Futures of Learning

Although India’s gaming market and associated activities have grown dramatically over the last few years, the research literature on the topic is still sparse. According to Nasscom, the Indian IT industry’s main association, the country’s gaming segment — comprising mobile, computer and console games and development — was estimated to grow from Rs 192 crore (US $3.8 million) in 2006 to Rs 1,700 crore (US $ 34 million) by 2010, equaling an annual growth rate of 72 percent. In spite of this increase, which is sustained by young men gaming in internet cafes and increasingly on mobile phones, the industry has yet to make significant in-roads into the everyday practices of Indians. There is therefore noticeably little in the public discourse about gaming addiction, violence and other concerns, which are so pervasive in other countries.

According to market research companies, the gaming expansion in India is pushed by increasing broadband use, growth of Internet cafes, an increasingly - and increasingly affluent - middle-class, the emerging youth market and inexpensive mobile prepaid game cards http://www.ibef.org/artdisplay.aspx?cat_id=60&art_id=17259&refer=n47. The Indian gaming expansion can also be ascertained from the fact that important gaming events and competitions are starting to be organized from this country. On February 12, 2009, the first-ever ‘World Gaming Day,’ which was marketed as “the largest-ever youth connect initiative to celebrate gaming” by its organizers Sony Ericsson, Zapak.com and Microsoft XBOX 36, was celebrated in Mumbai http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/Software/Sony_XBOX_announce_World_Gaming_Day_on_Feb_12/articleshow/4090144.cms. The World Gaming Day culminated four weeks of intense activities, with an estimated 19 million games played predominantly in India, US, UK, Australia, Singapore, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia. Later this year, the FIFA Interactive World Cup 2009, sponsored by Electronic Arts and Sony Ericsson and played entirely on Playstation 3 consoles, will take place in India. The flipside to this growth is the gaming industry’s concern about the increasing pirating practices.

Another element in the growth of Indian gaming is its connection to the world of Bollywood, materializing in mobile phone games based on popular Bollywood films. For example, at the World Gaming Day mentioned above, two Bollywood actors were at hand to congratulate the winners and to extoll the fun of playing games. Earlier this month, the Bollywood classic “Devdas” gave rise to “Dev D,” a new mobile phone game that enables gamers to take on the persona of the main protagonist of the film. The hope is that the mass appeal of such classics will translate into mass markets for the games (http://in.news.yahoo.com/137/20090203/740/tnl-second-bollywood-hero-goes-virtual-i.html). Similarly, the country’s first 3D video game is inspired by the Bollywood hit thriller “Ghajini.”

Most games are played in internet cafes, mainly by boys and young men. While networked gaming is one of the most popular activities in urban internet cafes (Rangaswamy 2007a), in rural internet kiosks boys have also been observed to play video games
(Kentaro et al 2007). Most specifically, zapak.com, a leading game provider that is part of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, is building ‘gameplexes,’ which are dedicated cyber cafes that promote online gaming. Zapak is also aiming to expand gaming beyond young males, with a service called zapakgirls.com, branded as “the world’s largest/India’s first ever/ gaming destination for women” that makes available strategy, puzzle and arcade games. The site also has forums with titles such as ‘Career’, ‘Health & Fitness’, ‘Love’, ‘Fashion’, ‘Family’ and ‘Let Loose,’ where the women can exchange their views on these topics (http://girls.zapak.com ). Similarly, Zapak Tiny provides games for 4 to 7 year olds, in order to grow the next generation of gamers (http://www.tiny.zapak.com ).

Educational Games

One important area arising from the development focus of ICTs in India is the development of games for use in mobile phones that help children, and adults, to learn outside the formal educational setting. The Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE) project at UC Berkeley uses such games to teach rural Indian children English; the project is supported by the MacArthur Foundation (http://hub.dmlcompetition.net/profiles/blog/show?id=2044804%3ABlogPost%3A3511).
The same team has also developed and field-tested various other games to help children who may not be able to go to school (Kam et al 2007). Another example is the work of Netika Raval around mobile phone games for water use, developed in part to connect children’s learning to real life experience (http://rdvp.org/fellows/2006-2007/netika-raval/). In virtually all of these design studies and their applications, at least one of the team members is of Indian descent and thus can act as a cultural broker for the design team, as it develops and tests its prototypes. Aside from examining the rural and urban of schools and communities, there is little attention paid to contextualizing these interactions in participants’ everyday experiences. In the formal educational setting, two young Indian bankers from Chennai, in partnership with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University, developed the HeyMath game, which provides mathematics textbooks, teaching and assessment tools as well as lesson plans over the internet, with the use of animation tools.

