Mine was the first household in Sri Lanka to have a working television set — two years before my adopted country commenced terrestrial transmissions in 1979. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) donated a 5-metre dish antenna that enabled me to receive signals from communications satellites placed over the Indian Ocean. It was a crowd-puller for several weeks: everyone from cabinet ministers and civil servants to school children wanted to see pictures coming in from the skies.

Today, television rules how Sri Lankans work, dine and socialise.And when an important cricket match is being broadcast live, I have to look hard to find any signs of life on the streets of Colombo.

Even if the novelty of images from the skies has completely worn off, debates on their social and cultural impact continue. In the early days, I was often approached by people who were concerned about what satellite television might do to local cultures, traditions and values. Some of us who suffer from information overload find it difficult to imagine its even deadlier opposite: information starvation. I get annoyed when I hear arguments — usually from people who have been educated beyond their intelligence — about the virtues of keeping happy, backward people in perpetual ignorance. Such an attitude seems like that of a fat man preaching the virtues of fasting to a starving beggar.

Every TV programme has some education content: the cathode ray tube (and now the plasma screen!) is a window on the world; indeed, on many worlds.Often it’s a very murky window, but I’ve come to the conclusion that, on balance, even bad TV is preferable to no TV at all.

In the mid 1970s, I was associated with the world’s first systematic attempt to transmit educational television programming directly to villages. The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) involved 2,400 villages in six Indian states, and used a leased American communications satellite to beam television programmes carrying information on family planning, crop production, healthy living and other practical matters that can raise the quality of life — and often save lives.

Working with the indefatigable Dr Yash Pal and his dynamic team gave me valuable insights on how developments in communications can produce tangible benefits for large numbers of ordinary people. Soon after SITE ended, I wrote, “One of the most magical moments in Satyajit Ray’s exquisite ‘Pather Panchali’ is when the little boy Apu hears for the first time the aeolian music of the telegraph wires on the windy plain. Soon, those wires will have gone forever; but a new generation of Apus will be watching, wide-eyed, when the science of a later age draws down pictures from the sky — and opens up for all the children of India a window on the world.”

Those experiments with the ‘schoolmaster satellite’ now seem to belong to a completely different age. Much has happened since, particularly in the 1990s when commercial satellite television proliferated, opening up fierce competition in the skies over India. Many millions of dishes have bloomed across the subcontinent, and tens of millions of modern-day Apus are now growing up taking satellite television, mobile phones and internet for granted.

But we have to acknowledge that the communications revolution has bypassed tens of millions of others in many parts of the world.We are reaching the point in our technological evolution when we can — and must — commit more time and resources to solving the problems of poverty, deprivation and inequality.

I discussed some of these concerns while addressing the UN General Assembly 20 years ago, during the World Telecommunications Year 1983. I suggested that the ‘A telephone in every village’ would be one of the most effective social stimulants in history, because of its implications for health, weather forecasting, market information, social integration and human welfare. I added,“Each new telephone installation would probably pay for itself, in hard cash, within a few months. I would like to see a cost-effectiveness study of rural telephone systems for the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. But the financial benefits, important though they are, might be insignificant compared with the social ones.”

When I spoke my mind from that famous podium in New York, I did not imagine how quickly my words would be illustrated by actual developments. Just as satellite television swept across the globe during the 1980s, the internet spread rapidly in the 1990s.Virtually everything we wish to do in the field of communications is now technologically possible. The key limitations are financial, legal, social and political. In time, I am sure, most of these will also disappear, leaving us with only limitations imposed by our own morality.

And making the right choices and investments is indeed a hard task. There is a danger that technological tools can distort priorities and mesmerise decision-makers into believing that gadgets can fix all problems. A computer in every classroom is a noble goal — provided there is a physical classroom in the first place. A multimedia computer with internet connectivity is of little use in a school with leaking roofs — or no roof at all. The top priorities in such cases are to have the basic infrastructure and adequate number of teachers — that highly under-rated, and all too often underpaid,multimedia resource.

We must therefore take a few steps back from the digital hype and first try to bridge the ‘Analog Divide’ (to coin a phrase) that has for so long affected the less endowed communities in developing countries (and even in some developed ones). Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) should be part of the solution, not the only solution.

We need to ensure that ICTs are not only accessible but are also affordable. I have seen how some Sri Lankan schools have all the hardware and software and yet can’t use the internet — because they can’t afford the phone bill. I was appalled to hear some years ago that about a third of transistor radios in the developing world are not used — because their owners can’t buy new batteries. (This inspired British inventor Trevor Bailey to develop the wind-up radio).

Our big challenge, therefore, is to get ICTs to solve real life problems without creating any new ones. In the early part of the last century,Mahatma Gandhi proposed a simple test for the effectiveness of any development activity: find out how the last man would be affected by it. We should adapt this as a test for ICTs in development: how will the last man, woman and child be reached, touched and transformed by these marvellous communication tools?

This Regional Human Development Report is a pioneering attempt to examine how ICTs can be used effectively to bring about such development and social change. It is no coincidence that it covers the Asia Pacific region — home to the world’s largest television audience, and where mobile phones and personal computers are among the fastest selling consumer electronic products. Using the United Nations’ eight Millennium Development Goals as a benchmark, the Report presents the experience of nine Asian countries.

There is no single formula for success; each country has to define what works best within the range of options and technologies available. Such decisions and choices have to be made quickly and resolutely as the development needs are vast and urgent.

The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs — a small army of ‘geeks’ who have reshaped our world faster than any political leader has ever done. And that was the easy part. As this Report shows, we now have to apply these technologies for saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor,misery and suffering.

In short, the time has come to move our focus from the geeks to the meek.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Colombo, Sri Lanka
12 November 2003

[The world’s best known writer of science fiction, Sir Arthur C Clarke has long advocated the appropriate use of information and communications technologies for development. He was the first to propose the concept of the geostationary communications satellite in 1945, and one of his short stories inspired the World Wide Web. He has lived in Sri Lanka since 1956 and was until recently Chancellor of the country’s MIT — the University of Moratuwa.]