Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for social and economic development in emerging economies have long been a focus of governments, the private sector, and most certainly donors and international development agencies.  Yes, despite all the attention garnered on this field, we are seeing a checkered history of ICTs as a tool for development, with both successes and significant failures littering the landscape.

With the phenomenal growth of mobile technology in the last ten years, the attention of donors, governments, and multi-lateral and international agencies has now turned to the telecommunications sector and mobile technologies as channels to deliver services and products to citizens at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Likewise, large corporate players understand that the more than 2.6 billion people making less than $2 a day constitute a significant potential market for m-products and services.  This population has access to communications technologies in unprecedented numbers.  It is estimated, for example, that in Southeast Asia 55% of the overall population overall now has access to a mobile phone. In sub-Saharan Africa, the numbers are growing fast as well; according to latest numbers an average of 48% of the population has mobile phone access.

In Latin America the numbers are even more impressive.  The vast majority of individuals there now have access to mobile phones with penetration rates of 86% on average across the region. The Middle East is equally highly penetrated with an average 80% market penetration across the region. [source: Wireless Intelligence]

Of course, this kind of penetration of a powerful technology, presents opportunities for healthcare, educatonal services, and economic development delivered over and spurred by mobile technology to populations that were previously extremely hard to reach. Getting the poorest millions connected to the information society will unlock new markets and drive the world economy to a different level.  The estimated purchasing power of this market is debated but if one takes China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa, and Thailand as a sample market, these countries collectively house 3 billion people with a GDP (adjusted to purchasing power parity) of $12.5 trillion. [source: Prahalad 2009]

While this market is undoubtedly large and attractive, it is also informal and highly fragmented. Tapping this market is not without significant difficulties for companies in many regions of the world.

It is therefore important to now seriously discuss the opportunities and critical success factors for scaling m-services – services and products for development delivered over the mobile platform – so that they can reach more people; improve more lives.

What are the barriers for scaling m-services? And how can industry, donors, and civil society organizations move from some of the many promising pilot projects in m-health, m-agriculture, and m-payments to economically viable m-services that increase the quality of life and drive economic growth for the poorest of people.

What kind of mobile services are we talking about?

There are a number of m-services particularly suited for scale that have been growing rapidly in many emerging economies. Some of these include:

• Financial Services conducted via mobile networks and devices: These include mobile payment and banking services, wage and social benefit payments, financial literacy and education.

• Health services supported by mobile technologies: Includes medical records management, health education and behavior change communications, clinical care, treatment support and medication compliance, disease surveillance, medical supply chain management, and health worker training and support.

• Mobile-based learning and education: These include testing, job support, just-in-time learning, mobile educational games, classroom support, teacher training, etc.

• Market information services / agricultural and rural development services via mobile: Farmer information services and help-lines, land and natural resource management, market pricing information, transportation coordination.

The case for scale: Scaling-up is imperative. (Or: no mass, no cash, no impact.)

Mobile technology has changed the way the poorest people are connected. There are two key dimensions that allow us today to talk about the potential for scale: Access and affordability.

• Access: While of course not all markets are saturated yet, as penetration numbers show, experts agree that that mobile access challenge has largely been met around the world.  Most individuals at the bottom of the economic pyramid can now easily make or receive a call with the biggest increase of connectivity happening in the last three years. Even rural BOP connectivity is growing apace, slowing down only recently during the economic downturn. [DeSilva 2008]

• Affordability: The total cost of ownership of mobile communications has been steadily dropping. On average for 77 emerging economies the TCO was USD 13.15; four South Asian countries were below USD 5 TCO in 2007, Since then, there are 12 others counties with TCO below USD 5. (Guinea and Madagascar in Africa).  Particularly in Southeast Asia operators have developed new “budget-telecom-network” business models with process innovations that enable exploitation of long-tail markets. [Teleuse On A Shoestring 2009]

As a result of these factors, scaling m-services is within reach. There exists a strong demand for information and knowledge that mobile communications can effectively address.  There are strong economics in place when services are overlaid using existing infrastructure and delivery mechanisms.  There are products such as information services delivered via mobile and mobile payments, for example, that are inherently scalable and potentially replicable across geographies; and the cost of deployments are rapidly dropping.  There is a market able to pay and there are relevant intermediaries and increasingly ecosystems of players in place.

