Correspondents' Correspondence

...Costly individual supervision is also necessary...

...And much the same mentality grips the promoters of India's "atoms for peace" program...

...As for maintaining television sets in rural areas, the isro experience is instructive...

...At the same time, Bombay TV telecast literacy classes for industrial workers that cost $4,200 an hour when there were barely 200 community sets (as against 100,000 private ones in the homes of the affluent...

...Even urban audiences have been mystified by it...

...It is found not only in tropical Africa, but in Central and South America as well...

...The satellite is on loan from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) free of charge for a year...

...On neighboring plateaux, hundreds of thousands of people debilitated by river blindness can hardly grow enough food for their livelihood...

...Thus the health program requires two decades...

...In the state of Maharashtra, for instance, a body called the Gram Shikshan Mohim (Village Education Campaign) was able to persuade unemployed graduates to spend a few months teaching villagers the three Rs...

...But this is hardly the case in India, which has 2 million schoolteachers—many of them unemployed and all underpaid—as well as several thousand idle university graduates...

...The real tragedy of the preoccupation with educational TV in a chronically poor nation like India, however, is that it ignores the country's basic resource: manpower...

...The operating investment itself?producing the shows and maintaining the sets—would be staggering...

...insisted recently that the imaginative use of advanced space knowledge "could initiate a total process of development to leapfrog from a state of backwardness and poverty...

...A prominent "space bureaucrat...

...In this rush for the fanciest technology, the price tag is conveniently forgotten...

...The region is impoverished at present because the inhabitants have abandoned the fertile land near the fly-infested waterways...

...Throughout the area, deserted villages are a fairly common sight...

...Plans call for the construction of new roads, schools and health services, the creation of a clean drinking water supply, and the provision of expert assistance to help people make the best use of the rich land...

...Districts suitable for economic and social development have already been studied in detail...

...Its success earned it the unesco Pahlavi award in 1972...

...An hour-long American commercial television program costs around $85,000, and while the figure might be only one-tenth of that in India, given the slender resources available it would still be prohibitive...

...The idea for the project was mooted as far back as in 1968...

...Of course, this calls for foresight and a mustering of the political will to pursue an alternative to the notions of the West, where television is a standard index of "progress...

...Clearly the cost of satellite educational television is terribly high for India...

...Once the threat of disease is eliminated, the countries involved will embark on a vast resettlement project...

...For this reason, the eradication program is relying on prevention—attacking the larvae, the weak link in the chain joining man, fly and worm, with an insecticide that is effective against the fly yet does not harm other forms of life...

...The new figure has been released by specialists using modern diagnostic methods as part of a vast international project launched in 1974 to eradicate the ailment in the region...

...In the human body, the worms produce millions of offspring...

...Yet unless this is recognized, India and the other countries in its predicament that are today poised to make the technological leap into sophisticated mass media will be doomed to repeat the follies of some of their brethren in Latin America and Southeast Asia, who flaunt TV aerials over their sordid shanty towns.—Darryl D'Monte Correspondents' Correspondentce Disease & Development Geneva—Public health planners in seven West African countries?Dahomey, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Togo, and Upper Volta —have been told that river blindness, the major disease in the Volta River basin, affects one million of their people, double the previously estimated number...

...it can damage other organs besides the eyes, leading to general weakness...

...Indeed, no one is any longer asking this should happen, only when...

...The experts obviously thought the set, made to receive the programs of the newly launched Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (site) in India, would be a fitting tribute to the man who first envisioned the revolutionary communications medium...

...It went on to list the objectives of site, which included population control and agricultural development...

...Professor V. R. Rao...

...These are expected to be wiped out in subsequent phases of the program...

...The appropriate drugs are not easy to apply, and have unpleasant side effects...

...Fishing is nearly impossible in many places...

...Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS Costly Education New Delhi—When Arthur Clarke, the science fiction writer, was presented with a special television set last summer by Indian space experts at his home in Sri Lanka, the irony of the gesture was probably lost on all who participated in the occasion...

...The program?the most detailed and far-reaching strategy ever prepared to conquer a health problem and thereby open the road to economic development in a given area," says the United Nations' World Health Organization—will cost $120 million over the next 20 years...

...But experts add that relatively large numbers of the insects have been detected in peripheral zones...

...The refrain has been enthusiastically picked up by the Indian Department of Atomic Energy and the Indian Space and Research Organization (isro...

...Females may grow to a length of five feet and live for 15 years...

...This was vividly brought home in Bombay when TV was introduced there three years ago: Shortly before the initial transmission was due to begin, hordes of people gathered around the TV tower, waiting to see the images literally emerge from it...

...The current project extends across approximately 450,000 square miles of territory, inhabited by about 10 million people...

...But B. D. Dhawan, who has written extensively on the economics of television in India, has warned of the dangers of "technological determinism," and of the ever larger sums such an approach to progress entails...

...An ambitious attempt to use sophisticated technology to help a backward country, site is a pilot venture and entirely an American brainchild...

...Of the estimated one million in this area affected to some extent by the disease, at least 70,000 are blind or have serious eye impairments...

...Chances are it will decide to go in for satellite with microwave or cable technology, to extend TV throughout the country...

...Treatment is difficult...

...The money could be far better spent on live rural teachers and doctors...

...Dhawan estimates that nationwide educational TV would cost at least $1 billion, including $175-$240 million in scare foreign exchange...

...site alone, with its 1,500 hours of programming, runs around $150 a minute...

...Yet officials don't seem to be giving much thought to what the expenditure will be...

...Television, however, means nothing to the great rural masses of this country...

...The potential of noncommercial television for enhancing national unity and for providing more education and instruction in India is virtually without limit," the report declared...

...But to the Indian villagers who are its intended beneficiaries, the educational enterprise remains an exercise in fantasy...

...Subsequently, the Philco-Ford Corporation issued a feasibility report that spoke in glowing terms...

...For almost a year now, no adult flies have been found in sprayed areas...

...What, for example, will India do when the $14.6 million one-year experiment is over and the satellite reverts to nasa...

...Funds are being raised by the World Bank, in conjunction with the UN Development Program, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development...

...River blindness is caused by a worm transmitted by the bite of a fly...

...The villagers move to the uplands," explains a project spokesman, "where farming conditions are less favorable and where overintensive cropping leads to the erosion of the land...

...Looking further into the future, specialists have also compiled a list of detailed recommendations to prevent the outbreak of other disastrous diseases?such as sleeping sickness and snail fever—in the potentially wealthy region.—Thomas Land...

...One reason is violent voltage fluctuation...

...The agency apparently has only one repairman for every 100 villages, despite the vast distances separating them, and within a few days of the start of site many sets were no longer working...

...In Andhra Pradesh, it was found that a person could be raised to the level of functional literacy for an investment of just $3...

...Instead of substituting capital for labor, the technocrats of Delhi would do better to put as many hands to work as possible in a massive battle against problems like illiteracy and disease...

...It is beaming educational programs to centers in six states throughout the country, each with 400 villages around it...

...Despite its name, river blindness does not necessarily result in loss of vision...

...One can well imagine, then, why the villager who is trapped in a bitter struggle for existence feels quite alienated from what he sees on the tube...

...The "teacher in the sky" could be an effective substitute for the conventional one in the classroom where there aren't enough of the latter to go around...

...To further complicate matters, the men appointed to switch on the sets —usually school teachers who are paid $4 a month for this task—don't always show up...