Sometimes the most deeply entrenched paradigms are redefined by unexpected people. Twenty-seven-year old Asha Devi is a pig farmer in Arkha Mustakil village tucked away about 40 kilometres from the Rae Bareli town centre. Three years back when her farmer-husband died suddenly in a road accident, the shy ghoongat-clad mother of three had to think out-of-the-box to make ends meet. Prodded by a couple of her women neighbours Asha Devi joined a Self Help Group (SHG) and applied for a loan of Rs7000. To get that loan sanctioned Asha Devi had to present a viable case of what she wanted to do with the money and how she planned to return it. Much to the amusement of other members and to a generous round of titters, Asha Devi haltingly laid out her plan to become a pig farmer. She bagged the loan and bought five local varieties of pigs - one adolescent male (pig farming experts call males Boar), three fully grown females (called Sows) and one female piglet - for a little over Rs6500.
Today Asha Devi owns over 25 pigs and piglets, after having sold around fifteen to the nearby 100% export-oriented meat factories and local butcher shops. At an average price of Rs2000 per animal, she has not only returned the loan but has managed to make a tidy sum of Rs23,000 with a potential earning of at least another Rs50,000. That's an over 150 percent annual return on investment. To put things in perspective, the biggest gainer for the month at the time of writing this column in the bourses was Jagan Lamps at just a shade over 116%. In another setting Asha Devi's innate ability to sense an opportunity would be seen as classically entrepreneurial and she would be feted as a highly successful businesswomen.
While Asha Devi's pugnacious transformation from a helpless widow to a hard-nosed entrepreneur itself is a paradigm shift, the real lessons imparted by the shy mother lie in way she has managed relatively complex tasks like maintaining balance sheets, profit and loss accounts, money transfers and even fertility cycles of the pigs. Tasks that is usually associated with literacy, a formal degree and a certain urban sensibility. Asha Devi is illiterate. But she has prospered by using indigenous and ingenious methods - from tying differently coloured threads on pigs to identity their fertility windows to allocating specific symbols to identify meat factories and butcher houses while filing accounts to using a form of knots and crosses to identify currency transactions. It might surprise you as it did me that these methods and their variations thereof have been in use for years by people who cannot read and write.
Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies anticipates the arrogance fuelled by a 'mythical superiority' of the rational and scientific spirit that modern education imparts to all of us. Explaining the lopsided nature of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests, Diamond who spent over 20 years with the tribes of New Guinea says a tribal may appear to be stupid trying to navigate an urban jungle filled with unintelligible road signs and eight-lane superhighways just as he (Diamond) would appear to be equally, if not more, stupid trying to hunt his next meal in the island's tropical rainforests. Introspect and you might stumble upon an instance or two where you would have muttered a curse under your breath after seeing a 'stupid village bumpkin' stuck in the middle of traffic trying to cross a road.
Asha Devi and Jared Diamond are both making one extremely important point to the policy wonks at Department of Information Technology (DIT), who are pulling out all stops to roll out an ambitious e- and m-governance platform by the end of December this year. Levels of education, entrepreneurial ability and innovation are not directly co-related. The fundamental premise of e- and m-governance is that a technology backbone has the capacity to connect people directly to information sources, eliminating knowledge brokers like bureaucrats and middlemen, thereby impacting society, polity and economy. Put succinctly, if people have free and unhindered access to information then governance - quality of your day-to-day life - improves. But if technology platforms have to be conceived as enablers and facilitators, then they must be configured to act as force multipliers in an agnostic manner. This agnosticism should not only be confined to devices but should also include content, navigation, information architecture, design and accessibility.
Formal education is fundamentally based on the ability to read and write a language. It's only when you understand the written structure of a language - grammar, semantics, syntax - that you start imbibing the lessons of formal education. Language allows the construction of a linear and chronological structure necessary to define and package real-life phenomenon in a discrete, abstract, replicable and rule-based form. Formal education is fundamentally theoretical principles first, practical application later. So when we, products of formal education, conceptualise accessibility, transparency, free information flow, we are automatically utilising a framework of meaning derived out of a semantic structure driven into us by decades of reading, writing and organised methods of communication.
