gandhi government in the late 80s and its priorities – growth based on liberalisation, privatisation and consumerism. Content priorities had also undergone change and satellite broadcasting and the new media were responsible for a new global emphasis - life style, fashion, business, sports, entertainment and personalities at the expense of other concerns, including many that are glaringly visible from the doorsteps and windows of corporate media houses. The rural beat that lacked glamour and has always be seen as a burden by state broadcasters and journalists underwent further downgrading in the context of these new priorities and the accent on targeted viewer and readership. While there has been a quantitative increase in news readership and more pages per issue, including special sections on every conceivable material interest along with a variety of entertainment programmes on national television not to mention cable channels, there has been very little reportage on how the other half lives and dies in rural and urban India. In fact, one could read the national press and be lulled by the global feel to these papers.

In a context characterised by such indifference, the vacuum for poverty news has been filled by statistics churned out by the government’s publicity machine. The central and state governments who had been caught off guard by the drought have responded in terms of classic media management: damage limitation exercises. The cyber and media savvy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, predictably went on the offensive and, as one commentator remarked:

‘The media are inundated with a flood of statistics at regular press conferences and Chandra Babu Naidu himself holds weekly video conference sessions with his District Collectors that is open to the public and the press to watch. Government hand outs list the many ‘action plans’ that are in the pipeline and have endless lists of the quantum of money spent under different heads of expenditure and drought relief’ (Menon, 2000: 132).

Not surprisingly media reports tend to regurgitate official statistics - the number of tube wells that have been sunk, the people that have benefited from drought relief, the number who are employed in Work for Food campaigns, the amount of money that has been disbursed for drought relief, the amount of fodder that has been procured, etc. Few journalists have bothered to verify official statistics or to confirm that out of the 280,000 bore wells in Andhra Pradesh, close to 100,000 are defunct or that most of the 25,000 protected water supply schemes are non-functional. But then issues related to poverty are typically dealt with in an episodic manner, fleeting, occasional, event-centred.

Lack of in-depth reporting
Poverty in terms of catastrophe continues to be reported in the mainstream media – but more often than not these reports are stories of human suffering, of personal tragedy, with little or no background reporting on the protracted reasons for drought or starvation. Most often these reports tend to articulate issues such as drought in the language of the temporary that is bound to improve with rains and a good harvest. Very few reports provide information on the reasons for drought – environmental degradation, poor life support systems, the destruction of common property resources and the political economy of globalisation as it affects the hinterlands.
It is only the occasional journalist who opts to investigate the larger, long-term reasons for events such as a drought or are inclined to frame poverty as a ‘process’ rather than as an ‘event’. The few who do paint a grim picture. Parvati Menon (2000: 130) reporting in one of India’s few socially conscious news magazines, Frontline, on the effects of the drought on a little hamlet, Gairangadda, in Andhra Pradesh, has this to say on the cumulative reasons for the drought:
‘The drying up of water sources, both for drinking and agriculture has led to crop losses, loss of jobs, increasing levels of indebtedness, distress sale of cattle and other assets, increase in out-migration, a sharp drop in purchasing power, which the recent hike in administered prices has added to and a growing population of the undernourished and the hungry’.

The world that has been fed on a diet of India on the move, Bangalore’s Silicon valley, software exports, and Cyberabad, is probably not going to hear of the many reports of the suicides of cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh, the increased activities of the ML Naxalite movement or stories of farmers in this state selling their kidneys as a way of getting out of their indebtedness and poverty (Sekhar: 2000). These stories point to the fact that the real India that exists simply cannot be wished away or changed through a new technology fix.

IT, poverty and development
It would be pointless to get into an argument about IT in the context of poverty alleviation. There are numerous stories from different parts of the world of IT-based interventions leading to networking, access to timely information, education, etc. The use of IT in mapping natural resources, predicting floods and weather patterns, demarcating the boundaries of indigenous groups, etc., has been of tremendous benefit. The example of Grameen Telecom from Bangladesh points to the use of cellular technologies in development and the potential of wireless technologies in the democratisation of communications. The worth of Internet-based community radio too has been explored in South Asia. There are also instances of villages with web sites and of institutions such as the Maharashtra-based Warna cooperative sugar factor wiring up some of the villages linked to their industry.

The use of IT in streamlining, information sharing, the creating of efficiencies, etc., cannot be disputed. The functionality of these technologies is a boon to the enterprise of development. But it would seem that it works best in situations where all thing are equal, in other words in contexts in which there is supportive infrastructure, uninterrupted electricity supplies, telephone lines, roughly equal opportunities, equal access to infrastructure, to decision-making, etc. In the Indian case, much has been written about IT in development – in fact, given all the hyperbole about ‘IT for Masses’ as outlined in the country’s recent IT Vision Statement (Zarabi, 2000) it would seem that there can be no development without IT. The many uses of IT for development that have been touted in India include telemedicine, distance education – the so called SMART schools, electronic governance and ‘broad banding’ resulting in information kiosks along the length and breadth of the country.