But most importantly, there is a moral imperative to scale potentially life-changing solutions. Al Hammond of NextBillion.net might have put it best when he said: “Ever since we finished our report on The Next 4 Billion, the numbers haunt me. How do we meet the unmet needs of four billion people?”

As the report points, out, the starting point is not the poverty of individuals at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Instead, it is the fact that these population segments for the most part are not integrated into the global market economy and do not benefit from it. According to The Next 4 Billion, they also share other characteristics:

1. Significant unmet needs. Most people in the BOP have no bank account and no access to modern financial services. Many live in informal settlements, with no formal title to their dwelling. And many lack access to water and sanitation services, electricity, and basic health care.
2. Dependence on informal or subsistence livelihoods. Most in the BOP lack good access to markets to sell their labor, handicrafts, or crops and have no choice but to sell to local employers or to middlemen who exploit them. As subsistence and small-scale farmers and fishermen, they are uniquely vulnerable to destruction of the natural resources they depend on but are powerless to protect. In effect, informality and subsistence are poverty traps.
3. Impacted by a BOP penalty. Many in the BOP, and perhaps most, pay higher prices for basic goods and services than do wealthier consumers—either in cash or in the effort they must expend to obtain them—and they often receive lower quality as well. This high cost of being poor is widely shared: it is not just the very poor who often pay more for the transportation to reach a distant hospital or clinic than for the treatment, or who face exorbitant fees for loans or for transfers of remittances from relatives abroad.

However, contrary to when ‘The Next 4 Billion’ was written, individuals at the bottom of the economic pyramid now have access to telecommunication technology in unprecedented numbers and with that, the potential to access markets, information services, health care, and education, to name just a few – delivered through and with the help of mobile tech.

And yet, despite the access and opportunity mobile technology presents for m-services, and the social and increasingly business imperatives, it’s been noted that the theory, practice, and ‘literature of scaling up is reminiscent of the Loch Ness Monster.  It has been sighted enough to make the most sceptical give it a measure of respectability; and its description is as varied as the people who have written about it.” (Peter Uvin and David Miller, Scaling Up: Thinking Through the Issues).  And even though these words were written in 1994, they largely hold true today.

What is “Scale”?

Scaling m-services, for the purposes of this discussion, refers first and foremost to simple economics.  In a scaled operation, the average unit price declines, and marginal costs of adding another customer are low, and the process is simple and extremely fast.  The second dimension of scale is one of arithmetic. The magnitude of global poverty necessitates information services and products that reach billions of people with discrete products reaching at least millions of people. [Prahalad 2009] Paraphrasing noted author and academic Clay Shirky in regard to scale in social development:  ‘First make it work, then make it cheap.”

The argument has been made that scale will take care of itself, that scaling in m-services will happen simply if we create the right products and tools that have value for the user.  And indeed, in comparison to other ICTs in emerging markets, there may be something unique about mobile technology.  After all, the hardware is selling itself with 4.1 billion people having access to it already.  In other words, the delivery platform is already largely in place. Focusing then on m-services rather than on the infrastructure and hardware, the attention shifts to the more established question of how users adopt new services, especially at the bottom of the economic pyramid with its unique constraints. [source, Jonathan Donner, private conversation]

Barriers to scaling m-services

At the same time as there are significant opportunities for large-scale m-services, there remain barriers to scaling up today.  Customers at the bottom of the economic pyramid have low ARPUs – the magic number that refers to the average revenue per user that telecoms measure as a key profitability indicator – and very high price sensitivity, making sustainable business models more complicated for operators and information service providers alike.  There are strong language and literacy barriers with a scarcity of relevant and accurate content available today.  Smart handsets and data services are still out of reach to the majority of the world due to costs and access, restricting m-services to BOP customers largely to the channels with the lowest common denominators: voice and SMS.

Many attempts at scaling up services to date have failed with only very few (and often described) services like m-payments in Kenya and the Philippines deemed successes.  Many of the failed efforts share similar characteristics however, that when carefully studied, indicate what indeed might work.  So, for example, M-Pesa’s initial attempts at developing an m-payment system in Kenya were not successful. (This is in marked contrast, of course, to try #2, M-Pesa’s current iteration which has grown rapidly and is being expanded regionally across East Africa by the operator). And yet, the first failure was illustrative.

