TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Village Vacuum

Little has changed in the villages of India in the past decades. Yes, schools have been built, but many still lack teachers and appropriate teaching methods. There are phone lines in many villages, but getting a dial tone is still a challenge. Electricity supply is at best intermittent. Health care is still limited in its availability. Entertainment is limited to radio or television, if it all the electricity is there.

India's villages are dependent on agriculture for much of their sustenance. Drought is a common occurrence across much of India. As a result, villagers, for the most part, remain a poor lot - the per capita income of India's villages is perhaps no more than Rs 12-18,000 (USD 240-360) per annum, as compared to the national average of Rs 25,000 (USD 500).

Perhaps, most important, the opportunities available to the people in villages are not dramatically different from what they were many years ago. Villages in India are where you live if you have no other option.

And yet, India is in its villages. 70% of Indians live outside of the urban areas. Even as there is one India which is racing ahead with optimism towards the future, there is another India which seems to be stuck in the past. If India has to progress, there is little doubt that India's villages have to progress, too.

Transforming Rural India is a challenge that should focus the best of Indian minds - it is perhaps the single biggest barrier to making India a developed country, and achieving the 10% growth that CK Prahalad talks about. India's villages need disruptive innovations to make the giant leap forward.

In this series of Tech Talks, I want to discuss the role that technology can play in transforming Rural India. Of course, one can argue that what the poor need is food, water and electricity, more than technology. It is an argument we have been making since our Independence.

India's solution so far has been myriad poverty alleviation programmes and employment schemes. Corruption is not the only reason they have met with limited success. The question to ask is have they changed or enhanced people's skills, and exposed them to new worlds. To that, the answer is a resounding No.

I agree with Digvijay Singh, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, when he says that people are not the problem, they are the solution. In India, we have always been weighed down by our numbers. After all, with over 700 million across 600,000 villages in India, it is no small measure to upgrade quality of life for so many. And yet, unless we think of ideas which work with the village as a unit, there will be no universal transformation.

The time for incremental innovation is over. India needs creative solutions to start a revolution which can take its villages fast forward in time - creating them economically viable units and growth engines, harnessing the power of the villagers, and opening up new horizons with the promise of a better tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Village Visits

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Village Visits

I am a city-dweller, as urban as one can get, having spent most of my life in Mumbai. My exposure to village life has been limited to a few days. But of late, I have spent quite some time thinking through what can be done to improve life in India’s villages. The immediate reason for this was a presentation I had to make to the Madhya Pradesh government on eGovernance. And that set me thinking about the state of Rural India.

Once a year, I travel for 2-3 days across Rajasthan, visiting various temples. Most of these temples are in villages, scattered across the state. In fact, seeing these temples built many centuries ago(and the new ones being built), I could not help thinking that if only we had spent a fraction of the money that we spend on religion on education, healthcare and other areas, the villages would have made much more progress!

On my last trip to Rajasthan, I also visited the village where my father was born and spent much of his early life. The road from the highway into the village is still dusty. There is now a school in the village – finally. It was built from contributions made by the locals who have since emigrated to the cities and done well for themselves. There are some homes which have been tastefully constructed but lie empty – their owners, of course, live in far-away cities. But for the most part, it is like time has stood still in this part of the world.

In Madhya Pradesh (MP), I also spent half a day visiting various villages around Bhopal. The abiding memory I have is that of a classroom of 24 children (ages 8-9), half of them sitting on 3 computers in groups of four, and learning. This is part of MP’s Headstart programme, where over 2,700 schools in villages have been equipped with computers to assist in educating students. The focus is on the “hardspots” of learning.

Seeing the kids there operating the keyboard and mouse with ease, I realised that they (and I) could have been in a school in Mumbai or anywhere else – for them, the digital divide had been bridged through these computers. Children everywhere have the same levels of curiosity. They can learn at the same quick pace of their city brethren. For these children, the computer is an ally, a friend, a window to a new world.

And then the reality sinks in. This effort is but a drop in the ocean. There are 50,000 villages just in MP. There are over 600,000 villages in India. We are touching but a handful of people. It will take many many years to the current pace of roll-out to reach out all the children. And by then, India would have lost yet another generation.

Tomorrow: IT for the Masses

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: IT for the Masses

My time and meetings in Madhya Pradesh set me thinking. We in India do not lack in ideas. What we lack is in the vision to think big. We think in terms of pilot programmes to cover tens or hundreds of villages, when the need is to do a roll-out in months or a few years across a nation. There are plenty of small-scale success stories – in fact, I would argue that at a small scale, we can get anything to work. What’s missing is the ability to think of solutions which can be replicated across India between two elections (5 years) rather than two generations (25 years).

I am heavily biased towards technology and computers, perhaps to an extreme. I believe that by empowering people with access to computing and the Internet, we can create a bottom-up revolution across India. These connected computers themselves will not work wonders, but they will open up people, especially the young, to new ideas and new worlds. They will make people learn new skills, which could be harnessed in a myriad of different areas.

For example, farmers could use the connected computers to get commodity prices faster, or get information on new agricultural techniques. The youth would get details on job opportunities across the state. The district administration could get details of problems in near real-time. The eligible could search for matrimonial matches across adjacent villages. The voters would communicate their concerns to the politicians and bureaucrats electronically, with a trail of the communication. The village officials could share governance best practices faster among their counterparts elsewhere.

Many of these and other activities could doubtless be performed without computers. But there is a pain in those processes. That is where technology can make a difference. Computers have been the disruptive innovation of the past two decades. And yet, they have barely made a difference to the lives of people in most of the developing markets of the world.

