Fishing in troubled waters

A news report, carried in several newspapers, reports that the Orissa state government has set up a service for fisherfolk, with five or six messages a day, in text and voicemail, providing ocean/weather data. Many years ago, following the disastrous typhoon of 1998, listmembers had advocated creating such early warning systems, based on community radios, in order to take care of both disaster preparedness and impact mitigation, plus the use of open data networks built and supported by local communities to create the expertise needed to build networks on the fly at refuges and camps for survivors.

The first part has been made possible by the eventual spread of accessible and more affordable mobile connectivity, although the investment in this has been made by private parties. Of course, on public spectrum delivered into their private hands, at the cost of any public alternative, but the good news is that the numbers of fisher deaths have fallen to a third in the first year since the service began, and it now has some 2 lac registered users.

Arguably, whether something worthwhile is done by private or public organisations should not be of much concern. However, the actual messaging service is in fact at public cost, by the state government. That kind of takes the gloss off of the achievement for me. Curiously, telco promoters have been repeatedly nominated to the Rajya Sabha. I'm sure that is entirely a coincidence. 

The anointing of Mr Sharma to TRAI (which may or may not have actually taken place by now) is another indication of present policy thinking on such things, since his previous achievement has been foisting the UIDAI upon the country. If the present slew of cases against it (disclaimer: this writer is a fellow petitioner in one of the cases) are successful, the disastrous exercise will be outlawed, but destroying the data collected to any minimal level of surety will cost us an unknowable amount more than the suspected (but not officially admitted) 15,000 crores spent on endangering 900 million persons for the yet uncomputed benefit of Indian and foreign private enterprises (and possibly the NSA and CIA, due to their connections with the private companies that were contracted by UIDAI for de-duplication). Actually, it is quite hard to put a fixed number on the value of identity theft, which is a movable feast, related to the numbers of actual users in a
 digital economy.

The lack of interest on the part of both central and state agencies to foster public involvement in the coastal safety service, and countless other such valuable (but not Stock Exchange linked values) initiatives remains exactly where it is, a festering sore.

Vickram

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

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