Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Behind the digital divide (19 Mar 2005) A conservative estimate of the cost of the equipment in the Embalam centre is 200,000 rupees ($4,500), or around 55 years' earnings for Thillan. Annual running costs are extra. When asked about the centre, Thillan laughs. “I don't know anything about that,” she says. “It has no connection to my life. We're just sitting here in our house trying to survive.” Scenes like these, played out around the developing world, have led to something of a backlash against rural deployments of new information and communications technologies, or ICTs, as they are known in the jargon of development experts. In the 1990s, at the height of the technology boom, rural ICTs were heralded as catalysts for “leapfrog development”, “information societies” and a host of other digital-age panaceas for poverty. Now they have largely fallen out of favour: none other than Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, derides them as distractions from the real problems of development. “Do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day?” he asked at a conference on the digital divide in 2000. “About 99% of the benefits of having a PC come when you've provided reasonable health and literacy to the person who's going to sit down and use it.” That is why, even though Mr Gates made his fortune from computers, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, now the richest charity in the world, concentrates on improving health in poor countries. Article URL: http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3714058 Read 66 more articles from Economist sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Humanoids on the march     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy