Technology Landscape in Health, Education, and Social Protection in South Asia

These deep gaps across regional, socioeconomic, gender, and language groups affect the use of technology to address inclusion and inequality in human capital. They became apparent in the COVID-19 pandemic, as discussed later in this chapter.

Although there is a significant level of public provision and financing of primary and basic education in South Asia, private providers and household financing dominate the higher levels of education (that is, secondary and higher education and skills training). The private sector is also the predominant provider of health care. In fact, the region’s public sector financing of health care as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP) is among the lowest in the world. Private sector participation in both education and health is highly differentiated, with high-quality educational institutions and hospitals accessed by the wealthiest households and with low-cost and poor-quality service providers for the urban poor and those living in periurban and wealthier rural areas. These characteristics of the provision and financing of the deployment of technology in different segments of the education sector highlight the risk of deepening inequalities in education.

The technology landscape in South Asia in the human development sector is vibrant with multiple suppliers in the private sector and the deployment of a host of technologies, especially in the private sector. The domestic technological capacity varies substantially, with India being the clear leader. Public sector capabilities of countries to deploy technology also vary, but most applications in service delivery in all three sectors involve digital platforms. Figure 3.2 summarizes the applications of technologies to human development in the three sectors in South Asia. The rest of this chapter describes the trends in health, education, and social protection and two case studies in the use of converging technologies.

HEALTH

Health technology markets in South Asia are dynamic, with India the regional hub connecting global and adjacent local markets. Indicative analysis shows that the health and technology–related industry in India may be as large as those in China and Japan, may be equivalent to 20–40 percent of the industry in the European Union, and is larger than that of the rest of the South Asia region by a factor of 30 or more. In South Asia, health technology and digital health solutions are supplied by five nongovernmental segments: • Global pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers (such as Pfizer, Roche, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, GE, and Omron) have