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Communication Barriers
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 in 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 of 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.
On a smaller canvas, the same logic must be applied in the Manipur context too. Efforts must be made to extend the advances in telecommunication technology to the districts in the interest of closer integration of the state. Again it is an acknowledged fact that establishing remote communication facilities through airwaves, have become far easier than developing surface communication infrastructure.
The example of Osama bin Laden, communicating with the rest of the world through his satellite phones from the inaccessible cave complexes of the Hindukush Mountains in Afghanistan, illustrates this point pretty succinctly. Surface transport is indispensable, but while they are being pursued, the former can be made to precede it.
The news that the new technology mobile telephones, Wireless on Local Loop, WLL, will be reaching Imphal is good news. We say this considering the convenience of mobile phones against the background of the ever-increasing pace of life in the city, and not so much of their fashionability. It will certainly be a boon for many professionals who spend most of their duty hours in the field. The telecom department already has a plan, but the state government can help by impressing upon the ministry of telecommunication, of the need to extend this facility at the soonest to all the districts. That would bridge a lot of the existing communication gaps in the state and the country.
(Courtesy: The Imphal Free Press) |
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