The initial offering was built for an institutional market, rather than the general public; the service offering was complex as opposed to exceedingly simple; the target market was a subset of the overall market as opposed to a mass market; and the products required new behaviours as opposed making existing behaviours that customers were familiar with more simple and easy. [source: GSMA Development Fund presentation]

Other current barriers to scaling m-services include the existing points of friction in the mobile industry today. For example, there is intense competition among operators which do not have a strong history of negotiation or shared approaches (other than interconnections) and who will need to consider, for example, new models and approaches in shared services and infrastructure. For example, there may be promise in shared agent networks as information intermediaries that can act as ‘on-the-ground’ sales and help personnel to scale services and train and employ a sizeable workforce.  (This approach is also referred to as “paraskilling’ as a promising but not uncomplicated business model for m-payments, for example).

Similarly, shared network infrastructure specifically in sub-Saharan Africa as is already the prevalent business model of operators in India, may become en economic necessity as downward price pressure and redundant network infrastructure increases.  Likewise, mobile network operators need to consider new technology products that are conducive to m-services such as such as data-rich MMS, increasing the length of SMS to more than 160 characters, and USSD services.

Critical Success Factors for m-Services at Scale

In a review of the literature and more than a dozen conversations with key stakeholders, there are a number of strong themes that emerged as critical success factors for providing m-services at significant scale.

1. Utility and User Needs:

One of the key themes mentioned over and over again can be summarized as ‘meeting a customers pain’, that is solving real-life problems for people at the bottom of the pyramid.  In other words, any offering has to be of clear and direct value to the user or customer today. This is often referred to as ‘utility’ – the ability of a good or service to fulfill a human want.  Projects that failed, for the most part, tended to put their institutional needs first as opposed to those of the end user.  While this may sound simple and obvious, in the field of social and economic development, it is a remarkably-often ignored proposition. Keeping the end user in mind and how it benefits their lives are paramount in considering what products might be able to be scaled.

Putting user needs and their desire for specific services first and foremost will require local partners, user-centric innovation processes including ethnographic and market research, needs assessments, rapid prototyping, and frequent feedback and sounds feedback loops to ensure that services and products indeed address user needs.

2. An Ecosystem of Partners:

Another theme that emerged is the importance of ecosystems of networks of companies, organizations and individuals that need to be in place for the entire value chain for m-services to take root, grow, and go to scale. As has been pointed out in the realm of mobile money, the key rule of growth there is partnerships. [Jenkins 2008] These players in an ecosystem of m-services include mobile network operators, retailers and local sales agents, regulators, banks, government ministries, local businesses, international donors, and civil society organizations, for example. These players have varying incentive and assets as well as limitations that need to be clearly understood in order to grow a successful ecosystem for scaled services. [Jenkins 2008]

Related to this network of partners is the potential role that so-called infomediaries play. In the field of m-payments, it has become obvious that the network of agents is critical with all the concomitant difficulties of having a wide-reach network of trained and trusted agents in place that act as touch points with BOP customers.  This infomediary role, of agents, so important in mobile financial services, may very well play a critical role in other m-services as well.

3. Domain Experts:

A third key theme is the importance of domain expertise in the specific m-services.  It was noted in our interviews that, in fact, m-services are mainly not about mobile technology per se but about mobile communications and networks as delivery channels for information that require expertise in health systems, banking and payments, developing business models, and operationalizing large-scale deployments, extending existing services to a mobile channel.

4. New Business Models:

To significantly scale m-services to the bottom of the pyramid customers may require rethinking existing business models, including non-commercial or soft funding at the start-up phases of m-services.  Donors and multilateral institutions may well have a role to play in providing capital investments until revenue from m-services starts to materialize.  Additionally, international financial institutions and development donors may play a role in building out the capacity of the some of the smaller players in a m-services ecosystem, such as agents, retailers, and domain content providers in health and education, for example.

