Slashdot Mirror
Third World Research, Development & Innovation
tovarish writes "It is nice to see that countries like India are trying to research communication techniques in backward and rural areas. While tech savvy people like us enjoy the latest gadgets it is quite a challenge to develop gadgets which actually help the poor and illiterate. While India's satellite launches and outsourcing news are already covered in slashdot umpteen times, sometimes her sensible achievements should be covered too."
Her sensible acheivements should be covered too? Can we mark the article blurb as flamebait? Lets keep the bias out of the story. Please.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
India isn't 3rd world
The Sudan is 3rd world
There's a book that gives a good use of communication in developing nations. It's by CK Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. It gives the example of how installing an internet terminal in rural Indian villages has helped them set the market for their livestock. They can log on, check the prices for the day and then head to market as more knowledgeable sellers. This keeps them from being taken advantage of and does a lot to help both their confidence and economic prosperity.
... to be a nuclear power, a spatial power, to be the biggest democracy in the world and still be considered a 'third world country'...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Shouldn't the topic be "India's, Development & Innovation" instead of "Third World Research, Development & Innovation" ???
Here is a short list of web definitions for the "Third World". You might be surprised - it wasn't originally meant to mean what we now think it means.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
In many ways the Indian attitude towards education is superior to our own.
Unless things have changed drastically in the past few years or so, while the attitude towards education may be great, their willingness to supply the funding behind that attitude is not.
In my opinion, technology does not, in and of itself, solve any problems. There must be attitudinal changes, particularly in the government. Closer to (my) home, this explains why, despite spending more and more each year on computers and other technologies, the US continues to lag behind other countries in education and in how much most current students know and how well they apply that knowledge. It's an attitudinal problem. We train our children to be too focused on education as a means towards a high-paying job, so they don't value knowledge unless they feel it directly translates into acquiring wealth. And that's the *successful* students. Many others, mostly raised in poor environments with limited educational resources and households were both parents *must* work in order to feed their children, have resigned themselves to working in the service industry for the rest of their lives and thus don't take any interest in education.
I'm not sure if these same psychological dynamics have started up in India yet.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
really just means Non-White.. I say this not to be abrasive but true.. Take a look at your nearest world map and start pointing at every place that "qualifies" as THIRD WORLD (what ever that means) - then to contrast point at all the places that qualify as "FIRST WORLD". BTW.. Where is the Second World?
Smile.
It goes back to the fifties and was coined by the French Alfred Sauvy, being analogous to the social classes in pre and post-revolution France. The first world is the U.S., Canada, W. Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, etc: they have highly developed economies, relying very little on agriculture, are very industrialized, and I'll venture to say democratic. The second world at the time was the U.S.S.R. and perhaps even E. Europe, depending on how you define it; they were also heavily industrialized. Thus, there no longer is a Second World. And finally, every other country was third world, which are often countries which are rural, not heavily industrialized, and generally poor.
A blog like any other.
Last year I was travelling the length and breadth of this vast country.
In the last ten years, the biggest changes in India are the spread of ATM's and mobile phones. When the state run BSNL started cellular services in 2002 in rural Indian towns, there were stampedes to get the application form.
What you dont find is decent broadband and good roads. Broadband may happen soon with Reliance Infotech putting fiber. But no chance of roads getting better.
And the country proves the trickle down theory favored by World Bank and IMF will not work. I am yet to see anything trickling down. And the country is liberalising for the last 10 years.
Does that mean liberalisation is bad?
No.
Tat Tvam Asi
Yes, it is true. America does less science research per capita than do many of the European nations, especially the countries that Rightwingers love to call "socialist", i.e,. Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, etc. All these countries and some others in Europe publish more science papers (in peer reviewed journals) than does America (some of them publish TWICE as many papers per capita as does America). Gee, I guess that blows away that neoliberal/laisseiz faire argument about America capitalism being the "driving engine behind improving technology, quality of life" etc., and how all those welfare states in Europe are just parasites on America....yawn....
Also, America is even behind 3rd world countries like India & China in terms of science research papers when looked at on a per-capita-wealth basis (numbers of papers per unit of wealth per country). Note on the graph how much to the right America is when compared to, say, India. India publishes more peer-reviewed science papers more capita wealth than does America.
THis is all based on the study entitled "Scientific Impact of Nations" by King for 2004. You can get a link to the pdf version of the paper and see a graph of science papers per per-capita-wealth here.
Well, you learned something today, huh? Now go watch the debate Wednesday and listen to Bush and Kerry tell us about how America is the greatest nation on earth.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
It appears to me that atleast a section of the slashdot crowd seems to think that satellite launches in India are a recent phenomenon. At the risk of repeating the obvious, let me say that India launched her first satellite back in 1976. And has been launching satellites regularly since. The largest number of them are weather and communication satellites (the INSAT series). There are also remote sensing satellites (the IRS). The INSAT series satisfies all of India's communication transponder needs and some transponders have been leased to other entities, bringing in money. INSATs were largely responsible for the communication revolution India experiences in the mid-80s.
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India also launches satellites meant for polar orbits (the IRS series, for instance) from her own soil, has been for some years now.
The latest news in India's space program is the launch of a geo-synchronous satellite (Edusat) that seems to have gotten attention at
But that's just the latest news; as I said, India's been in space for nearly 30 years now.
Population: 1,065,070,607
Japan:
Population: 127,214,499
(from wikipedia).
Please keep these facts in mind before saying anything.
India faced three wars immediately after partition. Two with Pakistan and one with China. Japan didn't face any. Nuclear weapons were a necessity for India.
India has 21+ different official languages. Japan has one. The space program helped put educational and weather satellites in place. And India now sells satellite launches.
It's extremely convenient to compare India and Japan, but it's really a wrong comparison.
I had occassion to look beyond my nose this morning, and you won't believe what I saw! There's a whole world out there, not just America, and there's many things in it. Like , countries !?! and they have *gasp* different forms of government!! and telephones, and TV? And the youngsters go to places like school and college and all. I didn't know college existed outside the good ol' US of A. God knows what they teach there. Should we bomb them out of existence before they become a threat to world peace, you think?