Let Our Handphones Talk.....

While there's no doubt that our country and people are progressing very well on the road to becoming a developed nation, there are many areas in the country where development has gone the wrong way or never picked up speed. These areas are often secluded and buried deep in the rural areas but they can often be seen from the roadside.

What do I mean by development going the wrong way? The most obvious sign is the modern ghettoes. You have modern buildings and infrastructure but the whole area stinks like a rubbish dump. Public facilities are vandalized and left unrepaired, the roads are full of potholes and ditches, and rubbish are strewn around like confetti. You may find this in the urban areas but mostly in the new townships which failed to grow as planned (by charlatans of course). Many buildings had turned green or brownish depending on whether the moss had done a better job that the rain and the red earth or vice versa. The lawn and the playground, if it had been provided for, would only be most comfortable to the buffaloes.

But the signs of progress and development among the people are obvious from the cars that are parked by the houses, the TV antennae, and the extensions done to the small original house, including those which are reminiscent of yesteryears. In fact there are places with a trace of the original village with their fruits and coconut trees which had been displaced by new roads and posts for the power lines but allowed to slip back into a ghetto-like scenario. In fact some villages which had been so-called "modernized" appear more like a deserted and dilapidated area for most of the inhabitants have moved to the towns and urban centers.

Actual poverty stricken areas which the floodlight of development had not spotted also exist in the rural depth. The village development committees have either missed them or averted them because of their unfriendly political leanings. More importantly some village heads have never brought the machinery of or the funds for develpment to these areas because of certain prejudice or misgivings, and no higher authority had seen it fit to intervene.The neglect, purposeful or otherwise, is kept a secret or the people could be reported as non-supportive of the government in power so that the higher authorities would not insist on helping them.

How can we bring out all these neglects and negative development into the open so that the government may recognize their existence and cause an inquiry to be made, call the peoples' representative responsible for the area to answer for them , and get some ameliorative action going? Only the private TV stations sometimes bring these areas into focus as done by Karam Singh Walia
and cause remedial action to be taken. Others remain unknown to the public and the government until found by accident.

It is in this regard that the newfound technology in the form of high-tech handphones with sophisticated cameras, the Facebook, twitters etc. can play a very important role in exposing these hidden or invisible dimensions of negative development or where development had not progressed at par with the national standard. Let us turn our hp cameras in the direction of these misfits and 'misfortunates' in as much as we love to capture the images of modernity, progress and the beauty of our people. We share them through the blogs, facebooks and the many faces of internet so that the government and those responsible cannot miss them. By exposing the areas and conditions in pictures, we will also expose the public servants or leaders who fail to take action to remedy the wrong or patch up the neglect. We cannot just depend oo the private TV station to do that while the radio can only describe the situation without showing convincing pictures. We must actually see them to be convinced and the entire population of the country with hps can certainly uncover every aspect of the neglect or negatives development in this country.

Yes, let our handphones with their digital imaging facilities talk. They don't lie.