Gaming Discourses

In contrast to countries like Korea, discourses of game addiction do not (yet) seem to have emerged; I could only find one article on general internet addiction (Kanwal and Anand 2003). It might be however that as gaming is taken up by the Indian population in a more substantial way, new dimensions of the moral panic discourse (Ravindran 2007) come to focus on issues of addiction and illness.

In addition, in January 2008, a measure was introduced in the Indian parliament to ban violent video games. Rather than garnering large-scale support, the bill has been controversial because it was introduced by a Bollywood star whose son purchased the game for his son, who wanted a popular game that his friends in the UK were playing. The reaction has been one of outrage against attempts of censorship at the state level, rather than in the video game industry. As one of the contributors to the debate noted, on the blog desicritics.org:

“As with Internet usage, parents need to make their own informed decisions as to which games their kids get to play. In fact, video games can be great bonding activities between parents and their children and I have frequently seen fathers come with their kids to the local pirates and buy games for their children after much entertaining discussions. The Big Brother approach rarely works with Indian citizens, yet people revel in the same nevertheless. When children find creative ways of breaking family rules, how does the state with lax legal institutions and enforcement agencies curb adults from indulging in activities they don’t consider to be illegal in the first place? Does censorship really work in India or is it just a paper tiger? Since when have we let these Bollywood actors and socialites dictate what the citizens of India can or cannot do? Maybe it’s time Mrs Tagore sorted out her own house, paid more attention to the kind of games her grandkids played especially when the games have big letters saying MA printed on them instead of urging the government to babysit the nation’s children at the expense of the tax payers hard earned money. Why should others pay for her blatant ignorance and negligence?” http://desicritics.org/2008/01/09/071938.php

I am quoting this post at length because it provides a good summary of my examination of gaming in India, as it touches upon its connection to Bollywood, the perceived entertainment value of gaming, as well as pirating activities. Most importantly, the post also speaks to a number of larger issues around the use of gaming, and new media technologies in general, and how Indian society is negotiating the issues that arise with their use. Just as for Indians themselves, much remains to be learned for academics wanting to study everyday gaming practices in India.

References Cited:

Friedman, T. (2005). Still Eating Our Lunch. New York Times, September 16, 2005.

Kam, M. et al. (2007). Mobile Gaming with Children in Rural India: Contextual Factors in the Use of Game Design Patterns. Paper presented at Digital Games Research Association Conference (DiGRA), Tokyo September 2007.

Kanwal, N. and A. Anand. (2003). Internet Addiction in Students: A Cause of Concern . CyberPsychology & Behavior, 6(6), 653-656.

Kentaro, T. et al. (2007). Rural kiosks in India. Unpublished paper from Microsoft Research India.

Rangaswamy, Nimmi (2007a) ICT for Development and Commerce: A Case Study of Internet Cafes in India. Paper presented at the 9th international conference on social implications of computers in developing countries. Sao Paolo, Brazil, May 2007.

Ravindran. G. (2007). Moral Panics and Mobile Phones: The Cultural Politics of New Media Modernity in India,’ Paper presented at the Living the Information Society Conference, Makati City, Manila, April 2007.

Mobile phones first arrived in India in 1995, and since then their adoption has grown exponentially, with average annual growth of 80 percent. Mobile phones have thus become a significant presence in the social, cultural and economic lives of Indians at all levels of society. While young people have embraced mobile phones enthusiastically, corresponding changes in social norms have caused anxieties among some parts of the population. In this post I will explore these issues in-depth, beginning with an overview of phone use, followed by an examination of resulting changes in social dynamics and a brief look at the use of mobile phones for development purposes.

