The Hindu Business Line : In defence of the computer

Mulayam Singh Yadav’s assertion that his party won’t allow computerisation is an old ghost unexpectedly raising its head afresh. Computerisation in India was a controversy from start, given the image of job loss that was attached to it. Popular belief was that computer and clerk wouldn’t survive together at the same office desk; it could be only one of the two.

In the late eighties and early nineties, many such protests had been the stuff of mainstream news reporting, prominent of the lot being the widespread opposition from the banking sector to the use of computers.

There were strikes, shutdowns and the regular spectre of protesters on the street — all against a machine that has since become ubiquitous.

A Ticket to change

What probably changed the tide, altered the popular perception of computerisation was the magic wrought by the computer at one of India’s best examples of inefficiency and corruption.

For decades, acquiring a railway ticket had meant anything from task to expedition. You stood in queue from morning, weathered the disputes and quarrels in the line, saw the counter shutting at lunch time, resume after lunch, saw it drift off again into tea and you finally came home exhausted with a precious, small card ticket.

During peak season, such as the summer vacation period, people would come the previous night and sleep in queue outside the reservation office so that they would be the first in line when the counter opened.

When nothing seemed to work and the hapless citizen was crushed by unmoving time and his own dismissive worth in the ocean of humanity clamouring for tickets, the lure of the tout proved powerful. Eventually, a railway ticket became a matter of having the right connections.

In 1986, computers were first introduced in the rail ticket reservation process at New Delhi.

About a decade later in 1994, the new online passenger reservation system was rolled out, all four metros and Secunderabad covered by 1999.

They worked as regional centres with other stations plugging in. In 2002, booking via the Internet was started.

Starting with major cities, computerisation progressively eliminated many of the ills associated with railway tickets.

Even today, there are occasions when a railway ticket needs divine intervention or one of those connections, but by and large that phase is reached after a transparent and often efficient shot at procuring your right of passage the proper way.

Some in the railways may have protested but ordinary people were simply happy to see the machines at the booking counter. The machines have since gone beyond metros and cities to towns and smaller railway stations.

With this powerful example centre-stage and even anti-computer folks from other jobs benefiting from the new-found railway efficiency, it was probably difficult to keep opposing computerisation at large. Bank strikes continued to happen but computerisation was hardly the cause.

If anything, customer sentiment with regard to banks at present may be one of over-computerisation in select cases and an inability to keep pace with technology change.

Mulayam Singh, it would seem, has never stood in queue at a railway reservation counter. Or, as has been the case with political parties ahead of the upcoming general election, he is desperate for a cause to call his own and therefore doesn’t mind inventing one. In the event, he found two that have hogged attention in the media – anti-computerisation and anti-English language. Both would have left India’s information technology crowd, including its component in western Uttar Pradesh’s Noida, appalled. Here was a country that owed its emergent profile to the surge of its IT industry and this was what a prominent politician and former chief minister had to say?

Pressures of politics?

Even if that holy cow of all politicians — the agricultural sector — was befriended and promoted, the role of computers in it cannot be discounted.

The machine finds application or has potential for application in everything to do with farm produce — from land records to fundamental research to best practices to information on the weather to harvest data to supply chain management and retail sales. Companies, through their e-initiatives in the field, have taken computers to the farmer.

So what makes this machine, so common in urban areas that a generation of children uses it with ease, appear like a two-horned devil to politicians? Probably Mulayam Singh Yadav wants a unique message to fight the elections.

The style fits the overall language of the 2009 general election with nothing solid and permanent on offer ahead of the polls and only the shakiness of post-poll coalitions for solidity.

Nothing is what it is ahead of election. Mulayam Singh can always change his view.

However in combination with that anti-English stance, he seems to betray something else about self and constituency. Everywhere, every day, in this changing world there is the ongoing divide of people into the mobile and immobile categories.

The former engages, adapts and seeks a wider world. The latter prefers a cocooned life, refusing travel in real and imagined terms.

In that cocooned state you link pride to your language and glorify your unruffled existence or have the world on your terms, enforcing your view on others.

Seeing anything different as potential subversion, you may then develop a fantastic suspicion for the computer. Information and efficiency are avoidable irritants. Like a film running in reverse, virtue graces the image of long, unmoving queues at railway counters.

The past becomes the present and the present becomes a soothing lullaby. Secure in his cocoon, Mulayam Singh Yadav drifts to sleep.

In his dream he eschews the English language and smashes computers...

The author is a freelance writer based in Mumbai

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