WIRING INTO THE WORLD --------------------- India has begun to tap the bewildering potential of computer networks and, with an increasing number of people going online, the country is poised to join an international community of info surfers. By Arun Katiyar Take a moment from the relentless rush of life. And think about this: if in the middle of making a crucial investment decision you suffered an urge to play, what would you do? Investment analyst Neeraj Maheshwari has it worked out. As information from the volatile Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) rapidly scrolls on his computer screen, he strikes a button on the keyboard, and begins to play noughts-and- crosses with a person he has never met. Even as he plots his next move, a tiny window opens on his screen announcing Brazil's 1-0 victory over the US at the World Cup. In the next few seconds, Maheshwari makes his winning move, thanks his unknown opponent, and goes back to monitoring the stock quotations. Okay, so he didn't leave his office to play a killing game of squash. But in the next few months, he might have the option to play a game of chess or even an electronic version of tennis. All without taking his eyes off the live feed of information seamlessly transfered from the trading ring of the stock exchange. Electronic sorcery? Well, almost. In an age when miracles and wonders have ceased to exist, technology has begun to turn dazzling new tricks. The magic 'mantra' Maheshwari uses to make it happen is 'networking'. The 30-year-old Bombay-based investment analyst is just one of thousands in the country to have taken a tentative step towards joining a community that works, plays and learns online. But once stripped of its techno-sparkle, networking is a fairly simple concept. At least in theory. The fundamental change in Maheshwari's workplace began when he harnessed the true potential of his personal computer (PC) by wiring it into his phone line with a modem. Suddenly his PC wasn't an ordinary number cruncher or a fancy desk-top decoration. As part of a 'network' of computers, it became a powerful communications tool. Now, connected to a service called India Online, Maheshwari is able to send messages (e-mail) to people, get a live feed of share movements at the BSE, do a run on information like shareholding patterns across 42,000 companies, play games with other users of India Online and get byte-sized updates on cricket scores and market-gossip 'broadcasts' on the network by an info-jockey. All at the same instant. In a way, it puts a new spin to the relentless rush of life. --- Networks, where computers are electronically linked to one another over a cable or satellite, are rapidly reshaping the world, changing the very way we think and talk. Three years ago, with satellite television becoming a reality, we came to live with terms like channel surfing. Now, deep-freeze your remote control and get this: television is mind-numbing; information surfing on the nets is mind-altering. The action is shifting to cyberspace, the vast electronic thoroughfare where computers meet and exchange information. At the tap of a keyboard, you can pop into a maze of retail data outlets, download airline schedules, scan the day's news or even participate in a shouting match on religious fundamentalism. Next on the Indian technological horizon? Online shopping. Making it possible are a strange mix of people, from computer nerds to hard-wired technologists. Bombay-based Bimal Sicka, a national bridge champion, initially went online to refine her game with partner Sheila Mahajan in Florida. Then she discovered the flexible nature of the technology she was riding. As an aspiring art dealer, Sicka is now busy digitising a dozen paintings to make them available as an electronic catalogue with India Online. Users of the service can view the paintings on their computer monitors, and even order the originals online. For Sicka, the venture will result in enormous savings. Reason: the 'virtual' art gallery will need no investment in real estate and is practically guaranteed to remain open 24 hours a day. People like Sicka, who have grasped the limitless nature of networking, are a growing band who are helping to turn the global home into an Indian reality. Others across the country are using the new technology to meet diverse requirements. At the Sri Aurobindo International Centre for Education in Pondicherry, students use ERNET (Education and Research Network) to get reader response to articles which appear in their journal, 'Golden Chain'. From Basudebpur on the outskirts of Calcutta, Rajan John, area manager for Lyons Seafood, uses his computer to dial into PCQ Online, an information exchange forum, looking for free software like programmes that help detect and eradicate computer viruses. John is disappointed: PCQ Online doesn't cater to his breed of 'file suckers'. Dr Radha Krishna Das of ISKCON uses his electronic mail box for, among other things, spiritual counselling. Message him on radha.krishna@axcess.net.in (the form email addresses take) and he'll help put the problems of life, the universe, and your dog in perspective. "Networking has opened up a Pandora's box," says Tilak Sarkar, chief operating officer of Business India Information Technologies that offers an online service called aXcess. "It's no more the exclusive domain of computer experts and mega corporations." Subscribers to aXcess can not only message over 25 million people worldwide for a fraction of the cost of a phone call but also dip into databases on foreign exchange rates, movements in the commodities markets and read business magazines on their computer terminals. Over the last 12 months, five commercial vendors ofonline srvices have sprung up, promiising individuals a chance to cruise cyberspace. Along with government networks like I-net and ERNET, the number of people who are already online in India is estimated to be almost 1 Lakh. Many of them are using ERNET to reach universities and hospitals halfway across the world to nibble away at data banks or chatter with research associates. At the National Centre for Software Technology (NCST), Director S. Ramani tweaks an address like PHNLINK@worldbank.orrg to rapidly produce reams of information on the financing of the Indian health sector. "This kind of instant access to information will change the value of ideas, bring in new business energies, and become the engine for tremendous social change," remarks Ramani. Not surprisingly, lawyers, bankers, students, industrialists and just about anyone with a computer and a modem - a device which helps send computer code over the phone line - is headed towards the inforemation freeways. "Networking will do to us what the phone did to the last generation," observes Professor V. Rajaraman, former chairman of the supercomputing centre at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. "Luckily, we appear to be preparing for it." With online services springing up like mushrooms in the monsoons, is the Information Revolution really here? The answer depends on who you ask in the business. Technologists and marketing executives are naturally enthusiastic. There are 5 lakh PCs in the country and the figures are growing at roughly 20 per cent each year. According to Worldwide Technologies director C. Subramaniam, the market for modems is growing twice as fast. Worldwide Technologies, amongst the largest suppliers of modems, expect to place 5,000 pieces with India Online alone by the end of the year. The picture behind the figures is not difficult to divine. Computer users want to reach out and communicate. Many are eager to become part of the most significant business and social trend that is currently sweeping the world, fuzzing up geographical boundaries and fighting time zones to feed a data-hungry society. --- The ability to leap over time and distance brought Partha Chakraborty back to India after completing his Ph.D at the University of Delaware, USA, to take up a teaching position at an engineering institute. Now, with a few simple taps of the keyboard, Chakraborty says he can stay in touch with professors halfway across the globe. In Delhi, similar reasons are driving Ragini Deshpande to log into the world using a computer stocked in her wardrobe. An archivist with the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, Deshpande has become a regular online junkie, relocating friends on the nets whom she hasn't met for more than a decade. "I've hired a cook so that I have more time to spend in Cyberspace," she says. Market studies appear to suggest that Deshpande will shortly find many more familiar names cropping up on Indian nets. Sprint RPG, which plans to begin operating its online service over the next month, estimates that the potential number of users for value added services, like e-mail, in the telecom sector is about 2.3 lakh in the coming year. However, the company is cautious about the figures, which suggests an explosion in the business. Sprint RPG has the logic worked out. There are more than 1 lakh fax machines (60,000 more are likely to be sold this year) and something like 60,000 telex connections and millions of courier packets could be replaced with a simple online connection. Sprint RPG president Ashok Sapra thinks it's only a matter of education before people fall in line with the technology. Once this happens, RPG's Harsh Goenka forecasts annual growth of around 30 per cent in business. Current estimates of the e-mail slice of the online cake place the total business at Rs. 30 crore. But that figure, others say, will be pushed higher by a veriety of goodies available