Communications of the ACM
India Embraces Technology as the Path From Poverty
Credit: Associated Press
The world hit seven billion people last week, and I think half of them were on the road from New Delhi to Agra in India. They were on foot, on bicycle, on motor scooters. They were in pickups, dented cars and crammed into motorized rickshaws. Somehow, without benefit of police or stoplights, this flow of humanity that is modern India impossibly went about its business.
But just when your mind tells you that this crush of people will surely overwhelm all efforts to lift the mass of India out of poverty, you start to notice a pattern: Every few miles there's a cellphone tower and a fresh-looking building poking out of the controlled chaos. And the sign out front invariably says "school" — engineering school, biotechnology school, English-language school, business school, computer school or private elementary school. India is still the only country I know where you can find a billboard advertising "physics degrees."
All these schools, plus 600 million cellphones, plus 1.2 billion people, half of whom are under 25, are India's hope — because only by leveraging technology and brains can India deliver a truly better life for its masses. There are a million reasons why it won't happen, but there is one big reason it might.
From TheRecord.com
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