Business models for m-services for the bottom of the economic pyramid also need to take into consideration the extreme price sensitivity of these customers and their very limited purchasing power that is small, irregular, and expensive to tap. Irregular cash flow is one of the key barriers in developing sustainable business models at the BOP and needs to be addressed. Affordability, cost to serve, and customer cash flow are the critical issues that necessitate a relentless drive in m-services to lower costs and that need to be a key ingredient of a successful business model. [Frandano 2009]

5. Technical Considerations

A number of technical issues also will need to be addressed rather soon to increase the scale of m-services. Several that have been noted in my conversations with stakeholders:

• Number portability and numbers as identifiers that are unique to a user would open up new avenues to identity management, currently a barrier in many mobile service offerings.
• Opening up larger-scale USSD services would diversify delivery channels that are accessible even on the simplest phones. USSD is an effective channel to access information that is currently left to the digression of the mobile network operators (MNOs). MNOs need to better understand the USSD channel as a delivery mechanism for m-services, consistently open it up for monetization and make it available in all markets as opposed to currently only very few.
• Treating the mobile channel as a secure channel would open up significant opportunities The capacity to authenticate parties that wish to communicate, and then if needed, establish a secure communication channel between them, is currently limited with operators in possession keys and/or cryptographic algorithms required by each authentication and confidentiality process.
• Multi-lateral hub models that would, similar to that of the Internet, select the least costly routing method for mobile transactions.

An enabling environment and the role of government

While ‘regulation’ has a negative connotation in many circles, it is nonetheless an essential component of an enabling environment for mobile services.  However, the role of regulation should be concerned with two key components: Ensuring trust in mobile services, and inclusion into information services delivered via mobile for the most vulnerable populations.

Governments can also become key customers in the effort to scale m-services.  In the area of m-payments and financial transactions, it may be necessary, for example, that ministries of paying out wages and salaries as well as social benefit payments take on m-payments as a some of the largest payers in a given country.  Similarly, governments play a critical role in using mobile channels in healthcare delivery and educational services. In fact, it may well be that in those countries where governments are taking a proactive role in leveraging the mobile channel deliver government services, scale along a variety of other services becomes possible faster and more simply with enabling regulation in the interest of government itself.

Summary

Mobile services at scale represent an enormous area of potential growth, and social and financial inclusion of the most vulnerable populations.  Currently, the field of m-services is littered with small-scale pilots, many of which are NGO and donor-initiated, that have little chance to scale to have longer-term impact and sustainability. To ensure this potential for increasing inclusion of more people in the information society to better their lives and well-being, all players in the mobile ecosystem need to rethink some of their existing strategies and consider what constitutes critical success factors in their given national and regional environments.

MNOs need to develop new alliances and consider new business models and increase their channels, governments need to become large-scale customers using mobile services for their citizens while ensuring through careful and limited regulation that there is an enabling environment for realizing the potential

Civil society organizations will play a key role as content providers and domain experts in a given field such as health care and education for example, and through value-added market research. Donors and multi-lateral agencies will be instrumental in offering innovative financing for start-up mobile services before they can become profitable.

M-services have the potential to change the way developing economies deliver essential social and economic services and attain sustainable growth.  It will take a combined and concerted effort to realize this potential.

This piece was originally published on MobileActive.org (http://mobileactive.org/scaling-mobile-services-development-what-will-it-take) and re-published here by permission.

References:

Donner, J., & Tellez, C. A. (2008). Mobile banking and economic development: Linking adoption, impact, and use. Asian Journal of Communication, 18(4), 318-332.

Frandano, A. K. M. K. P. (2009, March). Emerging markets, emerging models. Monitor Group.

Giray, F., Gercek, A., Oguzlar, A., & Tuzunturk, S. (2009). The effects of taxation on mobile phones: A panel data approach. International Journal of Mobile Communications, 7(5), 594-613.

Global Mobile Tax Review. (2007).. GSMA Association and Deloitte.

Jenkins, B. (2008). Developing mobile money ecosystems. Washington, DC: International Finance Corporation and Harvard Kennedy School.

Kalil, T. (2009). Harnessing the mobile revolution. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 4(1), 9-23.

Kramer, W. J., Jenkins, B., & Katz, R. S. (2007). The role of the information and communications technology sector in expanding economic opportunity. Cambridge, MA: Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Porteous, D. (2009). Mobilizing money through enabling regulation. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 4(1), 75-90.