As of October 31, 2008, there were a little over 320 million mobile phone subscribers in the country, which is about 26% of the total population (http://www.india-cellular.com). The great majority, about 24 million use GSM systems. The most important cell phone carriers are Airtel with 25.04 percent of the market, followed by Reliance (CDMA and GSM) with 17.93 percent and Vodafone/Essar with 17.70 percent. There are a wide variety of handsets available, provided by both foreign and Indian companies and catering to every niche of the Indian market. The most expensive GSM handset cost about US $12,000; it is marketed under the Nokia super premium luxury brand Vertu, and shows that mobile phones are status items for Indians of all income classes. Airtel and Vodaphones sell Apple’s 3G iPhones for about US $700, depending on capacity. On the other end of the spectrum, aiming at the so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid (bop) market, the Nokia 1200 costs 1200 rupees, which is about $24. The CDMA handset market is firmly dominated by Reliance, which sells Blackberry smart phones for about $620, while on the low end, Tata Indicom sells a Samsung Model for $20, which is just under 1000 rupees. 60.90 % of the population is covered by mobile signal http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/DisplayCountry.aspx?code=IND. In any given covered area, between 4 and 7 companies provide mobile phone services, often offering a dozen tariff plans. Although I could not find any definite numbers, more people use prepaid cards than contracts (http://www.gsmap.org/wp-content/uploads/files/prepaid%20connections037215.pdf).

Mobile Social Dynamics

Especially among poor Indians, mobile phone ownership is dominated by men; a study conducted in 2006 found that women had greater access than men to household-owned land lines than to individually-owned mobile phones, but had similar access to public phones and much greater access to phones owned by others (Iqbal 2007). Even when women owned a mobile phone, it was primarily men who made the decision about how much money to allocate to phone use (Iqbal 2007). Similarly, in their study of urban Delhi, Tacchi and Chandola (Heather Horst, personal communication) found that men dominated ownership of mobile phones; women typically had to ask permission to use a mobile and also were monitored while talking. On the other hand, in a recent study of West Bengal, Tenhunen (2008) notes that women who are (increasingly) gaining access to mobile phones also gain greater mobility in general, although stigma associated with female mobility does remain. Gender relations are thus central to the dynamics of mobile phone use. More generally, Tenhunen (2008) argues that mobile phones increase the efficiency of the market, facilitate alternative political patterns, and invigorate traditional networks of kinship and village sociality.

Regional differences also play a role here. Sooryamoorthy, Miller and Shrum’s (2008) study of mobile users in the South Indian state of Kerala, which is known for its well-developed education system and youth and women programs, found that, in contrast to those who use email and other programs, mobile phone use tended to decrease the diversity of geographical ties. Research by Donner et al from Microsoft Research India (2008) also suggest a collectivist ethos, including in middle class households. They note that individuals share across generations (parents and children), with their peers (siblings and, to a lesser degree, friends). In some cases this may involve simply borrowing a phone because someone is nearby (what they term ‘proximate sharing’) or it may involve ‘distributed sharing,’ examples of which are a parent trying to reach a child through their friend’s phone. Others use their phones to contact point people who are relied upon to spread information. Donner (2007) argues that the sending and receiving of missed calls, or beeping, is another way that individuals in India communicate without the outlay of money or minutes.

Many have commented upon the great enthusiasm Indian youth express for the mobile phone, as can be seen in the utube videos posted on the Indian section of mobileyouth.org (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcPoVt--9UU&feature=related ). This enthusiasm is also evident in the growth of game applications for mobile phones, which I will examine in Friday’s post. The academic literature on this usage is only beginning to emerge, however (Kumar and Thomas 2006). Chakraborty (2006) conducted a comparative study among Indian and American university students and discovered that the former relied on their mobiles more frequently as their only phone, and thus developed a different relationship to them than their American counterparts. There were also significant differences in the practice of text messaging.

Swank’s (Heather Horst - personal communication) recent research among Tibetan refugees in North India suggests that mobile phones are contributing to cross-gender forms of communication. In her preliminary analysis of 700 text messages, Swank found that teenagers were exchanging jokes – quite often ‘dirty jokes’ – over text messages that they would not normally utter in person. Steenson and Donner (2009) note that the sharing of mobile phones complicates and is complicated by traditional gender roles. This suggests that the mobile phone is enabling young people (as well as older ones) to subvert established notions of gender relations.

