Chin Saik Yoon
Chief Editor

Online services

E-government

The complex and time-consuming bureaucratic procedures of many governments in Asia have helped to endear many members of the public to the Internet and ICTs. One of the most frequently reported acknowledgements of the usefulness of the Web, by villagers and others who would normally not even think of going online, concerns the facility offered by many local government authorities for downloading official forms for filing all sorts of applications. For these citizens, interactions with officialdom usually requires a minimum of two visits to the nearest town where a government administrative centre is located. The first visit is usually dedicated to queuing for long hours to collect the necessary forms. These precious documents are then taken home where they are completed, often with the assistance of a literate relative or neighbour, and then brought back into town on another day for processing by the local official. Now the citizens can just pop down to the nearest telecentre or cyber café and have the forms downloaded and printed, saving them at least one expensive and time-consuming trip into town.

The people’s appreciation for ICTs grows even fonder when procedures can be completed online. Citizens of the Philippines can now apply for the renewal of their passports and register births, marriages and deaths via the Internet (p. 221). In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, an area with one of the most IT-savvy state governments of the country, the people have also found the new online system of property valuation more transparent and less corruptible in addition to being time-saving (p. 115).

The intensity of use of government online services by citizens varies considerably between subregions. The uptake of online services in Hong Kong has been reported to be slow (p. 92). The government there offers 110 different types of online services ranging from filing of tax returns and payment of taxes to applying for senior citizen cards and updating personal information, such as addresses, in government databases. Singapore, on the other hand, reports high usage of e-government services (p. 248). One-third of all Singaporeans deal with their government via the Internet. An average of 400,000 transactions are logged each month. The 1,625 online services offered by the Singapore government, as of October 2002, represent 83 percent of all government services which are considered suitable for online transactions. The most popular service is the filing of tax returns; nearly 600,000 taxpayers used the service in 2001.

The Australian government delivers online almost as many services as in Singapore – a total of 1,315 types of services by March 2001 (p. 35). The World Markets Research Centre ranks Australia as the second in e-governance in the region. Top place goes to Taiwan, which also ranks second in the world following the USA. The Taiwanese Government Procurement Information System is one of the most active. It had posted 720,000 public bid-request announcements by the end of 2001. The system receives about 300,000 enquiries every month and a total of about 8.5 million queries at the time of writing (p. 287).

E-government initiatives involving the collection of personal data often raise major concerns within civil society because of ethical considerations and the risk of misuse of such private information. One example of such an initiative is the highly controversial programme in Japan to build a national database network containing the personal information of citizens. It quickly polarised civil society and some branches of government. The network was designed to share key citizens’ data across all municipalities and central government agencies. The potential invasion of individuals’ privacy alarmed not only civil society but also a number of local governments; the city of Yokohama decided not to connect to the database nor permit its citizens’ private data to be included in it (p. 127).

E-commerce

The chapter on Singapore offers the most detailed statistics on how online services have grown in the private sector. E-commerce, in particular, seems to have done very well in the recent past. In Singapore, B2B sales more than doubled during the 1999–2000 period, rising from S$40 billion to S$92 billion. B2C sales also rose dramatically – from S$36 million in 1998 to S$200 million in 1999 and S$1.17 billion in 2000 (p. 249). Data from the Australian chapter shows that 10 percent of the population had made purchases online by the end of 2001. This more than doubled compared with the previous year, when only 4 percent of Australians purchased online. It is also significant that 82 percent of the Australians who shopped online also paid for their purchases online, thereby displaying a high level of trust in the e-commerce system (p. 35).

There are a number of encouraging initiatives to customise e-commerce to serve developing country needs. B2Bpricenow.com of the Philippines is one of these initiatives (p. 222). The website helps farmers market their produce. Traders from around the country log on to negotiate purchases with the participating farmers, who are trained in the use of the Internet and the website by local NGOs. The Pan Asia Networking programme of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, one of the co-publishers of this review) also runs a website http://www.PanAsia.org.sg where NGOs market the products made by their partners and members in villages.

