BEEBE EEEEEEEEEEEES

DEVOLUTION

As new technologies make it possible to move more information faster than ever before, we are dazzled by the millions of
gigabytes that move across the world in nanoseconds. We are infatuated by bandwidth, digital television by gadgets and giz-
mos. Yet we hardly ask questions about the quality of the information: What is it that we are communicating? Is it relevant?
Will it make the world a better place? And does all this information add up to knowledge? The challenge is to get the infor-
mation to where it is needed through the most cost-effective method possible. Only when information helps people commu-
nicate, participate and allows them and their rulers to make informed choices does that information become knowledge.
The growing gap between the world's have and have-nots is today reflected in the gap between the know and the not-
knows. If we want to turn information into knowledge and give the developing world a chance to take a shortcut to pros-
perity, the knowledge gap needs to be bridged urgently. Here we are not talking about the top-of-the-line computers in
each classroom in India, we are talking about a teacher who is trained and motivated, a classroom that has a roof, school-
children who have enough to eat so that their brains are not stunted by low calorie intake.

The scriptures are right: “Knowledge is a sword, and wisdom is a shield." Perhaps nowhere is the raw power of knowledge
as relevant today a: is for the two-thirds of the world's people who live in the countries of the South. And yet in the de-
veloping countries of the South, the holy trinity of the Information Age (television, telephone and computer) is present, if
at all, only in its cable and satellite television incarnation. South Asia, where one fifth of the world's population lives, is
today within the footprint of at least 50 broadcast satellites. In India, Pakistan and Bangladesh alone there are more than
70 million households with television, giving a viewership of 300 million. By the year 2007, there will be 550 million tele-
vision viewers in these countries, and half of them will be hooked up to cable and able to watch 350 channels that will be
available by then.

Advances in information technology are supposed to shrink distances, but they don't necessarily bring people together.
Better communications through satellite may give people a wider array of programming to choose from, but it does not
guarantee that they will be more tolerant of diversity. In fact, more information seems to mean more ignorance, and better
communications initially at least tends to highlight the differences between peoples.

Knowledge may be a sword, but it double-edged. The delivery mechanisms for knowledge are today in the hands of fewer

and fewer people. Globally, media ownership reflects the supranational ownership patterns and mega-mergers with other
worldwide businesses. More and more of the message therefore propagates a global consumer monoculture that is waste-
ful, unjust and environmentally unsound. It is when this culture is put forward as the only one to aspire for that it helps per-
petuate economic disparities and unsustainable lifestyles.

It also leaves more and more people out of the knowledge loop. They have lost the knowledge they had, and what has re-
placed it is no longer relevant or useful. Ultimately, this provokes an extremist backlash against an uncaring elite and a
soulless global culture.

In a lot of ways, it is just like the loss of genetic diversity. High-yield hybrid seeds have replaced a rich variety of local ce-
reals, improving harvests but also making the crops more susceptible to disease, and needing expensive inputs of agro-
chemicals to make them work. Globalisation of media subliminally spreads information that eats into traditional knowl-
edge bases and indigenous processes best adapted to deal with local conditions. Internet may offer a chance for South
Asian countries to leapfrog technology, to level the playing field, to democratise information by giving a voice to diverse
groups so that a new age when better communications will spread useful knowledge will be ushered in. But going by past