These social transformations do not go unchallenged, especially by “moral panic agents” that seek to police the proliferation of mobile phones, and especially camera phones, among young people (Ravindran 2007, 2008). The impetus for their actions came from the Delhi Public School scandal in November 2004. As described in Ravindran (2008), the scandal centered on 2.37 seconds of video shot by a boy making out with his girlfriend, who were both students at an elite public school in Keshavapuram, New Delhi. A few days later, after the couple had broken up, the boy sold the video clip for Rs. 50 to friends. When this became public, both students were expelled from their school. The video clip was then transformed into a hot-selling CD by the pornographic merchants of Palika Bazaar in New Delhi, and lastly a student at IIT Kharagpur posted the content for sale on Bazee.com, the Indian affiliate of ebay. The media pounced on the story, seeking to associate camera phones and its young users with criminality. As a result, Anna University in Chennai, a top-ranking engineering university, used the scandal to ban the use of cell phones on campus and dormitories and conducted raids to enforce the ban (Rediff.com 2004). This practice was quickly emulated by other educational institutions and in 2006, legislation was introduced in the Indian parliament that sought to regulate the use of mobile phones (Ravindran 2008). Young people, in turn, used new media technologies to debate these developments in blogs and discussion forums, as I will explore in greater detail in my internet post next Monday.

Ravindran (2008) uses this incidence to make a larger argument about moral panics associated with camera phones, focusing his study on the (Tamil) vernacular press that is used by moral panic agents as a mouthpiece. Examples from headlines included: “Cell Phone Revolution: Satan in Palm;” “Tragedy Caused by Cell Phone: College Student Arrested for Killing Co-Student,” “Seller of Cell Phone Memory Cards with Obscene Pictures Arrested” and “TADA for Jeans...POTA for Cell Phone! The Plight of Colleges under Excessive Controls” (TADA and POTA refer to the draconian Indian laws against terrorism, which were repealed after political campaigns against them). As these headlines show, the social changes, including the possibilities to subvert strict sexual norms brought about by the use of cell phones are presented as scandalous and borderline criminal practices by parts of Indian society that see themselves as the guardians of traditional customs. The author argues that these dynamics are part of the emergence of an Indian control society that seeks to contain and police the transformations brought about by new media technologies (Ravindran 2007).

Mobile Phones for Development

A significant part of the research into mobile phone use in India focuses on their deployment for development purposes. Specifically, in the economic domain access to mobile phones helps small entrepreneurs overcome information asymmetries in the market place that have traditionally led to their exploitation through middle men. An often-cited example are Kerala fishermen who find out about the best prices for their catch before landing in a particular port (Jensen 2007, Reuben 2007). Donner and Tellez (2008) have undertaken preliminary studies of the emergence of m-banking among small enterprises. Donner (2009) has also investigated the use of mobile phones among small enterprises in India and found a reliance of voice and text messaging. Besides these economic applications, there are also mobile educational games being developed to assist children (and adults) with nonformal learning, as I will examine in Friday’s post on games. Another growing area is the use of mobile and smart phones for healthcare delivery purposes, as was highlighted in a recent report by Vital Wave Consulting authored for the United Nations Foundation (Vital Wave Consulting 2009).  The report listed a number of Indian projects that used mobile phones for education and awareness; remote data collection; remote monitoring; disease and outbreak tracking, and diagnostic and treatment support.

In sum, mobile phones have become pervasive in all parts of Indian society, and especially their use among young people is resulting in profound effects on social norms and cultural conventions.

References Cited:

Chakraborty, S. (2006). Mobile phone usage patterns amongst university students: A comparative study between India and USA. M.S. thesis submitted to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Donner, J. (2007). The Rules of Beeping: Exchanging Messages Via Intentional “Missed Calls” on Mobile Phones. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1).

Donner, J. et al. (2008). “Express yourself” and “Stay together”: The middle-class Indian family. In J. Katz (Eds.) Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies. (pp. 325-338). Boston: MIT Press.

Donner, J. and C. Tellez. (2008). Mobile banking and economic development: Linking adoption, impact, and use. Asian Journal of Communication, 18 (4): 318-332.

Donner, J. (2009). Mobile media on low-cost handsets: The resiliency of text messaging among small enterprises in India (and beyond). In G. Goggin and L. Hjorth (Eds.) Mobile technologies: from telecommunications to media. (pp. 93-104). New York and London: Routledge.

