My experience at a not-so recent Conference on ICT in India!

Well not so recently i.e. on Aug 28,2010 I went to a conference on "ICT: AN ENGINE FOR INCLUSIVE SOCIAL GROWTH" organised by CSI-DC, the reason I went there as there were some big people coming there from NASSCOMM and NIC so I had some questions in my mind which I wanted to ask them for so long so this was the golden chance + wanted to see if they were aware of FOSS, and how can FOSS help in ICT stuff, in bridging the Digital Divide.

Before I get into all the real stuff, let me tell you the arrangement from CSI - Delhi Chapter were awesome, nice food, nice goodies and awesome venue (Constitution Club of India, Rafi Marg), and a damn chilling hall. So kudos for that.


RIGHT Way, with the WRONG thing

Now lets get back to work ya the Conf. started with Chief Guest Dr. B.K. Gairola, Director General NIC in his speech he told about an incident of some rural area in south where they were deploying something, and a little girl was preparing a some list of people in her village with some calculation stuff in MS word and then he asked her that is there a better soln./app to do the same stuff then he told her about MS Excel......

Yeah the story is good but IM(not-so)HO the incident was good but here the the right way of ICT is taken with the wrong thing i.e. MS Office in place of some Open Office suite, had that been the case I would have given this a +1.

And then I didn't get a chance to ask them questions because like every other conf. they were running out of time.



A common problem/issue with all the presentations was that they all were PPTs. (M$'s proprietary Powerless Point Presentation format)


NIC guy's laptop running Windows 7


next was the session of National Knowledge Web by Mr. R.S. Mani, Senior Tech. Dir, NIC-HQ, ND he told about NKN which is basically a project of around 6000 Crores in which they will connect all major organisation/institutes of the country with the high-speed Internet, Gbps lines. But this guy had Windows7 running on his laptop what that meant was these guys are wasting taxpayers' money in buying these proprietary s/w total fail for me!! He talked of security and more but no talk about how the  OS used in most of these organisations i.e. M$ Windows with awesome IE 6 browser used in many of these place can be a security threat to everyone!!
 But there was a small mention of Fedora in context to IIT Chennai and JNU which brought smile on my face.. finally something good.

Biometric Application in Social Sector

This was truly a great session by Prof.(Dr.) H.M. Gupta of IIT Delhi, his presentation was nice, he discussed both pros and cons of the technology.

I asked him about the privacy issue in UID he said yeah that's a issue so needs to be discussed.

Next was a Presentation on "Transformational impact of Rural areas thru Broadband N/w" by Mr. Tanay Krishna, GL, C-DOT, ND. In his introduction they told that he has three patents under his name and obviously this was told with "he is the innovator" kind of pride in the voice so I said fine I am gonno ask him about that too. After that he started his presentation told about the Broadband N/w and the devices C-DOT had developed. Then he talked of low cost terminals with nice GUI and localization stuff.  So after he was over with his presentation it was q&a time Since he talked about terminals I asked him what Platform they are going to use... GNU/Linux?? LTSP will be best? to which he didn't reply properly said we are thinking and all.... then I straight away asked him about his Patents....on what thing he had patent but as expected he hesitated, and couldn't explain and organisers told me to contact him offline/personally.

His hesitation was another proof of how Patents are taken and why they can't be discussed publicly or may be he didn't what he had patent on coz of the vagueness the Patents have so he needed to contact his lawyer before that LOL........Whatever it was this was a fail for me......

then was a session on "Smart Cards in Rural areas" by Mr. Vivek Varshney, Head-GD, Nokia-Siemens, Gurgaon he told about many success stories related to ICT in Rural areas where people get loans on smart card and more and then there was mention of Lao Localization project based on KDE, OLPC and Kerala also overall nice session.

Then "ICT in healthcare" by Dr. Thanga Prabhu nice thought, nice presentation but still no mention of foss as such but its k he is doctor and when the S/w guys don't know about FOSS how will a doctor and hats off to him coz he came from Bengaluru, gr8 work sir.

After that "ICT in Education: eLearning" given by Prof.(Dr.) M.M. Pant
I was excited about this as the topic seemed interesting and yes it was.
He told about the changing role of a teacher these from a typical teacher to a curator or mentor and told about the next in thing that will be Personalized learning and about M-learning too..... no doubt his ideas were just awesome and so I wanted his presentation to be a bit longer...but Pant sir had to cut short his presentation and he finished his presentation real fast and organisers were happy coz they were on time now.
And was happy to see that he is on Facebook and Twitter too!

Now was the time of Panel Discussion on "ICT as an Engine of Social Economic Growth"

Dr. Mahesh Chandra (DDG, NIC-HQ) as Chairman & Moderator

and the Panelists were :

1. Prof.(Dr.) P.S. Grover, Ex-HOD, DU
2. Ms. Rama Vedashree, V.P.,NASSCOM
3. Mr. Pradeep Gupta, CMD & Chairman, Cyber Media

This discussion started with intro and then Presentation of Prof.(Dr.) Grover , nice presentation then came the time to introduce the Lady from NASSCOM, Ms. Vedashree, and I was stunned to hear that the V.P. of the National Advisory had 3-4 certifications from the MICROSOFT, with some odd long names which obviously I don't remember, so now I understood how Proprietary M$ stuff is being pushed in to eGov and our country and how our future is being spoilt. My point here is that these a person who herself is certified from Microsoft can advise our eGovt. to work with Open Standards.

Next was Mr. Pradeep Gupta's presentation he made some good points gave an example to support the fact that why should we bridge the digital divide he said 0/0 is not defined, 1/0 is infinity , 0/1 is 0 itself and only 1/1 is 1 and that's what we need to be that is bridge the gap and we all become 1 and hence country will progress.

After this Dr. Mahesh Chandra, the Moderator of this talk summed it all up nicely and now was the questions time and I was literally dying to ask him
Why the hell do govt. websites give info in .doc files and why OpenStandards like .odt aren't used, why not OpenOffice is used, what will happen to our data after say 20 years from now when M$ will stop making Office or will no longer exist/support it ?? Why are you wasting taxpayers' money in buying those licenses of bad software but obviously I asked all this in polite manner with all respect to his position.... he replied that now they are using OpenOffice and Odt at places but the .doc has to be used as they get it from other people and OpenOffice can work with .doc so this is not much of issue.

My next question was Why do the govt. websites recommend and some even make it mandatory to use IE, do I need to purchase useless s/w worth 20000 INR just to access my data??
His reply was simply that they get are not the advisory people they simply get orders from above so they have to follow them and I knew he got orders from the lady sitting right next to him Ms. Vedashree from NASSCOM, who have and are polluting the computing culture of the country and making us slave of these Corporate houses!!

Overall this conference was good for me because everything happened almost according to expectation I knew that this is going to happen how corrupt NASSCOM is and more but just wanted to get more proofs and wanted to ask them f2f that why are they doing this to us, but according to me ICT is a fail without FOSS and so I will call this conference a fail because the sole reason behind this workshop can't be fulfilled with bad proprietary, non-standard stuff!!

To all the readers of this article well thanks for your patience to read the long article and please now at least now open your eyes don't get fooled by these corporate houses and corrupt organisations like NASSCOM!

These are my personal views great if you agree and even more great if you don't, well in both the cases do comment!!

Thanks and JAI FOSS!!