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N Sathiya Moorthy in Chennai
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on Monday said that the spread of information technology should not cause social isolation of the vulnerable people in the society.
"Modern culture is oriented to serve mainstream needs. The globalisation of the nineties, while integrating the world, has also caused social deprivation in many countries," she said.
She was inaugurating a conference on 'IT-software in Indian and Asian Development', co-sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, in Chennai.
Information Technology, instead, should be an instrument of 'social inclusion', Jayalalithaa said. "India and other countries in Asia need a low-cost, open-source platform to steer their growth in the IT sector. We also need to develop and share appropriate technologies like the 'Simputer' and indigenous technologies like the 'corDECT' for wireless communications."
The chief minister said Asian economies, which have shown a downturn in the late nineties, could boom once again by tapping the potential of information technology for earning foreign exchange.
Pointing out that Tamil Nadu was the first state in the country to come out with an IT policy of its own, Jayalalithaa said, the government was willing to be a pro-active partner in the endeavour in association with other state governments, the Centre and other Asian countries.
She said the need of the hour is to build fruitful partnership for mutual advantage and at the same time cautioned the nation from entering into a pricing game.
Jayalalithaa proposed `Disaster Recovery Centres' as a good platform for such partnerships among the Asian countries, and promised all help to such an effort for any Asian nation that was interested in locating such a centre in Tamil Nadu.
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