Iqbal, T. (2007) Gender inequalities in access and use of telecom at the bottom of the pyramid? Findings from a five country study. Paper presented at International Workshop on ICTs and Development: Experiences from Asia. National University of Singapore, April 2008.

Jensen, R. (2007). The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector.  The Quarterly Journal of Economics 72(3), 879-924.

Kumar, K. and A. Thomas. (2006). Telecommunications and Development: The Cellular Mobile ‘Revolution’ in India and China. Journal of Creative Communications 1: 297.

Ravindran, G. (2008) The Cultural Politics of New Media Modernity in India: Reading the Roles of Moral Panic Agents and Mobile Phone Users. Paper presented at International Workshop on ICTs and Development: Experiences from Asia. National University of Singapore, April 2008.

Ravindran,G (2007) Moral Panics and Mobile Phones: The Cultural Politics of New Media Modernity in India. Paper presented at the Living the Information Society Conference. Makati City, Manila, April 2007.

Reuben, A. (2007) Mobile Phones and Economic Development: Evidence From the Fishing Industry in India. Information Technologies and International Development 4 (1), 5-17.

Sooryamoorthy, R., P. Miller and W. Shrum (2008) Untangling the Technology Cluster: mobile telephony, internet use and social ties. New Media and Society, 10, 729 – 42.

Steenson, M. and J. Donner. (2009). Beyond the personal and private: Modes of mobile phone sharing in urban India. The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices, 1, 231-250.

Tenhunen, S. (2008) Mobile technology in the Village: ICTs, culture, and social logistics in India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14 (3), 515-534.

Vital Wave Consulting. (2009). Mhealth for Development: The Opportunity for Mobile Technology for Healthcare in the Developing World. Washington D.C. and Berkshire UK: Un Foundation-Vodaphone Foundation Partnership. Available at http://www.unfoundation.org/global-issues/technology/mhealth-report.html

Welcome to the next country in our blog series on New Media Practices in International Contexts. Over the next two weeks, I will be providing overviews of the use of new media, specifically mobile phones, the internet and games, in India, and I invite you to share your thoughts on what you read, as well as fill in the gaps that invariably exist in a summary like this one.

This is especially true for the country under consideration, which, with almost 1.2 billion people, is the second most populous country in the world. India is also a country of marked contrasts, where ancient and modern practices coexist and the chasm between the rich and the poor is visible and palpable to all. The 2007/8 Human Development Index places India 128th out of 177 countries (http://hdrstats.undp.org/countries/country_fact_sheets/cty_fs_IND.html). While a third of India’s population is urban, and divided between a growing middle class and vast slums, the great majority live in rural areas. The country has experienced strong economic growth, with growth rates of close to 10 percent in 2006 and 2007 (which are expected to slow down with the global recession (http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/002200902051923.htm). In spite of these economic advances, India’s social inequalities persist; indeed, the drop in poverty reduction since the 1990s, as compared to the 1980s, has shrunk and personal and regional inequality are increasing (Jha 2008).

About 17% of the population is between 15 and 24 years old (http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/mdg/SeriesDetail.aspx?srid=656&crid=356), and it is these young people that are experiencing the changes brought by new media technologies most dramatically, both in their personal and professional lives. The focus of my posts will mainly be on the new media practices of these young people, practices that need to be situated however within the larger framework of the role played by ICTs in India’s economic, political and socio-cultural contexts. In this regard, Ravindran (2008) talks about a cultural politics of new media modernity in India, including the policing of proliferating new media technologies use among young people. Specifically, a discourse of moral danger is generated by “self-styled guardians of morality and culture” (8), who use especially India’s vernacular newspapers to create a moral panic among the population at large about new media technologies. I will elaborate on this cultural politics in my mobile phone and internet posts; suffice to say here that young people are using these very technologies to counter the moral panic discourse by presenting technological progress as unstoppable.

In this introductory post, I will lay out the Indian ICT landscape and infrastructures and present a brief overview of the academic literature on the topic.

The ICT Landscape

Despite India’s prominent role in the technology industry, there continues to be a vast gap in the use of technology in the country. Leung (2008) suggests that India’s relationship with internet technology falls into two stark dichotomies: Indians are represented as either technically-savvy techno-elites or as poverty-stricken subjects who need help to bridge the digital divide.

