Like three of the five previous U.S. presidents to visit India before him, Pres. Barack Obama took the customary pilgrimage to an Indian village. Unlike his predecessors, however, he did not actually set foot in one. Instead, in a tip of the hat to India’s vaunted high tech sector, he visited with the residents of Kanpura — a non-descript village, 40 kms. from Ajmer in Rajasthan — via a video link from Mumbai.
The video conference purportedly allowed Obama to observe firsthand the IT revolution powering grassroots democracy in rural India at the gram panchayat level, the smallest unit of democratically elected bodies in India.
Obama was suitably impressed by “this terrific experiment in democracy,” raving: “One of the incredible benefits of the technology we’re seeing right here is that in many ways India may be in a position to leapfrog some of the intermediate stages of government service delivery, avoiding some of the 20th century mechanisms for delivering services and going straight to the 21st.”
Unbeknownst to Obama, the real efficiency of the hi tech experiment — possibly the most important one for Indian officials — lay in the fact that it prevented real life village conditions from intruding upon the shining and spectacular, ready-for-business India on display for the world’s preeminent visitor and his accompanying international media entourage. Far from the range of prying foreign cameras, the marvelous technological efficiency of the video conference masked the lack of the very transparency and accountability that the U.S. president was at that moment extolling.
For this investigation, Little India reporters fanned out to the villages blessed with U.S. presidential visits during the past half century to report on what happens after the camera lights have been turned off and the cosmetics and make-up washed away....... |
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