Ten years of login...

NANDINI GUHA / TNN / Oct 21, 2005, 21:27 IST

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In a decade, the Net has changed our lives completely.

In a decade, the Net has changed our lives completely.
Dr Indrajit Sardar, orthopaedic surgeon, had performed knee replacement surgery on 65-year-old Basab Mukherjee of Jabbalpore. One month down the line, Mukherjee got a fracture just above the knees and panicked.
He got his X-rays done, mailed them to Dr Sardar and got operated on by a local surgeon.Six months down the line, he came down to the city, met Dr Sardar, and distributed sweets to the hospital staff.
Amit Purakayastha, a businessman, had to urgently catch a flight to Mumbai, since his elderly aunt was hospitalised for an emergency operation.

He logged on to a popular airline's website, paid less than half the price for the ticket and flew down in a day's time to take charge of the situation.
Life has changed with login. The World-Wide-Web, which arrived in the city barely 10 years ago, has completely changed the way we read, the way we shop, the way we buy our holidays, the way we consult our doctors, the way we bank and...
... even the way we choose our partners!
Thanks to the Internet, the classroom is no longer an enclosure with four walls, with the teacher reading out archaic lecture-notes from his college-days.

Teachers, in their orientation programmes, are taught not only to deliver power-point presentations on Shakespeare and Shelley but actually asked to access e-books, original research documents available at say, the Smithsonian and look up speciality journals at "J stores".
"Calcutta University is the largest country-wide user of UGC's Inflibnet and Infonet programmes. All departments, all campuses, and all professors are now connected through a 3 Mbps lease line, mostly funded by the UGC.
The first campus to have internet access was the Rajabazar Science College, which got connected seven years ago," said Prof Tapan Mukherjee, Pro-VC (Finance), Calcutta University .
With the advent of the Net, it's over to telemedicine for our city's medical fraternity. "When the libraries are closed, when cell-phones are switched off and you need to know a crucial aspect of heart surgery the night before the...
... operation, you can only surf the www.
You can actually participate in a heart surgery in Los Angeles from an OT in Kolkata, thanks to video-conferencing through VSNL. The docs there often consult us, thanks to seamless technology," said Dr Indrajit Sardar.
The Net has also radically transformed the relationship between banks and their customers.
Almost all banks now offer Internet banking...which allows customers to see their balance as well as transfer money from one account to another, seamlessly.
Riding the Internet boom is BSNL, which now connects over 3 lakh homes in the city. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. "Demand for Internet is growing at the rate of 35 per cent every year.
Even last year, the market was growing just at 28 per cent. Our dial-up and Data 1 schemes are growing in popularity every year. But in our estimate, there are...
... at least 10 lakh people in the city who use the Net.
Many of the surfers operate from cybercafes,"said S K Chakraborty, Chief General Manager, Calcutta Telephones. BSNL is also hard-selling its broadband services for a minimal rate of Rs 250 per month.
The speed on offer is 256 kbps - and over one lakh consumers have already jumped onto the BSNL bandwagon.
caltimes@timesgroup.com

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