on networks. "By 1997, things will change dramatically," predicts Chandrashekhar Rao, managing director of UUnet, a Hyderabad-based information technology firm with a user-base of 4,000. "The market will blossom to a couple of thousand crores." Rao, whose UUnet's user base includes large business houses like Shaw Wallace, thinks that hundreds of smaller companies will join in once they discover that not being online could spell total isolation. The predicted threat may lead an increasing number of people to wire into the nets. The immediate benefits will turn them into believers. Melstar Industries, a Bombay-based company that provides networking solutions, found that communication bills came crashing down within a year of using e-mail. Says Melstar chairman Suresh Bansal: "We paid as little as Rs. 58,000 in phone calls. The perceived savings have been in the region of Rs. 3.75 lakh." The cutting edge Melstar acquired, however, will only be reflected in its accounting ledgers sometime later this year. Recently the company bagged a large contract from an Italian firm, using e-mail to transfer vast amounts of data between Italy and India. Using a courier to senf the same information would have taken Melstar weeks - and could have cost the company valuable business. The inevitability of using networks to tighten and improve business is perhaps best reflected in how the Rs. 500-crore Asian Paints instantly ships production figures, sales targets and company policy between 14 production plants and distribution centres across the country, over a network. "With up to the minute information on production, we are accurately able to tel distribution offices what to expect," says systems executive Ramesh Nair at Asian Paints. "Fuzzy forecasting is a thing of the past." "Clarity, that's where networks win," observes Malcolm Monteiro, Blue Dart's senior vice-president, systems. At the courier company, more than 500 e-mail boxes have been installed over a Rs. 30-lakh private network spanning the country. After harvesting the benefits of the technology Blue Dart decided to offer about 50 large clients a chance to plug into their computers and sample the technology. By using a specially tailored software package called Power-Dart, the courier company's clients, which include Citibank, Titan and Arthur Anderson, can log in and track their shipments, delivery dates, and pull out a list of acceptable goods in a flash. "You don't need to wait for an operator to repond," says Monteiro. "The new system has helped improve our responsivensess and more important, iot provides accurate information." Although Melstar, Asian Paints and Blue Dart are using almost identical technology, each has found a different pay-off. With a slightly different twist, companies are using networking to set up ingenious new routines. Aiding them are Bulletin Board Services (BBS), one of the more interesting online developments that seems to have gone virtually unnoticed. In Calcutta and Bombay, modem anc computer companies use BBSs as a tool to improve customer support. Data Byte of Bombay, for example, gets itrs customers to post their problems on a BBS. Say your hard disk kicks up a racket during read/write operations and you begin to worry about a crash. What do you do? When the company engineer logs on, he'll answer the query (he'll probably tell you not to worry, or change the way the hard disk is mounted). The advantage: engineers need not leave the office to attend to minor problems that seem to plague all computers. The bonus: a solution once posted on a BBS will always help users in the future. BBSs work in a simple but powerful way. Newbies, or first timers, who dial in with their computers, answer a short list of questions about themselves and create a password. From there on, it's one dizzy ride on the digital roller-coaster. The dozen-odd BBSs in the country let users swap information on topics ranging from gossip to food to sports. The list of topics on which ideas and observations can be left behind often run into well over a hundred. And while you may find it difficult to get an appointment with people like industrialist Madhupati Singhania or film make Mansoor Khan, they'll be happy to chat you up on Bombay's Live Wire BBS (LWBBS) where they are regulars. Messages left behind in what are called FidoNet areas get echoed over 25,000 BBSs, or 15 million terminals across the world within a few hours. "I'm off to Japan, any help on how not to get ripped off?" placed on FidoNet will produce a weekend of reading. "Where are the best steaks in Bangalore?" will perhaps produce names of little-known dives with an added debate on what makes a good steak. Suchit Nanda of LWBBS says that last October he was "flooded with messages from people across the world asking how they could help or send aid to