INTRODUCTION

The information revolution, along with its attendant explosive growth of knowledge, and the related phenomenon of the globalization of the world economy have brought about the Information Age, which affects all aspects of economic, social and political activity. Insufficient appreciation of this phenomenon leaves a number of developing countries on the short side of an information and technology gap, marking the disparity between information rich and information poor. South Asia is no exception to this disparity where India might have an edge over the others like Bangladesh and Nepal. The need of the hour is, therefore, to join national development information portals with that of other regional initiatives in a collaborative effort to use information and communication technologies (ICT), specially the power of the Internet, for knowledge sharing and disseminating development information. Through a partnership alliance with country development gateways and in collaboration with the Development Gateway Foundation (DGF) the South Asian Regional Development Gateway (SARDEG) is envisaged to be an online communication initiative (Internet portal) that provides and promotes exchange and dissemination of information on development matters in the region initially focused on India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. In later stages, the regional gateway will also try to include the remaining South Asian countries as well based on our success in establishing regional partnerships and operational modalities.

The State Rural Technology Promotion Council (SRTPC), Assam (India) has taken the lead in building this regional gateway to overcome the development communication gap in the region and utilize the new forces of ICT to promote social and economic growth in the region. Preliminary discussions were held with the existing country gateways in Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and India (upcoming) via teleconference, email etc. on this initiative and the country gateways have shown keen interest to join the regional gateway project. Based on these discussions and major regional goals that have been articulated by South Asian leaders , a number of regional issues of common interest were identified as follows:

• Poverty Alleviation and SAARC Development Goals (SDGs)

• Advancing Economic Cooperation

• Social Challenges focusing on women and children

• Environmental Challenges and Natural Disasters

• Combating Terrorism

• People-to-people contact and cultural cooperation

• Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

The global movement towards an information age and the worldwide technological innovations of recent years, along with other structural and economic developments, has led to rapidly falling costs for information and communication technologies. Together with changes facing global and national telecommunication regimes, this presents a clear window of opportunity for appropriate “leapfrog” strategies to accelerate the development of the continent. The creation of SARDEG as a development information portal is both a necessity and an opportunity to accelerate development in all spheres of South Asian economic and social activities.

The paradigm shift in the poverty reduction initiatives in the recent decades has gradually ushered in a new vision of development co-operation based on partnership, ownership, country leadership, broad-based participation, development effectiveness and accountability. The regional development gateway initiative in the South Asia is a definitive step towards that collaborative trend and a welcome change for developing countries like Bangladesh, India and Nepal. Though the beneficial impacts of ICT in the overall development of a country is hardly questioned, incorporating the ICT tools in the ‘transformational’ process mitigating the economic and social empowerment needs of the poor and the women in developing economies is a complex issue. While the link between ICT initiatives and socio-economic development results in general are to still to be thoroughly researched the controversy continues to surround ICT interventions in development programmes doubting these efforts being “techno-quick fix” or “unacceptable tradeoffs” in terms of investments.

The immediate beneficiaries from the regional gateway will be various organizations and institutions in Bangladesh, India and Nepal who are planning and implementing different development initiatives. They will be more cooperative in knowledge and resource sharing in their approaches and will develop a capacity to tackle impediments to their development programs following the approaches of others who succeeded. The capacity-building component of the gateway will enable them to help other institutions to monitor and evaluate their development programmes more objectively. The gateway will focus on issues, needs, obstacles and lessons from development programmes in the rural areas of the region that will benefit ongoing programmes to improve the monitoring and evaluation standards. The gateway portal will also provide a clearinghouse for various policies where both poverty-alleviation and economic empowerment goals are more effectively mitigated within the national plans and programmes. Regional governments, non-government organisations, aid agencies, academia, civil society and media will benefit from the comprehensive cross-country data, information, reports and networks for partnership that will assist them in identifying the problems, opportunities and strategies for addressing poverty-alleviation and overall development programmes in the region. International organizations like UNDP and World Bank, as well as research communities and media agencies will benefit from a better understanding of how various approaches are being applied for poverty alleviation and attaining development goals from a comparative angle in a region that is relatively diverse linguistically, politically and culturally. This will also benefit areas such as intercultural media and communications studies, regional cooperation and international affairs.

SARDEG envisages taking advantage of the most important aspects of the Internet, and building the ability to capture and disseminate information services consistently across the region and provide a unique platform for broad collaborations among various stakeholders, as well as with other existing Country Gateways. SARDEG will bring together development stakeholders to collaborate online and engage in activities related to development like, e-government, e-health, e-commerce, e-learning etc.