The rise of the Indian technology industry, which was facilitated by the government’s deregulation of the telecom industry from the mid 1990s onwards and generated US $64 billion in annual revenues in 2008 (5.5 percent of the national GDP (http://www.nasscom.org/upload/Annual_Report07-08.pdf), has contributed to India’s global economic success. It has also “creat[ed] a new generation of young professionals who are often the first in their families to have a debit card, benefits, to live alone or with roommates” (McKenzie 2007). These changes are accompanied by transforming generational relationships, sexual mores and power shifts, all of which are contributing to the moral panic discourse. Furthermore, India’s software industry has been rocked by the Mumbai attacks and revelations of massive accounting fraud at Satyam Computers, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7818220.stm, once considered a poster child of corporate citizenship. Nevertheless, it will continue to be the destination of thousands of young Indians, fulfilling their, and their families’ aspirations, of a better life.

ICT is also seen as benefiting those who remain excluded from these high-tech dreams, by harnessing the power of these technologies for development purposes. There are thousands of so-called ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) initiatives underway in India, funded by a wide variety of actors, ranging from governments (national and state) to corporations to NGOs and foundations inside and outside the country (cf. Schwittay 2008). New technologies are deployed to provide e-government services, improve education and healthcare and foster economic development, and are thought to overcome gender and caste inequalities. Initial unbridled enthusiasm over the impact of ICTD programs has given way to a more nuanced view of their potentials, and to an awareness of the need to situate them in the political, economic, socio-cultural and technological contexts of their places of application (Brewer et al 2007, Sreekumar 2006).

Technology Infrastructures

Until the mid-1990s, ownership of a telephone was considered a luxury in India, with waiting periods of up to several years for a landline, even after paying hefty application fees (Kumar and Thomas 2006). In 2007, 3.37 per hundred inhabitants had fixed phone lines (http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/DisplayCountry.aspx?code=IND), paying an average of US $3.30 per month for its maintenance (World Bank 2006).
Mobile phones, by contrast, have become a consumer item embraced by a broad segment of the population. As of October 2008, there were a little over 32 million mobile phone subscribers, which is about 26 percent of the total population (http://www.india-cellular.com). Many more Indians have access to mobile phones through sharing arrangements of various kinds. I will devote Wednesday’s post to a closer look at mobile phone practices in particular.

Similar to landlines, only 3.17 per hundred inhabitants had personal computers at home in 2007
(http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/DisplayCountry.aspx?code=IND), which are heavily concentrated in more affluent households. However, the lower middle class is beginning to embrace computers enthusiastically, driven by status ambitions and especially by aspirations of a better future for the young through access to technology and technology skills leading to technology jobs (Rangaswamy 2007b). Correspondingly, the demand for purchasing a home computer is mainly driven by high school and college age children, especially those who attend schools with low-quality ICT facilities. Computers are a compulsory subject in Indian schools, adding to the pressures to own a home computer, and children become the de-facto teachers of their parents.

Recognizing this as an emergent market opportunity, there are a number of high-tech companies developing products and pricing models to target the lower classes. One example is Intel’s and Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go computer purchase program, which was unveiled in May 2006 and piggybacks on the popularity of pay-as-you-go mobile phone cards (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/may06/05-21EmergingMarketConsumersPR.mspx).
A recent initiative by India’s Human Resource Development Ministry should also assist the lower classes in owning their own computers. A laptop computer costing as little as US $10, developed by the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, is currently being tested and expected to become commercially available in June 2009 (http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Jan302009/national20090129115438.asp).
One of the targets of this government program are educational institutions, which would receive the computers at a subsidized price. In conjunction, the program envisages to provide broadband connectivity to about 20,000 institutions. This is important given that the number of broadband internet subscribers is minuscule, at 0.37 per hundred (http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/DisplayCountry.aspx?code=IND. The ultimate aim is to create a virtual technological university, and to this effect, the government also plans to produce e-content on every subject, which would be made available free of cost.