The effort to localise e-commerce has even led to the creation of the “e-marketer” – an online sales person. The Foundation of Occupational Development, an NGO based in Chennai, South India, has trained out-of-school youths to go online to promote and help sell Indian crafts such as saris and stone sculptures at its Indiashop website http://www.xlweb.com/indiashop, which specialises in Indian crafts (Chin, 2002b). The e-marketers are helping local craft artisans reach an international market, to which they had no access previously. The experience obtained from running Indiashop has inspired the idea of a home-merchandising scheme which will involve women operating virtual supermarkets contained in a CD-ROM that runs on a desktop or laptop computer. In the concept, women virtual supermarket managers will take orders for everyday consumer products from their neighbours, consolidate the orders and e-mail them to a central depot for fulfilment.

Appropriate services for development

Distance education and telemedicine are the main prongs of what many consider to be the most promising applications of ICTs in development. Pakistan set up its Virtual University http://www.vu.edu.pk in 2002 to extend the reach of tertiary education in the country. The university uses an astute mix of old and new media: television and the Internet play equally important roles in the conduct of its programmes. The first course offered by the Virtual University is the Bachelor of Computer Science programme. Postgraduate programmes are planned for the future (p. 239).

The Pacific Islands have been involved in distance education since the mid-1970s. The University of South Pacific began using postal mail and radio communications long before progressing to telephone conferencing and e-mail. More sophisticated digital technologies were introduced in 2000 to set up a WAN called USPnet linking learning centres in 12 countries. The network offers real-time, two-way videoconferencing for students to interact with faculty members. The network also links academics from partner institutions in Australia, Japan and the USA and makes available to the students learning material from these locations (p. 309).

Massey University in New Zealand delivers and supports 300 of its courses on the Internet and 15,000 of its students are registered to make use of its web-based facilities. In Waikato University, 100 of its faculty teach online; 800 of its courses are offered with some form of e-learning support and 100 out of this total are offered fully online (p. 208).

Thailand has connected about 5,000 of its approximately 34,000 schools to the Internet. The connected schools make up SchoolNet. The Internet serves to enrich the formal educational programmes conducted in the conventional way by teachers. The focus is now on creating quality educational content in the Thai language for online delivery. Thailand is one of the linguistically isolated countries in the region. The lack of engaging and useful content in Thai on the Web is one of the reasons users, especially in the rural areas, have not gone online in larger numbers (p. 272).

Inspiring as they are, the above cases are rare examples of e-learning activities in the developing countries of Asia Pacific. Obstacles such as limited Internet access and low bandwidth discourage learning online. Many of the countries, already challenged by difficulties of effectively managing conventional educational programmes, are not able to invest efforts in extending their already stretched resources to online programmes. Nor should they, many would argue.

The same reasons standing in the way of e-learning also hinder the development of telemedicine. However, the arguments for investing in the latter make a stronger case. Telemedicine extends limited medical expertise to more people. It has the potential of saving lives. But it also costs more to set up. The widely dispersed population of the Pacific Islands are the beneficiaries of the Pilot Telehealth Project coordinated by the Fiji School of Medicine and the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association. The pilot is based on the model of the Western Pacific Health Net, which covers US-affiliated islands in the North Pacific. It will use a “store-and-forward” approach rather than live videoconferencing which is favoured by developed countries. High-quality still images of radiographs, electrocardiograms, patient photographs and other materials will be sent from medical outposts by primary health-care providers to medical specialists based in urban hospitals for diagnosis. The specialists may then either request for additional information from the health-care providers or prescribe treatment for the patients. Apart from facilitating consultation and diagnosis, ICTs are also used to run e-mail discussion lists for health professionals and medical practitioners. The Pacific Public Health Surveillance Network is one such example (p. 312).

The private sector is the prime mover of telemedicine in Bangladesh, where companies are setting up health-care centres in areas without adequate medical services. The centres are equipped with pathology laboratories, scanners and other diagnostic equipment to serve as remote centres where patients’ diagnostics are recorded and sent via the Internet to specialists in the cities for diagnosis (p. 56). The Philippines is served by a popularised variation of telehealth services. Users may either e-mail or send SMS messages to doctors with their medical questions; the doctors will give their diagnosis or medical advice also by e-mail or SMS (p. 223).

Content
Online services
Innovative and key initiatives
Enabling policies
Some trends and concerns