While it is important to take some of these initiatives seriously, it would seem that what the country needs is a balanced approach based on real needs, on a recognition that computer literacy must go hand in hand with basic literacy which is in a pretty awful state in the country and that telemedicine go hand in hand with improvements to the health service which are not, by any stretch of the imagination, in a good shape. In fact, a study has shown that job opportunities in Bangalore’s information sector have scarcely benefited the city’s urban poor except in a marginal sort of way:

‘Bangalore provides a good example of the wide range of opportunities arising in the wake of the setting up of numerous hi-tech industries, precisely the scenario visualised by the proponents of economic reforms… And yet, a study done in 1996 indicates that the poor households living in villages in the close vicinity of the city could hardly benefit much from the rising tempo of its economic activities excepting access to low-paid informal sector employment’ (Rao,1998: 1951).

While the computerisation of government administration is both necessary and achievable, it would seem that it will take more than ‘transparency’ or reliable doses of information to change the situation regarding poverty in India.

One of the better, readable accounts of poverty in India is a book by the Indian journalist, P. Sainath (1996), Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts. The sixty or so stories are each of real people affected by development – of Mukta Kadam, a Gadaba tribal from Korapet District, Orissa displaced thrice because of ‘development’, of the deaths of Binjwhar tribals in Madhya Pradesh because of starvation, of the black goat ‘that proved to be the solitary scholar at the primary school building in Nunmatti village, Godda’ (p .55) while the school teacher pocketed his monthly pay, and of government doctors making a fast buck doing private service at the expense of empty rural dispensaries.

Such stories point to the fact that while the prevalent mood is to portray sunny stories about economic growth in India, there are many more about the other side of development that are waiting to be told. However, given the extent of corporate and government management of the media, these real stories are bound to remain marginal to news agendas, at least in the immediate future.
So how can research contribute to both making sense of development needs and communication-based interventions in India that will make some difference to the people who need it the most?

ö In a context characterised by huge divides between rich and poor, often translated into information divides, there is a need for background research that focuses squarely on the structural reasons for poverty, prior to extensive or local communications interventions in development. Such research would generate valuable base line information that would in itself be useful in the stages to do with the planning and determining of priorities, formulating solutions and strategising, participatory, sustainable change. It would provide the information necessary to focus on the information/communication needs of the most vulnerable of people. In cases where such data is already available, and presumably, there are some around, researchers ought to consult such studies before embarking on initiatives linked to poverty, communication and development.

ö There is also a need for research on the emerging political economy of communications in India in its national and international dimensions. With the state having capitulated to the interests of private, global capital and to the new IPR regime of the WTO, its welfare budgets have been seriously curtailed. If, as it is often claimed, the government is committed to making the other half of India information rich, it has no choice but to invest in and make space for old and new media that are local-specific and community-based. This includes investments in basics such as electricity, communications infrastructure, and the necessary mechanisms that will allow access to community radio and the ‘information kiosks’ that seem to be a mainstay of news today. Given the fact that the state has subsidised local development through devolved forms of local government in India such as the Panchayat System, it would make sense for such efforts to be linked and enhanced by a subsidised community communications programme.

While NGOs continue to play an important role in the democratisation of communication and the extension of communication rights, only the government has the needed capacities to initiative extensive communication and development projects. Simultaneously, there has to be a renewed focus on media ownership patterns in India and for policies in favour of broad-based ownership. Unless there is a sustained effort to regulate this sector and restrict rampant instances of cross-media ownership, etc., it would seem that mainstream media agendas will ensure that the poor continue to figure as an ‘event’ rather than as lives lived in the context of a ‘process’ called poverty. There is also a need for proper investments to be made in strengthening rural capacities in journalism. This is by no means a new idea. What is needed is an exercise in intentional capacity building among communities who, for countless reasons, have not been able to have their own media presence.

ö Finally, and here UNESCO and others surely can make the difference – there is a need for larger global studies on issues related to ‘communication and the globalisation of poverty’. This could include research on the impact of global and national communications on ‘expendable communities’, those who do not have the purchasing power to plug into or buy into this new world. We do occasionally hear of the ‘digital divide’ but it would be a worthwhile exercise to undertake participatory ethnographic studies on issues such as communications access, media use and mediated expectations in the context of urban slums and rural communities. Occasionally one does come across snippets, such as the fact that in a survey conducted in the squatter settlements in the trans-Yamuna area of Delhi, 37% of the households in the 45 resettlement colonies have TV sets, 11,275 black and white and 160 colour TV sets’ (Shah, 1990: 53).

The fact remains, however, that they did not have access to minimum rights to shelter, sanitation, drinking water, which seems to suggest that a lot more research needs to be done on issues such as ‘leisure’, globalisation as a selective process, poverty and media access, the mediation of political influences, and local, everyday resistance.

Paper presented at the Fourth UNESCO-IAMCR Roundtable on Development Communication, ‘Participation, Poverty and Minority Rights Within the Framework of the Right to Communicate’, 18 July, 2000.

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Pradip N. Thomas (PhD) is Director of Studies and Publications at the international headquarters of the World Association for Christian Communication. He has written many articles, the most recent being ‘Copyright and the emerging knowledge economy in India’ in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XXXVI, No. 24 16 June 2001). He is co-editor with Michael Richards and Zaharom Nain of Communication and Development: The Freirian Connections (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000).