Prahalad, C. K. (2009). The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid: Eradicating poverty through profits. Wharton.

De Silva, H., & Zainudeen, A. (2008). Teleuse at the bottom of the pyramid: Beyond universal access.

Tax and the Digital Divide: How New Approaches to Mobile Taxation Can Connect the Unconnected. (2005). Tax and the digital divide: How new approaches to mobile taxation can connect the unconnected. GSM Association

Teleuse on a Shoestring. (2009, June).. LIRNEAsia. Retrieved September 30, 2009, from www.lirneasia.net/wp-content/uploads/…/capetown_april09-20.ppt

Mobile phones have already played a significant role in advancing citizen media around the world. They were instrumental in helping capture photos and videos on the streets of Tehran during 2009 protests that followed the elections there. A video captured during that time even won a prestigious journalism award. Mobile phone technology has been used in Namibia to enable more people from around the country to express their views in one of the country’s largest newspapers. In the US, day laborers have been using MMS messages to blog about their daily lives. In South Africa, citizen journalists use SMS, MMS, and other phone-based technologies to submit content and commentary to a local newspaper. The list of examples are plentiful.

In the ongoing digital divide discourse, there are many concerns about fostering online participation in less dominant languages. Voice-based technologies on the mobile phone may play a role in bridging this inequity, especially with languages with weak association to written representation, or languages with tricky character sets. Mobile voice-based technologies also provide opportunities for information services and participation for non-literate audiences.

Making information accessible

For example, a few innovative projects in India are already taking advantage of the ubiquity of mobile phones and cheap voice calling there in order to enable both reporting and news dissemination to rural villagers in local languages. Widespread illiteracy makes newspapers and SMS alerts inadequate as news delivery systems, and irregular electricity makes television and radio unreliable. Voice calls are also very inexpensive in India, with per-second billing and a downward price-war among the main operators. Voice calls over mobile phones are an easy way for villagers to stay informed. In the region of Uttar Pradesh, Gaon Ki Awaaz delivers twice-daily news updates via voice calls to villagers in their native Avhadi language. Launched in December 2009, the project now has 250 subscribers spread throughout 20 villages. Read a case study on the project here.

Further south, a similar project is operating among the members of the Adivassi tribe in India. Like Gaon Ki Awaaz, it allows villagers to share and receive news over their mobile phones in their native language (in this case, Gondi). Launched by Shubhranshu Choudhary of the International Center for Journalists, the project focuses on citizen reports with dozens of citizen journalists reporting throughout the region.

How do we fulfill the potential?

I had the pleasure of attending the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile last week. The summit brought together bloggers, activists, and thinkers working to advance citizen media all around the world.

While the discussions that took place were informative, most presentations and panels fell short in  recognizing the role mobile phones have played and exploring the potential mobile phones can play in citizen media.

There were three unconference-style sessions at the summit, and each session had at least some discussion on the use of mobile phones in citizen media. In most of these conversations, I was glad to realize that mobile phones’ potential in citizen media was in the back of many minds. Given the potential, however, I kept wishing that mobile phones’ role in citizen media were discussed front and center.

Raising further questions

As a way to push these ideas further, I pose the following questions:

• How can you use mobile phones more in your daily reporting work? Will they let you become more creative, spontaneous, immediate in how you can cover events and news? Will they help you in your reporting as they are innocuous devices, much less likely to be confiscated by authorities if you are covering sensitive events? Will they be handy simply because they will always be in your pockets?

• Can we turn increased access that mobile phones provide into increased participation? What is required beyond access to facilitate participation on mobile phones? Can we include ways to participate via sms or voice in every new participatory project that we envision?
• Can we use voice-based technologies to interact better with communities which have richer oral than written traditions? Can we enable more participation in native languages by using voice-based technologies?

Tell us if you have more ideas, or whether you are exploring some of these ideas in your work. If you would like to find out about the tools that you will need to do this work, find case studies of other organizations doing similar work, or a myriad of other resources having to do with mobile phones, check out (and contribute to) the MobileActive.org mDirectory. To read about case studies, tools, and resources specifically to do with media production and dissemination, have a look at this page.

