Everyday, we read Indian success in outsourcing. These days, we are reading some news about Pakistani success in call center and Information Technology too. Sri Lanka is not doing badly and Bangladesh is trying hard. However, still we cannot find many blogs in South Asian langages. To find out about Internet usage in South Asian countries, I visited the website www.InternetWorldStats.com and checked the stats of Asian Countries. All the statistics mentioned here in this post have been taken from that website.
According to the website, Bangladesh has only 300,000 users of Internet while for Bhutan the number is 20,000. Even a big country like India (with one billion population) has only 50,600,000 Internet users (4.5% penetration) and for Paksitan it is 7,500,000 (4.6% penetration). I am from South Asia and I know many people here use Internet only for checking emails to keep their monthly internet bill to a minimum level. Finally, many of the internet connections are in offices, organizations and educational institutions and that is why the market of South Asian blogs is still very small and that is why many bloggers do not want to give the effort in making a blog in the local language.
It will take time for blogs in South Asian languages to take off. Hopefully, it will happen sooner rather than later.
I think the reason why internet access is limited in South Asia and South East Asia is from the government's policy.
They don't really know the use of internet and just assume that internet is a a place to get porn access.
No wonder because most of the government are stand from old people.
In Indonesia, for example, a few years ago government take over and avoid the VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) just because they afraid that government will loose income from telecommunication company they have. What a pity.
Posted by: Yeni Setiawan | May 4, 2006 7:37 PM | Permalink to Comment