Knowledge at Doorsteps

Dr. Om Vikas, Director, Department of Information Technology in the Ministry of Communciation & Information Technology presented the various sources of knowledge in his lecture “Knowledge at Doorsteps” (March 21st).  Some of the sub-themes of his lecture included ‘The emergence of knowledge-based Society,’ ‘Technology shrinks distances in real time,’ ‘Increasing returns in knowledge economy,’ ‘Linguistic pluralism,’  ‘e-content and universal access.’ ‘World knowledge in natural language.’  He raised and answered fundamental questions in IT like ‘Is there Gain in knowledge or Loss of Knowledge?’ and ‘Is the technology to Divide or to Unite?’

Tracing the technological development, he said while the writing system was invented over 500 years ago, the first written book came only in 1300 BC, and the printing press was invented in 1450 AD.  The development in the information revolution, in contrast has been fast, in waves of quick succession.  He also discussed the various aspects of the information technology, including accessibility, proliferation, language barriers that needed to be crossed as also the need to incorporation IT in the routine system.  The objective of the power-point presentation of Dr. Om Vikas was to discuss the IT scenario world over and with special reference to India.