Roads have long been considered a prerequisite to development. By connecting rural communities with the more developed parts of the country (and beyond), they facilitate unhindered movement of people and goods, opening up whole new avenues for development. Recent studies suggest virtual roads can play as significant role for the uplift of the poor. Thus the new Nepal Telecom Authority (NTA) report on internet penetration in Nepal comes as a pleasant surprise. It suggests up to 20 percent of the population, or 5.7 million Nepalis, are now using internet. (By contrast, under 12 percent Indians have web access.) The increase is largely attributed to the spread of mobile phones which double as internet interface. Here is the sad bit though: Most of the expansion has been witnessed in urban hubs, while large swathes of rural areas, home to 80 percent of the population, are still cut off from the digital highway. But things are looking up.
One in two Nepalis now has access to basic telecom services, including most of the web-less hinterlands. The rural access to mobile telephony and internet services could increase by leaps and bounds if the Rs 6-billion strong Rural Telecommunication Development Fund (RTDF), established for the development, expansion and operation of telecom services in rural areas, can be put to judicious use. NTA plans to use the fund to establish optical fiber network in all 75 districts to provide broadband internet and other telecom services at affordable rates. Sadly, the nitty-gritty of RTDF expenditure remains vague. Internet providers for their part have shunned countryside for fear that their investments might be at risk.
It is important that steps are taken to minimize these risks, for the expansion of mobile telephony and internet could bring meaningful changes in the lives of the poor and marginalized. It can help farmers gain a fair price for their produce by enabling them to shop around for buyers online, instead of having to rely on unscrupulous middlemen. In other developing countries, mobile payment solutions have helped extend financial services to the unbanked and underbanked, bringing them attendant benefits. Besides the more obvious payoff, greater internet penetration can have all kinds of unintended positive impacts on the lives of the poor, as Zack Matere found out.
Matere is a Kenyan potato farmer whose potatoes were dying and he was struggling to understand why. Traditional literature offered little help. Nor did his farmer friends have a clue about what afflicted his potatoes. What he did next has become the stuff of legend in modern development literature. He bicycled 10 kilometers to the nearest internet café and Googled (for the very first time in his life) “potato disease”. It took him no time to find out that the ailment was being caused by ants. He also found that other farmers had gotten rid of similar problems by spreading ash on their plants. When he applied the solution, the problem disappeared. Harvests doubled. The internet has produced many such success stories. There are enough of them to make our development planners realize that this is one investment worth making.
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