Development, Democracy, and the Village Telephone.

Conventional thinking about Third-World development rejects the idea of state-of-the-art technology for villages that lack adequate water, power, food, and literacy. But Sam Pitroda argues that modern telecommunications and electronic information systems are completely appropriate technologies even for the poorest regions of the world. Why? First, telecom is indispensable in mobilising the resources necessary to meet basic human needs. Second, information technology is the greatest democratizer the world has ever seen. The author was born to a lower caste Indian family in a village without electricity or telephones. At 22, he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. At 38, he was a U.S. citizen, a self-made millionaire in the field of digital switching, and a man with a mission. In 1980, Indian telecom was in a sorry state, with 2.5 million telephones and 12,000 public phones for a population of 700 million people. Only 3% of India's 600,000 villages had telephone service of any kind. Worse yet, switching and transmission technologies were antiquated. Convinced that India needed digital technology, universal telephone accessibility, and native Indian engineering, the author became an unpaid adviser to the prime minister and launched a program to modernize Indian telecom. By 1987, India had developed its own digital electronics industry and was manufacturing the world's first small rural digital exchange for village use. Today rural exchanges are being installed at the rate of 25 each day. By 1995, more than 100,000 villages will have telephone service. By the turn of the century, virtually every Indian will have access to telecommunications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]