A variation of this post was originally published on Mobileactive.org (http://mobileactive.org/potential-mobile-phones-citizen-media-thoughts-global-voices-citizen-media-summit) and republished here by permission.

A moving report titled Gender Violence in India by Prajnya shows that violence against women is on the rise in India.

An underreported problem

One important issue that the report discusses are flaws in the annual reports produced by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) about violence against women. For example, the NCRB often reports honor killings as torture or caste violence rather than gender violence because of the existing legal system. For this reason, the rate of violence against women may seem much lower than they actually are.

Prajnya’s report, however, uses new methodology and a variety of reports to provide a more accurate depiction of the crimes being committed against women in India. It draws attention to six kinds of violence: pre‐natal sex selection, child marriage and forced marriage, honor killings, dowry death, domestic violence, and rape.

Pre-natal sex selection

The report finds that pre-natal sex selection practices have resulted in at least 10 million missing girls, since ultrasounds and other sex‐selection tests became available two decades ago-‐a striking example of modern technology facilitating age‐old prejudices.

Child and forced marriage

According to the report, South Asia has the highest rate of marriages involving girls under the age of eighteen. Girls and women are often forced into marriage for a variety of reasons. Some include bringng families together for business reasons. Others involve family honor.

Honor killing

Honor killings or crime is committed in India (particularly in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu) in order to salvage the “honor” of a clan, community or family that has somehow been “violated.” Usually the violation occurs through the actions of a woman in the community choosing a husband, lover or boyfriend, against her family’s wishes. Breach of caste rules also lead to violence.

Dowry deaths

Dowry deaths occur when a woman is either murdered or driven to suicide because the family that she has married into demands a higher dowry (or money given by a woman’s family to her husband and in-laws). Since 2006, there has been an increase of 6.2 percent in dowry deaths in India. Nearly 25.7 percent of total such cases reported in the country were reported from Uttar Pradesh (2,076) and Bihar followed next with 14.5 percent (1,172).

Domestic abuse

Indian women are equally vulnerable to domestic violence. A total of 75,930 cases were reported in the country in 2007 with an increase of 20.3% over 2006 and 35.8% over the average of the previous 5 years (2002-2006).

Rape

Madhya Pradesh has reported the highest number of rape cases (3,010) accounting for 14.5% of total such cases reported in the country. Nearly 9.5% (1,972) of the total victims of rape were girls under 15 years of age, while 15.2% (3,152) were teenage girls (15-18 years). Nearly two-third were women in the age-group 18-30 years. Rapists were known to the victims in as many as 19,188 (92.5%) cases according to NCRB statistics for 2007. Neighbors figured as the most common of perpetrators: in 36 percent of the cases a neighbor was involved.

Further readings

Prajnya 16 Days Campaign Against Gender Violence Facebook Notes

Prajnya 16 Days Campaign Against Gender Violence

An anniversary of violence by Kalpana Sharma, The Hindu, 13 December, 2009

In India, the problem of violence against women is a result of a long standing power imbalance between men and women. Men have control over access to property and resources. There is also a sexual division of  labor in India that results in female exploitation–physically, mentally, and commercially.

Oppression in India

Women in India are subject to all forms of violence. Female infanticide is quite common in Haryana and Punjab because there is a preference for sons because male children carry on the family lineage. The education of sons is also considered much more important. In these two states, the sex ratio is lower than the national average.

Discrimination within the household

Within the household, there exists gender discrimination which determines intra-household distribution of food. Because women and girls are given less food than men, malnutrition among adolescent girls and women is quite prevalent in India.

Lack of opportunity to work

Due to lower educational levels, a woman has a much lower capacity to earn. Women from upper castes are seldom allowed to work outside the home. However, work participation rate among low caste women is better compared to that of upper caste women.

Honor killings

Honor killings are quite common in Haryana and Tamil Nadu when young girls marry somebody outside their caste and clan against her family’s wishes.

Women as property

Dowry is demanded from the husband’s side (in-laws) when younger women get married. Newly married women become subject to verbal and physical abuse. In many cases, young brides are burnt to death by her in-laws if the parents fail to meet the requisite dowry demanded. Women are also viewed in terms of their virginity, as chastity is considered as a great virtue.

