How can a country that boasts 800 films a year being in production also be a country where so very few people even have access to things like computers? Is it possible to be both on the forefront of modern film making and also have one of the highest poverty rates? India is a country that straddles sides of this line.
India is a country that desperately wants more. They want to make movies, use cell phones, have computers in their homes and consistently use electricity. However this is not true for many of its citizens. They are one of the largest cell phone producers in the world, many people own more then one. Yet there are parts of the country who run on as little as three hours of electricity a day. How can these people be expected to have a cell phone?
They are proud of their film industry. They love going to the cinema and it shows. People will dress up just to go to opening night of a film they are excited for. Yet there are over 25,000 street children living in Jaipur who may never even get the chance to see a movie yet dress up for one. They live on the streets or in make shift homes with no running water or food let alone the electric power to run a television.
While in India I spent some time working at an NGO in Jaipur. Ladli is a school for street children. A short reprieve from the hard lives they live. They are taught skills that will hopefully give them a craft to earn money with. They are taught how to make bracelets and sew. They are not taught how to use computers. I was told while I was there that they will inevitably have no use for such things once they leave the schools. It is unlikely they will ever use computers. There is also no not enough money for the school to provide computers to learn on. These are India's youth. Learning the trade of sewing not computer science. Leaning how to make bracelets not how technology works.
There is also another unfortunate problem in the country and that's the reliability of the electricity. One small village I stayed in was beautiful. We stayed in a renovated palace. What once housed local royalty was now a hotel. However when asking if I was able to get wifi or more likely a locals home which provided a single computer for tourist use, I was told that they had not had any power as of late so it would be hard to find something like that for me.
“Around 137 million Indians were online by June 2012 (Internetworldstats.com). The online revolution has largely bypassed rural India, a government study has shown.” BBC World Profile
In a world that's rapidly moving forward and ever changing how are these people ever going to keep up? Is there even a chance for them? The answer is no unless they can start utilizing the youth for the future. There is no way to change the way that most of India lives. It is idealistic to think that the poverty and isolation are things that can be easily wiped out. It is a long road for them but if they can start with the new generation they have a shot at dragging themselves into the dawn of new technologies.