Schools are indeed one of the places where innovative practices are put in place to connect young people to computers and the internet. In October 2008, the government of Andhra Pradesh (AP), the most populous state in Southern India that has long invested in ICTs, contracted the Silicon Valley company nComputing to outfit computer labs in 5,000 schools with a virtualization software that allows multiple users, all working on their own stations, to connect to one computer. (The deal provides 50,000 computing seat, in a state with 1.8 million children, which shows the magnitude of the undertaking).
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/ncomputing-provides-18m-andhra-pradesh-students-with-computer-access-72200.php
Another initiative is the multi-mouse developed by Microsoft Research India, whereby children, each with their own mouse, can play games on one computer, leading to higher student engagement (Pawar, Pal and Toyama 2006).

There have also been efforts to provide children with access to computers outside the formal school setting, such as the Hole in the Wall project established by Dr. Sugata Mitra. In 1999, when he was a research scientist at NIIT, Mitra installed a computer in the wall separating NIIT’s headquarters from an adjacent slum of Kalkaji in New Delhi, in order to observe how children taught themselves how to use the computer (Mitra 2005, Mitra and Rana 2001, Mitra et al 2005). The project was scaled across India with the help of the International Monetary Fund, and has also been emulated in other countries, for example through the Digital Doorway program in South Africa.

Another important way in which many Indians, especially young men, access new technologies is via public access points. In urban areas, internet cafes are the primary space where first-time technology users become initiated (Rangaswami 2007a). These cafes are run on a commercial basis, and chat rooms, stock trading and networked gaming are among the most popular uses. In his study of Bangalore internet cafes, Nisbett (2005) found that while members of different socio-economic classes frequent them, many used them for such mundane tasks as email and internet-related chat (IRC). Furthermore, the young people that were the immediate focus of Nisbett’s study actively appropriated and shaped ICT spaces in ways that went beyond communication agendas and lead to the acquisition of a broad range of IT skills.

Between half and three quarters of the users of internet cafes are male, often students, which shows that unless specific steps are taken to ensure that women and lower castes also have access to the technologies provided there, the marginalization of these groups will increase further (Sreekumar 2006). It is here where of internet kiosks established and maintained by governments or NGOs aim to bridge this gap. These kiosks are often found in slums or rural areas; one study estimated that rural internet kiosks could provide the first experience with ICT for as many as 700 million Indians (Rangaswamy 2007a). However, another study of rural internet kiosks in Tamil Nadu found that they too were mostly used by male school and college students, from higher socio-economic status (Kumar 2004). Thus, there specific development aims need to be actively shaped and pursued, rather than merely stated.

The Literature on New Media Practices in India

My blog posts are based on various sources: information gleaned from journalistic and popular sources; a growing, but still limited, academic literature on the topic, and personal research findings of myself and colleagues. The academic literature is produced mainly by Indian scholars, mainly of whom study or teach at U.S. or English universities and maintain strong research ties to India. (In parallel, many technology initiatives work with engineers and scientists of Indian descent, sometimes trained in Western universities, who are familiar with Indian contexts.)

There are a number of themes found throughout most of this literature. One is the emphasis on the larger context of technology production and consumption, especially its relation with opportunities for economic development, questions of access and digital divide, and integration with social concerns. There is also much attention paid to non-resident Indians and the (virtual) ties they maintain with their homeland. This diaspora is not only a research subject, but also funds some of the ICTD projects mentioned above. Another unique aspect is the active participation of Microsoft Research India, a corporate emerging market research lab, in the production of the academic literature (Toyama, Rangaswamy and Donner, who will be cited frequently, are all part of the lab). The extensive literature produced by this group, for example around rural internet kiosks, is produced with an eye towards the commercial potential of new media technologies, which does not stand in the way of providing detailed analyses of their use.

Over the next two weeks I will examine in-depth new media practices of predominantly, but not exclusively, young people centered on mobile phones, gaming, the internet and digital media production. As you read these blogs, I invite your comments and suggestions for further research.

References Cited:

Brewer, E. et al (2007). The Challenges of Technology Research for Developing Regions. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 5 (2), 15-23.

Jha, R. (2008). Economic Reforms and Human Development Indicators in India. Asian Economic Policy Review, 3 (2), 290-310.

Kumar, R. (2004). Social, governance, and economic impact assessment of information and communication technology interventions in rural India. Thesis submitted to the MIT department of Urban Studies and Planning.

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