In terms of family planning, women have been used as the subjects of experiments. Governments promote contraceptives to lower fertility among women, at the behest of multinational corporations and the corporate sector, without thinking about their consequences. Population control and family planning is considered a way to control women’s sexuality.

Photograph posted on Flicker by “Mckay Savage.”

Data on violence against women

In a country like India, it is difficult to rely on statistics pertaining to rape cases. The data may show that such crimes being committed may be going up or down. But in reality, women are afraid of even lodging FIRs (First Information Report) in police stations despite being raped or sexually harassed. The judiciary and the legal system are biased in favor of men. Cases of violence against women are under-reported.

According to the latest National Crime Records Bureau 2007, a total of 1,85,312 incidents of crime against women (both under Indian Penal Code-IPC and Special and Local Laws-SLL) were reported in the country during 2007 as compared to 1,64,765 during 2006, thus recording an increase of 12.5% during 2007. These crimes have continuously increased during 2003-2007 with 1,40,601 cases in 2003, 1,54,333 cases in 2004, 1,55,553 in 2005, 1,64,765 cases in 2006 and 1,85,312 cases in 2007.

The total number of sexual harassment cases were 10,950 in 2007. The total number of cases pertaining to cruelty by husband and relatives was 75,930. There were 61 cases of importation of girls. Altogether there were 38,734 cases of molestation in 2007. (See the URL: http://ncrb.nic.in/cii2007/cii-2007/FIGURES_2007.pdf).

The number of rape cases has increased by nearly ten fold from 2487 in 1953 to 20737 in 2007. Young girls also become victims of child abuse at the hands of their closest male relatives, which they are unable to protest.

What can be done

When women protest against their exploitation, many try to silence them. The experience of Bhanwari Devi, the ’sathin’ from Rajasthan, is a case in point. She was gang-raped for working against child marriage practiced by the upper castes in her village.

According to the NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) 2008, respect for women seem to be the worst in Andhra Pradesh, which accounted for 83.5 per cent of cases under Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act of total cases across the country. Out of a total 1,200 such cases, Andhra had registered 1,005 incidents in this regard. The NCRB data clearly points to the profile of the average rapist – over 75% were known to the victims. In fact, nearly 10% were relatives. Another disturbing aspect was that about a quarter of the rape victims were minors.

During the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in September 1995, the United Nations Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, said that violence against women is a universal problem that must be universally condemned. The United Nations has termed violence against women as a gross violation of human rights. In India, a survey showed that for each incidence of violence, women lost an average of 7 working days.

Role of media

Media that includes television, radio and newspapers can play a positive role in creating awareness about the pitfalls of violence against women. Mass media’s power should not be undermined by our policy makers.

Society does not have much space for people who defy the mainstream, especially for those with a homosexual identity. In India, the mainstream love stories that most people encounter are about heterosexuality. But despite this glaring absence of popularity or even visibility, homosexual identity has still managed to consistently survive. The Indian films Fire and My Brother Nikhil are examples of film bringing marginalized people to the forefront.

Fire

Deepa Mehta’s Fire was released in India in 1998 and ignited the film world with its bold statement. It was about women who bond out of loneliness and neglect and who develop a lesbian relationship. The film was shocking to the Indian moral brigade who found it defamatory to the image of India in the public eye. Many went on rampages, tearing down posters and disrupting theatres where the film was playing. Though the film angered many, at the same time, it was one of the first Indian films to illustrate a positive lesbian relationship.

My Brother Nikhil

My Brother Nikhil is the story of a state swimming champion Nikhil who goes through severe psychological and social stigmatization once it is discovered that he is HIV positive. Set in Goa between 1987 and 1994, the film marks Nikhil’s struggle with with the stigma of HIV and homophobia.

The stigma of HIV

The stigma related to AIDS is shown in a scene where the other swimmers all leave the pool on seeing Nikhil. It is seen again when a restaurant refuses to serve Nikhil’s parents because their son is HIV positive. What follows is a series of tumultuous events where he is thrown out of his house and later put into jail: examples of ostracism due to being gay and HIV positive.

