Global Policy Forum

By Shashi Tharoor

Internet access

GENEVA Dollar signs are no longer the only element dividing the haves and the have-nots. That is already clear from a preparatory conference here this week on the issues to come before the first World Summit on the Information Society, scheduled for December 2003.

In the era of the information revolution, there is lots of liberté, some fraternité and no égalité. Access to information is increasingly vital for development and prosperity. Yet the new divide in the world is not just between high-tech countries and low-tech countries; there are also no-tech countries, and their prospects are grim.

No one disputes that there are dramatic disparities across the world. An estimated 1.3 billion people subsist on less than a $1 a day; nearly a billion people are illiterate; well over a billion lack access to safe water; some 840 million starve or face food shortages; and nearly a third of the people in what the United Nations calls the least developed countries will probably not survive to their 40th birthday.

Yet the most striking global divide of today is information inequality. The new poverty line is drawn this side of the computer keyboard. You can tell the rich from the poor by their Internet connections.

Each year the UN's Index of Human Development reveals that more countries have lower scores than in the previous year. Dozens of countries are regressing, not progressing, in terms of human development. One crucial reason is that the knowledge gap - embracing information, education, and access to technology - is widening.

There can be little argument that information and freedom go together, or that education is the premise of progress. The information revolution is inconceivable without political democracy - and vice versa. Already, the spread of information has had a direct impact on the degree of accountability and transparency of governments around the world.

There is widespread recognition that restraints on the flow of information directly undermine development. Global interdependence means that those who receive and disseminate information have an edge over those who curtail it. The consequences are apparent in all fields of human endeavor.

The challenge is how to widen the reach of information - how to make it available to people everywhere, whether they live in the industrialized world or the developing world. The ability to receive, download and send information through electronic networks, and the capacity to share information has already become the new hallmark of development.

Communications and information technology have enormous potential in furthering sustainable development. The task is to promote greater, freer and fairer access to information for developing countries, which means improving their infrastructure and sharing technological advances with them.

For their part, developing countries need to open up to the outside world, liberalize the mass media, and resist government control and censorship of information. International organizations are already thinking of pilot projects in such fields as interactive long-distance learning, telemedicine, telebanking and micro-credit schemes, environmental protection and management.

The developing world must seize such opportunities.

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