No matter how well meaning, like several e-governance initiatives, the results emerging out of such an approach is text-heavy information architecture, user interface and design that is inaccessible to a majority of Indians who can neither read nor write. Open any government website and you will know exactly what I mean. For us the ability to read is our primary tool, and consequently even the most highly qualified information architect or user interface designer from premium institutions ends up treating colours, fonts, other design elements like dotted underlines as accessories rather than a primary communication tools. For those who have been part of the information architecture, user interface and design industry - like me - the most common and absolutely unusable feedback for any design is: "It's not impactful. Let's change the colours and put more pictures."
For Asha Devi the people and institutions providing governance solutions for her - DIT, institutions consulting with them, academicians and policy advisers associated with them - are all afflicted with the formal education syndrome. Asha Devi derives meaning in her day-to-day life not from a semantic structure but from a semiotic (symbols) structure. In a sense, Asha Devi ideally would want someone who is illiterate to design a user interface for her so that she can engage meaningfully with the information that is supposed to facilitate and empower her. I would recommend my column
When in Doubt Don't Write, Just Speak published in Governance Now (July 1-15) for all those skeptical about the ability of illiterate people to interact with and master relatively complex technologies.
But DIT, as usual, is focused on providing the infrastructure backbone rather than concentrating on content or its mode of delivery, where the real opportunity to permanently change the paradigm of governance rests. Touch-screen interfaces and mobile devices today are changing the way we interact with information in a dramatic manner. We are moving towards an interaction that is based on a combination of discrete symbols (use of arrows/colours to show Sensex figures), videos (how to use EVMs) and GIS mapping (hyperlocalisation). The Apples and Samsungs of the world are already showing the way by architecting an application environment based on semiotic structuring rather than a semantic structuring.
Moore's law will ensure that the prices of touch-screen devices will drop down to extremely affordable levels sooner than latter. When that happens, will Asha Devi encounter the RTI Act as chunks of unintelligible text or will she be able to browse it as small multimedia components and interact with it? That requires a paradigm shift in our mindset liberally coloured with a false sense of entitlement and superiority.
R. Swaminathan is a National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) Fellow.
Courtesy: Governance Now
Sometimes the most deeply entrenched paradigms are redefined by unexpected people. Twenty-seven-year old Asha Devi is a pig farmer in Arkha Mustakil village tucked away about 40 kilometres from the Rae Bareli town centre. Three years back when her farmer-husband died suddenly in a road accident, the shy ghoongat-clad mother of three had to think out-of-the-box to make ends meet. Prodded by a couple of her women neighbours Asha Devi joined a Self Help Group (SHG) and applied for a loan of Rs7000. To get that loan sanctioned Asha Devi had to present a viable case of what she wanted to do with the money and how she planned to return it. Much to the amusement of other members and to a generous round of titters, Asha Devi haltingly laid out her plan to become a pig farmer. She bagged the loan and bought five local varieties of pigs - one adolescent male (pig farming experts call males Boar), three fully grown females (called Sows) and one female piglet - for a little over Rs6500.
Today Asha Devi owns over 25 pigs and piglets, after having sold around fifteen to the nearby 100% export-oriented meat factories and local butcher shops. At an average price of Rs2000 per animal, she has not only returned the loan but has managed to make a tidy sum of Rs23,000 with a potential earning of at least another Rs50,000. That's an over 150 percent annual return on investment. To put things in perspective, the biggest gainer for the month at the time of writing this column in the bourses was Jagan Lamps at just a shade over 116%. In another setting Asha Devi's innate ability to sense an opportunity would be seen as classically entrepreneurial and she would be feted as a highly successful businesswomen.
While Asha Devi's pugnacious transformation from a helpless widow to a hard-nosed entrepreneur itself is a paradigm shift, the real lessons imparted by the shy mother lie in way she has managed relatively complex tasks like maintaining balance sheets, profit and loss accounts, money transfers and even fertility cycles of the pigs. Tasks that is usually associated with literacy, a formal degree and a certain urban sensibility. Asha Devi is illiterate. But she has prospered by using indigenous and ingenious methods - from tying differently coloured threads on pigs to identity their fertility windows to allocating specific symbols to identify meat factories and butcher houses while filing accounts to using a form of knots and crosses to identify currency transactions. It might surprise you as it did me that these methods and their variations thereof have been in use for years by people who cannot read and write.
Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies anticipates the arrogance fuelled by a 'mythical superiority' of the rational and scientific spirit that modern education imparts to all of us. Explaining the lopsided nature of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests, Diamond who spent over 20 years with the tribes of New Guinea says a tribal may appear to be stupid trying to navigate an urban jungle filled with unintelligible road signs and eight-lane superhighways just as he (Diamond) would appear to be equally, if not more, stupid trying to hunt his next meal in the island's tropical rainforests. Introspect and you might stumble upon an instance or two where you would have muttered a curse under your breath after seeing a 'stupid village bumpkin' stuck in the middle of traffic trying to cross a road.
Asha Devi and Jared Diamond are both making one extremely important point to the policy wonks at Department of Information Technology (DIT), who are pulling out all stops to roll out an ambitious e- and m-governance platform by the end of December this year. Levels of education, entrepreneurial ability and innovation are not directly co-related. The fundamental premise of e- and m-governance is that a technology backbone has the capacity to connect people directly to information sources, eliminating knowledge brokers like bureaucrats and middlemen, thereby impacting society, polity and economy. Put succinctly, if people have free and unhindered access to information then governance - quality of your day-to-day life - improves. But if technology platforms have to be conceived as enablers and facilitators, then they must be configured to act as force multipliers in an agnostic manner. This agnosticism should not only be confined to devices but should also include content, navigation, information architecture, design and accessibility.
Formal education is fundamentally based on the ability to read and write a language. It's only when you understand the written structure of a language - grammar, semantics, syntax - that you start imbibing the lessons of formal education. Language allows the construction of a linear and chronological structure necessary to define and package real-life phenomenon in a discrete, abstract, replicable and rule-based form. Formal education is fundamentally theoretical principles first, practical application later. So when we, products of formal education, conceptualise accessibility, transparency, free information flow, we are automatically utilising a framework of meaning derived out of a semantic structure driven into us by decades of reading, writing and organised methods of communication.
No matter how well meaning, like several e-governance initiatives, the results emerging out of such an approach is text-heavy information architecture, user interface and design that is inaccessible to a majority of Indians who can neither read nor write. Open any government website and you will know exactly what I mean. For us the ability to read is our primary tool, and consequently even the most highly qualified information architect or user interface designer from premium institutions ends up treating colours, fonts, other design elements like dotted underlines as accessories rather than a primary communication tools. For those who have been part of the information architecture, user interface and design industry - like me - the most common and absolutely unusable feedback for any design is: "It's not impactful. Let's change the colours and put more pictures."
For Asha Devi the people and institutions providing governance solutions for her - DIT, institutions consulting with them, academicians and policy advisers associated with them - are all afflicted with the formal education syndrome. Asha Devi derives meaning in her day-to-day life not from a semantic structure but from a semiotic (symbols) structure. In a sense, Asha Devi ideally would want someone who is illiterate to design a user interface for her so that she can engage meaningfully with the information that is supposed to facilitate and empower her. I would recommend my column
When in Doubt Don't Write, Just Speak published in Governance Now (July 1-15) for all those skeptical about the ability of illiterate people to interact with and master relatively complex technologies.
But DIT, as usual, is focused on providing the infrastructure backbone rather than concentrating on content or its mode of delivery, where the real opportunity to permanently change the paradigm of governance rests. Touch-screen interfaces and mobile devices today are changing the way we interact with information in a dramatic manner. We are moving towards an interaction that is based on a combination of discrete symbols (use of arrows/colours to show Sensex figures), videos (how to use EVMs) and GIS mapping (hyperlocalisation). The Apples and Samsungs of the world are already showing the way by architecting an application environment based on semiotic structuring rather than a semantic structuring.
Moore's law will ensure that the prices of touch-screen devices will drop down to extremely affordable levels sooner than latter. When that happens, will Asha Devi encounter the RTI Act as chunks of unintelligible text or will she be able to browse it as small multimedia components and interact with it? That requires a paradigm shift in our mindset liberally coloured with a false sense of entitlement and superiority.
R. Swaminathan is a National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) Fellow.
Courtesy: Governance Now
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