victims of the Latur earthquake." --- In Delhi, the half a dozen BBSs are regularly used to download free software and put up adertising. Often a BBS will support more than a gigabyte of free software, from games to Windows. People have managed to sell their motorbikes and modems using a BBS. Primal Scream (the sound two modems meet when they meet), a BBS for cybepunks, is quickly becoming a kind of electronic pub where youngsters meet online. The goodies available on it would make rockers salivate helplessly: lyrics to more than 3,000 rock albums; an online entertainment magazine; popular MTV veejay Adam Curry's daily gossip column picked up from an Internet site in the US called mtv.com; fan mail addresses and a chance to download pictures of your favourite rock stars. "Primal Scream is for non-geeks, not computer buffs," says Ashish Gulhati, who runs the latest BBS to open its electronic doors to the country. "We don't go heavy on the computer stuff, we're purely into rock 'n' roll." BBS applications are endless - mostly because they are run by people whose motto appears to be 'plug in, trip out'. Amongst the most popular are those that entertain. Says Shamit Khemka, who runs LWBBS-Calcutta and has sophisticated CD-ROM encyclopaedias available online: "Guys will log on and play games with each other or simply download pictures of pretty women in various stages of undress." One of the hottest games being played online - by people separated by several kilometres - is Doom. Featuring non-stop violence, Doom is a Terminator-style game that supports lifelike sound effects. Khemka says that interactive games are one good way of getting hooked on the new technology. "The serious stuff invariably follows." BBSer Niel Hirjee, for example, is currently working on a tea database that is expected to generate considerable user-interest in places like Calcutta. Large organisations are innovating to exploit the commercial opportunities offered by BBSs. Some in pretty strange ways. Ahmedabad's Silvertouch Computer Inc., a company which manages to sell a modest 5 to 10 modems a month, has set up a BBS with a singular purpose: To expand the market for modems in cash-rich Ahmedabad. An investment of Rs. 2 lakh on the BBS could result in the sale of more than 100 modems tagged at Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 21,000 apiece. "The problem in Ahmedabad is that no one understands the advantages of going online," says Jignesh Patel, a partner in the BBS venture. Hopefully, potential customers will learn from companies like Citrin in Bombay and Coral Software in Calcutta who have created special message and file areas on BBSs that remain hidden from other users. Access to these areas is limited to authorised and prevalidated users. For many months, Bombay-based Associated Cement Company (ACC) used a similar host facility on Delhi's ECTCNet. The Bombay office would leave vast amounts of financial data and employees in Delhi would retrieve them using their computers. "By the time they stopped using us as a host, the Bombay office had downloaded teo gigabytes of games alone," says software consultant Kishore Bhargava, who runs ECTCNet. The efficiency with which BBSs and networks operate largely depends on the telecom infrastructure. The question technologists need to address is: can the Indian telephone system be relied upon when it can't even provide a clear voice line? Popular opinion appears to be reasonably optimistic. Experts say that e-mail, electronic data exchange (EDI) and video conferencing are likely to force improvements in infrastructure. "It's a little like the Indian roads. Everyone knows they are bad, but cars haven't stopped using them," says V. Babuji, director, development, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) which offers a sophisticated messaging system called GEMS.400 as well as EDI. --- The bigger threat appears to have come by way of the policy announced by the Department of Telecom (DoT). Vendors of value-added services - like e-mail and EDI - must pay a license fee of Rs. 25 lakhs in the first year along with a performance guarantee of Rs. 5 lakh. The complicated fee structure, which also lays down fixed tariffs, ominously informs that by the fifth year the operator must pay Rs. 50 lakh. Although some like C. Padmanabhan, chairman of the Madras based Icnet, beiieve that a fair amount of govenmental checks and balances may be necessary to safeguard user interests, others are alarmed. S. Ramakrishna, director, Department of Electronics (DoE) who is also the project director of ERNET says the "DoT should be more concerned about providing a robust infrastructure. Instead it has mixed up the innovation chain with the commercial chain." If the DoT doesn't relax its license fee requirements, the first to pack up their modems