In 2000 the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism published information on ownership of the supposed mansions of President Joseph Estrada's mistresses. The data was gathered from public-access computers in the Securities and Exchange Commission and through anonymous tips. When traditional news media refused to run the story, the center posted it on its own Web site.

Less than a year later, in January 2001, Estrada was forced from office, in part by large demonstrations in Manila that whose organizers used cell phone text messaging, Web sites and e-mail lists.

This year, the center targeted the Bureau of Internal Revenue. It posted on its Web site a study of extravagant houses and luxury vehicles owned by officials who can't explain how they paid for them. The study highlighted numerous applications by officials to change their birth records to delay their retirement, indicating how lucrative their modestly paid positions might be.

Partly as a result, the bureau is investigating 127 of its employees for various offenses, and the Office of the Ombudsman has filed charges against four bureau employees.

Digital prophets have long extolled the democratizing power of the Internet and the technology's potential impact on the way leaders govern. Throughout Asia that potential is becoming reality as notions of governance expand beyond the political authorities governing sovereign states. A vast array of individuals and groups is taking action to force change.

The new players come in many forms, from business forums and kinship circles to diaspora associations, relief organizations and women's networks. And their impact is being felt on the national, regional and global stage.

In recent years, such groups are increasingly going online to try to influence the rules that shape political, social and commercial life. Their Internet-based advocacy tools and strategies are proving successful at many levels.

Internet efforts in Asia against corruption, which can cost up to one-sixth of a country's gross domestic product, help in the fight against poverty. The poor depend heavily on basic public services which are drained of essential funds through corruption.

That means successful efforts to combat corruption also contribute in many ways to broad-based development, and disproportionately benefit the poor.

Diaspora networks take a different approach. These associations were formed initially to help Asian expatriates keep in touch with their local areas and create communities in their new countries.

Increasingly, they are taking on the role of promoting greater financial and technical assistance by members to projects in their home countries. Examples include Rebuild-Afghanistan.com and Afghans4tomorrow.com, which are working to improve postwar Afghanistan.

As the promise of online governance becomes a reality, the spreading of computer access to the broader public is another priority. Three developments in India could have a dramatic impact. Indian researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to bring down the cost of the “last mile” of telecommunications connections from an average of $900 to below $200, thus making IT access affordable to many more people.

The Simputer, a cheap alternative to personal computers being developed by a different Indian team with the aim of expanding IT access for poor communities, runs for eight hours on three penlight batteries, has text-to-speech capabilities in five languages, smart card capabilities and a touch screen accessible to those who cannot read and write.

On the software side, a team from Hyderabad is now achieving close to 95-percent accuracy in the machine translation of northern Indian languages, and expects similar success with southern Indian languages.

These developments could soon empower millions of people with affordable, multilingual computing, and give grass-roots governance the potential to make a significant dent on poverty in Asia.

The writer is a regional cooperation specialist at the Asian Development Bank. This is a personal comment.

Copyright © 2003 the International Herald Tribune

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