A Million Man hours get wasted per day. Ignorance is costly, not only to an individual but to India as well.

It was a fine morning, The only difference to any other morning of my life, I figured out about this one was that – it started early. I saw the time on my wall clock in the room, which I had not seen for ages now – 5:45 am. If not for the purpose of receiving my grandmom at the railway station I would have continued the legacy of not seeing this orientation of the hands of my wall clock. My grandmom returned after a tour to rajasthan (North India), where she had been for the opening ceremony of a Temple.

They say when a person’s wisdom augments, his perception about things goes deeper. Something we have already seen a thousand times, starts looking new to the eyes. So was the case with the scene of the people jostling at the railway station ticket counters. The sight of this scene earlier made me feel pity for the people who had to wait for hours together so early in the morning to get their tickets, and we all know, waiting for that long in a queue is definitely frustrating.

But this time, I was astonished at myself, I did not feel the same. The pity was no longer for the reason that waiting is frustrating. Instead, my inner self was feeling pity for another reason and telling me – “How ignorant these people are!”

Man makes machines, invents gadgets and reaches newer heights in technology, to make things better and easier for the mankind for a collective progress of it. Amongst such innovations and inventions of the 20th century – Internet has been the most dramatic invention to hit the world. Its impact is exponentially increasing as years are passing by.

Coming back to my feeling, Today Indian Railways has made commendable efforts in launching a number of quality railway reservation websites, which are extremely userfriendly to any and every individual.

www.irctc.co.in
www.srailway.com
www.indianrail.gov.in
www.indianrailways.com

These sites make it easy for all travelers to book tickets at the nearest cyber café – avoiding his running around in heavy traffic in cities today, alongwith avoiding the loss of time that they would have to go through, waiting in long queues.

But to me it looked that people had lots of time and needed places like these railway station ticket counter queues to kill it. Right? It ain’t like that. Hundreds of them queued up there early in the morning, when majority of them could have done away with online booking (assuming that they had credit cards, or atleast they could have increased the business of few credit card offering companies). But fear of unawareness or feeling embarrassed to have to ask about online booking, seems to surround them for which the price they pay is hours of time in a queue.



This was one of the stations of our country. There are 1000s of them in our country. Assuming such crowded ones are exactly 1000 in number in our country, and 1000 such people lose atleast an hour there everyday (though actual figures might be much bigger), Our country loses a million productive hours per day. I call them productive hours because its generally people who are beyond 18 found at the counters. If each of them had used the alternative method of online booking, They could have done away with a maximum of 10 mins each. Meaning a saving of 0.8 million productive hours per day for the country.

Since this is the smallest number assumed. If we actually extrapolate it over all the stations in the country – we can literally save millions of productive hours of the country, which can be invested in various other productive things – which surely would help the country progress.

This is just one field of observation. There are many things that can happen sitting at home through internet for which people lose hours together in all age groups. This makes us realize the importance of creating awareness of basic computer education to masses, and also the importance of augmenting Internet awareness amongst the masses.

Its my earnest request to all the readers to participate in any manner they can, in increasing the awareness and knowledge of basics of computers and internet and its applications amongst the masses in India. Hats off to eBIZ.Com Pvt. Ltd. which is doing a commendable work in this direction since its establishment in Jun 2001 with the help of its 7.5 lakh associates. It has been successful in a big way. But, the mass of our country is too big and it demands more and more people to take up this responsibility. I also congratulate eBIZ.Com Pvt. Ltd. for providing means of livelihood to the people participating in its promotion. It gives an opportunity to people to work and earn even during this time of recession in the world. (for more information visit: www.lalwanibrothers.gq.nu and www.ebizelindia.com )

Hope this article could ignite those neurons of your brain which would be last ones to die on your brain, and help you retain this observation permanently on your brain and extend this to all other fields that you observe and understand daily. I also hope that these ignited neurons on your mind, make you get into action towards this cause. All the best, May God bless us all. Your comments are most welcome.