Digital divide Earthquake Emergency Management in Pakistan

            When assistive technologies are not provided or available to different regions or countries than digital divide occurs. The difference between IT development within different regions in a country or in different countries is known as the digital divide.

            Digital divide mostly occurs between rich and poor countries. It also exists in urban and rural cities. Since the poor countries have very few assistive technologies that can be used to remove disabilities of impaired persons. It is admitted fact that there is a big variation in disability prevalence rate between high and low-income country. The most prominent reason of this is high-income countries provide many facilities to disabled people due to which the disabled people can live their normal life; according to the social model of disability they cannot be called as disabled people. In high-income countries in which many impaired people cannot be called as disabled people, due to the following reasons

        High-income countries like in Norway, the NAV provides electronic Wheel Chairs to handicap people, there are proper pathways for them. Low-income countries cannot afford it. So, in this way Pakistan is a low-income country. Still, now new buildings don't have proper pathways for handicapped people.

        Rich countries like Norway the surface between the entrance of the transport is equal to the surface of the earth so a person on a wheelchair can easily step into any bus, tram, train. So according to the social model of disability, the person on the wheelchair is not a disabled person. But Pakistan doesn't have equal surface between the entrance of the transport vehicle to the earth. So, according to the social model of disability, a person on a wheelchair is disabled in Pakistan.

        High-income countries have special toilets for impaired people and they can use it without anyone’s help, but Low-income countries do not have such facilities which increase the ratio of disabled people in low-income countries according to social mode.

        High-income countries provide special gadgets to impaired people through which they can do work. I personally Visited NAV which is government institute of Norway and there I met David. He was blind, But NAV provided him assistive technology and special gadgets and he was doing a job there and he uses the MacBook. While Pakistan has a lack of such assistive technologies. Only Rich people in Pakistan can afford such technologies as the Government of Pakistan does not provide such facilities to its disabled persons.

        High-income countries have elevator facility which mostly low-income countries do not have. In Pakistan elevator exist only in shopping malls or big highly developed offices.

        High-income countries provide assistive technology for impaired people. Like in Norway I went NAV and I saw they are providing the computers that can be used by eye. There were also computers that can be used by moving the head.  According to the social model of disability the people that do not have hands but have such assistive facility they cannot be called as disabled persons as they are full filling their needs by using such assistive technologies. But on the other hand, such people will be considered as disabled if they do not have assistive technologies.

        Another technology I saw at NAV is they made a special software for deaf and dumb in which a communicator speaks on their behalf, so this service removes the deaf and dumb disability. But, this service is very costly. So low-income countries do not have such facilities that can overcome the gap between normal and disabled people and society.

        The digital divide can be measured by measuring the gap among the cities or countries that can and cannot use new technological tools, like WIFI, 3G or 4G. A study was conducted to calculate the existence of a digital divide in rural and urban areas of different cities of Pakistan. A survey was conducted amongst 384 respondents from Muzaffarabad, a City of Pakistan. Results of that survey confirmed that the websites using web 2.0 are more popular and attracting people to use the internet. As it covers diverse users of different abilities moreover people feel easy to use such websites (Shokat et al., 2018).

Pakistan is listed amongst the low-income countries. So, to implement a Universally designed ICT system is quite challenging.

            In Pakistan, many deaths happen during an emergency due to not having proper knowledge of what to do in such a situation. That’s why the knowledge of emergency management precautions and safety is very important. Pakistani people do not have an awareness that how much lives could be saved if they focus and pay attention to safety precautions for an emergency.

            An example of unawareness took place on the 25th of June 2017 at 9:25 am when an oil tanker was going from Karachi to Lahore and carrying 40,000 liters of fuel. When it was taking a sharp turn, it flipped on National Highway, Ahmedpur East. The fuel started leaking and many nearby people from the village rushed there to collect the fuel. There were many women kids and old men as well. Everyone was collecting fuel without having an awareness that fuel can catch fire. After a couple of minutes when many people gathered there to collect the fuel the tanker exploded and squeezed all the nearby men, women and children who were collecting the fuel. Approximately 123 people died in this incident and more than 120 got injuries (Michael, 2017).

            As the focus of this research is to implement a universally designed system to educate people about safety precautions. So, in universal design, we cannot ignore disable, handicapped or impaired people. It is very rare in Pakistan that someone accepts disabled persons as a contributing member of society. Even disabled persons are considered a burden on the family. But we cannot ignore disabled persons, as approximately10% of the population of the world is disabled according to the United Nations. Like in many other countries, disabled people are living a miserable life (Salahuddin and Jalbani).

            Moreover, these people should know all the possible safety precautions in an emergency. Pakistan is a low-income country it is very expensive to provide safety precautions instructions to people, especially to the disabled or impaired persons. So, the cheapest and easy way to provide safety precautions for emergency management is to make a Universally designed website.

From the above-mentioned example, it is clear that

ICT is not much used as emergency management in Pakistan

The universal design of ICT Is not so much common in Pakistan

Slow internet speed or no internet availability, electricity load shading, virus threat and not having enough knowledge to use mobile features to surf the internet are the main reasons due to which ICT is not very much used in Pakistan (Siddiquah and Salim).

References of Earthquake Emergency Management in Pakistan

Pascapurnama, Dyshelly Nurkartika, et al. "Integrated health education in disaster risk reduction: Lesson learned from disease outbreak following natural disasters in Indonesia." International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (2018): 94-102.

Salahuddin, Khalid and Dr Amanat Ali Jalbani. Disabled Citizens: A Case Study of Pakistan. Karachi, Pakistan, 2007.

Siddiquah, A and Z Salim. "The ICT Facilities, Skills, Usage, and the Problems Faced by the Students of Higher Education." EURASIA JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICS SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION (2017): 4987-4994.