Breaking down stereotypes

The film is a major landmark in the Queer history of India. Not only was it one of the first mainstream Bollywood films with a gay storyline, but it also broke several stereotypes. The effeminate gay man was suddenly replaced with Nikhil, a seemingly normal man with no cliched traits to mark him as gay. This depiction of a gay man challenges the stereotype that all gay men are effeminate or dress in drag, making My Brother Nikhil a film that challenges social norms and stereotypes.

The film also challenges stereotypes by not stating how the protagonist contracts HIV. Though the public perception is that gay men contract the virus through promiscuity, this film avoids this stereotyped view by leaving the possibility of how Nikhil became HIV positive open. Instead of focusing on how Nikhil contracted HIV, it emphasizes the challenges that each of the characters face and how their changing identity is shaped through this tragedy. HIV infection here works as a metaphor for the stigma of being gay and HIV positive.

Positive images of love

The relationship between Nikhil and his boyfriend, Nigel, is also depicted in a positive way. It is heartening to see Nigel’s love for Nikhil. Despite the hostility directed towards Nikhil which also directly affects Nigel (his house is defaced and the word “faggot” is written in graffiti), he still remains committed to Nikhil until the end. Nikhil and Nigel’s relationship is one defined by love, companionship and mutual respect which again breaks the stereotype that homosexual relations are merely about the desire for physical intimacy.

Mainstream Indian films still have a long way to go till homosexuality can be out of the closet. However, films like My Brother Nikhil and Fire are paving the way for acceptance of marginalized people.

Caste system, which is still widely practiced in Hindu communities in large parts of India, means that many lower caste women in India are denied access to health care.

Recent report by the Associated Press says that

“caste discrimination continues to plague Indian mothers. One 2007 study in six north Indian states found that 61 per cent of maternal deaths were among Dalits — as “untouchables” are now called — and the indigenous people known here as tribals, Human Rights Watch said. Those two communities are at the very bottom of India’s complex social ladder, and are far more likely to live without equal access to jobs, education or health care.

In Uttar Pradesh, caste discrimination is an ingrained part of the medical system, doctors and activists say. “Upper-caste health workers refuse to visit Dalit communities,” said Lenin Raghuvanshi, a rights activist. Because of that, “pregnant Dalit women do not get [nutritional] supplements and the majority of them are anemic.”

Discrimination

Curse of caste means that lower caste patients are often asked for bribes, favors just get admitted to a hospital-even in emergency cases. Rajender Singh Negi at One World South Asia writes about an egregious incident of discrimination in his article Social exclusion rampant in India’s maternal health care

“New Delhi: A husband rushed his pregnant wife, writhing in labor pain, on his bicycle to a government hospital in Rampur Maniharan block. A nurse there demanded a bribe of Rs 500 for admission. Unable to pay the bribe, she was refused admission. The woman delivered a dead baby outside the hospital gates. The husband and wife were dalits. Later the hospital authorities tried to hush up the matter.”

Maternal mortality

Although high rate of maternal mortality among women of lower caste is a reality in India, it is not the only healthcare issue they face. Malnutrition, poor access to childhood vaccinations and preventative care, comparatively increased exposure to diseases caused by poor sanitation are also plaguing India’s lower caste population.

Professor K.S. Jacob of the Christian Medical College, Vellore, Tamil Nadu says

” Health indicators: Data from the National Family Health Survey-III (2005-06) clearly highlight the caste differentials in relation to health status. The survey documents low levels of contraceptive use among the Scheduled Castes(SC) and the Scheduled Tribes (ST) compared to forward castes. Reduced access to maternal and child health care is evident with reduced levels of antenatal care, institutional deliveries and complete vaccination coverage among the lower castes. Stunting, wasting, underweight and anaemia in children and anaemia in adults are higher among the lower castes. Similarly, neonatal, postnatal, infant, child and under-five statistics clearly show a higher mortality among the SCs and the STs. Problems in accessing health care were higher among the lower castes. The National Family Health Survey-II (1998-99) documented a similar picture of lower accessibility and poorer health statistics among the lower castes.”

The way forward

In spite of all odds against them, India’s lower caste women are now organizing and standing up for their rights. Here is one such young warrior Hema Konsotia. She is a college graduate and a union activist in New Delhi. The video is from World Focus.

Click here to view the embedded video.