Heralding Knowledge Based Societies

Dear Colleagues at WSN.

Greetings from SDNP India!

A lot has been said about the digital divide being a hindrance to evolution
of Knowledge Societies in the South. However digital divide is only one
aspect of the gamut of factors and one should also look at impeding
factors- some of which if dealt strategically could be turned into
comparative advantage for the Southern countries. A true Knowledge Society
is like a perfect system where the knowledge gets recognised and valued and
also ends up benefiting the society from where it originates. So, it is not
just a question of people accessing information but also about information
finding its way to the probable users and that is exactly what is lacking
before we can call a society as a perfect
knowledge society. 

In  what I have concluded in my recent paper on "Heralding
ICT-enabled Knowledge Societies- way forward for developing countries" at 
     http://sdnp.delhi.nic.in/resources/internetinfo/articles/heralding.htm
the problem with many developing countries so far has been their inability
to recognize the knowledge they possess, put a value to it and use the
power of knowledge to their growth. Ironically, the value of the vernacular
knowledge gets noticed in developing countries only after its value is
recognized and put to use in the developed nations. The self-imposed
barriers need to be removed if these countries are to be a part of the
growth of the knowledge societies. And developing countries do have a
comparative advantage over other countries because of their richness and
diversity of the human resource capital which is the base capital for
knowledge incubation.

Further, there are a lot of other barriers which impede the transformation
to perfect knowledge societies such as Northern-centric content, linguistic
barriers, and lack of skills which I have raised in the paper along with
outcomes of some of the discussions held during the Global Knowledge II at
Malaysia. 
An abridged version of the paper in form of an editorial has been placed by
One World Europe Think Tank at their website at
http://www.oneworld.net/thinktank/id/index.html


Thank you for going throught this email and I would be grateful to have
your feeback on the paper.

Warm Regards

Vikas Nath
Programme Officer, SDNP India 
Inlaks Scholar 2000-1 (L.S.E)
T: +91 11 436 2140
F:  +91 11 436 1147
E-mail: sdnp@envfor.delhi.nic.in
URL : http://www.vikasnath.org