and mothball their computers will be BBSs. Predictably, the most rabid attacks against the policy can be found on BBSs in the country in forums called dot.busting. Connected over the informal BharatNet, views on the policy are exchanged daily. The current length of the dot.busting file runs into several hundred messages. Says an alarmed Atul Chitnis of CiX, a Bangalore-based BBS which has about 500 users, "To remain viable we must have 2,500 users immediately. This is impossible. Someone must stop the DoT." If nothing can, chances are that only a few online services will survive and another five which are on the way - amongst them Datapro and Wipro - may have to restructure their business strategies. Perhaps only private networks like those used by Blue Dart, Microlaand, Ranbaxy, and the Ministry of Defence will remain unaffected. Current estimates put the number of such companies using what are called Wide Area Networks (WAN) at 500. Says S. Sengupta, assistant manager, product marketing and support, ITC, which retails a product called cc:Mail: "Private networks have become status symbols." Indeed, they are. Or else the industry would not be predicting that 5,000 companies would have installed WANs by the end of the year. WANs use sophisticated software that can copy spreadsheets, memos and messages to other terminals with the click of a mouse. Programmed to dial up the information with a fixed frequency, the system links with offices in other cities and carries out its tasks automatically. But because WANs use the public phone system, they must still face slow, unreliable lines. "That is the single biggest deterrent to networking," says Sameer Kochar, product manager of Pertech Computers Limited (PCL), which markets a WAN product called Office. According to Kochar, anyone serious about networking must ultimately look towards the inevitable solution - creating personal satellite links that bypass the over-taxed DoT infrastructure. Large WAN users like Brooke Bond-Lipton are already toying with the option, using what are called Very Small Aperture Terminals or VSATS (pronounced we sats). Using transponders on INSAT and an investment of around 20 crore, Brooke Bond-Lipton could soon have the solution it is looking for. "We use the network to leverage on each other's experience," says K.G. Mohan, head, information technology, Brooke Bond-Lipton, whose work force is wired into 25,000 electronic mailboxes worldwide. "The only way to instantly access this bank of experience is through an unbroken line. This is where VSATs come in." What Mohan is talking about is an exciting new era, though in the near future it will remain the domain of only large companies. Even so, with the estimated market fore 10,000 VSATs by the year 2000, six giants are lined up on the starting blocks: Comnet Systems, Comsat Max, Hughes Escorts, Wintech, Wipro and Amadeus have obtained letters of intent to begin setting up commercial VSATs. The logic behind the predicted success of VSATs is compelling. While the government encourages setting up industries in bacward areas, communication facilities invariably lag behind. To use the state's incentives, many companies may find VSATs attractive. Until last year, the question was who do I communicate with? Now that the question is becoming irrelevant, the query everyone wants answered is: where's the information and how much will it cost? As always, BBSs make a good first stop. For a small fee, BBS system operators will log into databases anywhere in the world and bring back anything from travel advisories for Turkey to step-by-step guides on how to set up your own BBS. --- There are other services, right in India itself, that will keep you awash in an endless stream of data. Log into Jurix and subscribers can hunt for information on Indian law. At Bisnet, large business corporations are tapping into the latest on government policy, industry and economy. To get an idea of how much information Bisnet supports, try reading their library of 300 journals, updated daily. EasyNet, from VSNL, lets you pick up information on subjects ranging from nuclear waste disposal reguations to photographic collections in France and the hottest trends in women's underwear. From the serious to the sublime to the sometimes silly, it's all there, waiting to provide digital nirvana to anyone who dials in. "There's a whole world of information out there. The ones who make it avbailable at competetive prices will ultimately win," says Sanjay Parode, managing director of DART, the company which offers India Online. As an increasing number of people go online, that truth will change in subtle ways. The real winners will be those who grasp the significance of the new technology. As they are saying around the world, crank up your modems and get going on the information highways.