COMMUNICATION BARRIERS |
Courtesy: The Imphal Free Press 17 January, 2002 |
Many new frontiers have been established in communication technology right before our very eyes in the past decade. Technology that once seemed a marvel and too remote even for the imagination, are today h the list of everyone's everyday paraphernalia. The advent of the computer age, the internet, cellular telephones, facsimile machines etc., just to name a few. Nobody is awestruck by these machines anymore, although backward states like Manipur are still to get the full benefits of them. Within the state again, it is the capital city Imphal that gets to see more of the latest than the districts, particularly the hill districts. Now with the privatization storm sweeping the country the expansion of these technologies have been accelerated to break neck speed. Indeed, if the advances made in the communication technology have reduced the world to a global village, India too, has become a smaller and more compact village by the same logic. We do not any longer have to wait for the newspapers from the metropolitan cities to know of the events around the world the previous day; they are there instantly before all who have access to these modern communication facilities. The catch again is, privatization has its own logic, and this logic is powered by the consideration of profit. Hence, the concentration of these communication facilities only in cities and towns with population thick enough to turn in profits. This is precisely where our problem is. And this is where we have no choice but to depend on the government's larger policy of bringing about a welfare state, as well as its interest in integrating all diverse sections or its population into the "unitary spirit that we all have been reading and hearing about ever since post-nursery days. It must exercise at least some bit of its regulatory power to divert these facilities to even the non profitable areas.
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