I believe that the time has now come to take computers and allied technologies to every village of the world. Only through such a mass-scale deployment can we create a platform on which can be layered other programmes whose power can now be amplified dramatically. From primary education to adult literacy, from providing a two-way flow of information to enabling transactions, from increasing governance transparency to reducing corruption, from jobs to marriages, computers can indeed be the manna for the world’s villages.

By themselves, computers will do little. They need applications to make a difference. They need change in government’s processes. But by making computing available to every citizen, they will force a seismic change through the lines of governance. They will become the platform which can be built upon to layer a whole range of different services.

Computing as a utility in every village is at the heart of my vision of transforming Rural India. As we shall see, a combination of innovative ideas can make this a reality in a commercially viable business model – one where the government is not a funder, but an enabler.

[I’d like to acknowledge the help of a few people who have helped stimulate my thinking in this direction. Prof. Ramesh Jain (for the invigorating discussions we have each time he visits India and his ideas on “folk computing”) and CK Prahalad (for his Bottom of the Pyramid ideas and writings, and his belief that India has to grow at 10% per annum) helped in getting me started. In addition, the discussions I had with R Gopalakrishnan (Secretary to the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, and who set me on the course by inviting me to make a presentation in MP), Rakesh Shrivastava (of MAPIT) and Anita Sharma (of MP’sHeadstart programme) have helped refine many of the ideas I will be discussing here.]

Tomorrow: A Wider View

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: A Wider View

In a world of “cold technologies” (ones that shrink the revenue pie like Linux and Outsourcing), the search is one for technology’s next killer applications and new markets. The schism in the world could not be more stark: there are about 500 million users of computers spread across much of the developed world and the elite among the developing markets. This is now a saturated market in terms of technology consumption. Yes, they will continue to buy new computers, cellphones and the like, but this is an “upgrade” market. They have current solutions, and are looking for incrementally better way to do their activities.

And then there is the Rest of the World, spread across the world’s developing markets. India, China, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Africa, the Eastern European countries – they are among today’s “nonconsumers”. They have been left out of much of technology’s value chain so far because of pricing. They cannot afford computers which cost almost as a year’s GDP. This is a world of 4 billion people at the bottom of the pyramid that subsists on less than Rs 100 (USD 2) a day. Technology is a distant, non-existent dream for them.

And yet, if we think about it, they are the ones who perhaps can do the most with technology because it opens up options and creates opportunities which hitherto did not exist. Computers and the Internet can break barriers of geography which have existed since time immemorial. For them, computers are not going to be an alternative, they are perhaps the only instrument for progress and growth, a passport to a better life. The problem is that the benefits of (arguably) the world’s greatest invention have so far been unimaginable to these mass markets.

The digital divide is thus a hard reality. But there is also another digital divide – between the envisioners who dream about what technology can do, the technologists who understand what technology can do, the funders who have the money but do not necessarily know how best to spend it, and the implementers on the field who know what solutions are needed. These divides have prevented appropriate and affordable technology solutions benefiting the world’s poorest.

India can become the first market to try out a set of new ideas to bridge the digital divide. India is large and diverse – it is in fact a collection of many smaller markets. India can become technology’s next big market. There is an optimism in its people for the first time in many generations that tomorrow will be better than today. There is a positive energy as people see symbols of the New India coming up even as the old sustains and endures. Indians also have the requisite technology skills to put together the solutions.

So far, much of India’s IT industry has focused outward – making India as a destination for outsourced services. The time has now come to look inward – what can we do for, in the words of CK Prahalad, the “India Inside”. If these ideas can work in India’s villages, they can surely work in the rural areas of the world’s developing countries, opening up markets for technology which are presently invisible. The bottom of the world’s pyramid waits.

Tomorrow: Indian Pyramid Economics

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Indian Pyramid Economics

Consider the Indian pyramid from the needs of technology. Right at the top are today’s computer users, numbering about 10-15 million. They have computers at home, or at the workplace, or use them from cybercafes across the country. India's present computer base is about 8 million. The last 3 years have seen computer sales stagnate between 1.5 and 2 million.

In the pyramid, the middle tier is the one which wants computers – they understand its value, but cannot afford the Rs 30,000 (USD 600) price point. This segment consists of about 40-50 million households or about 160-200 million people – they are the ones who have access to telecom (either a landline or a cellphone) and cable television. This is India’s aspirational middle class.

This segment needs computing for which they are perhaps willing to pay Rs 500-700 a month, which is about half of today’s EMIs (equated monthly installments) of Rs 1,000-1,500, over a 36-42 month period. They could get access to consumer finance, but probably feel that the cost of the computer is still too high to justify a purchase. These users need English and support for at least one other Indian language.

The bottom of the pyramid in India is the one in its 600,000 villages, numbering about 150-200 million households (600-800 million people). Few among them have seen or heard of a computer. For the most part, they live on less Rs 50 (USD 1) day. This is a segment which could use computers for getting land record details, for grievance redressal, for getting commodity prices, for literacy, and many other reasons. This segment presently has little or no access to computing – cybercafes cannot be found in villages.

This is a segment which can pay a few rupees each time they access a service. But very quickly these rupees start adding up, limiting usage. The question is: how much money can be invested by a household in this segment for access to computing? This answer will determine what is required to make an economically sustainable model. The assumption we will make for now is that they are convinced that like health insurance, paying for computing is necessary because it will guarantee a better future.

Assume on an average each Indian village has about 1,000 people (or about 250 households). The per capita income for Rural India is perhaps no more than Rs 1,000 a month (Rs 12,000 or USD 240 a year). For a family of four, this works out to about Rs 4,000 a month. Let us halve that for the bottom of the pyramid. This gives us a figure of about Rs 2,000 a month. Will this household spend Rs 20 a month (1% of their income) on technology?

Let us for a moment assume they will. (We will come back to why they will do so a little later.) This gives us an income of about Rs 5,000 per month from the 250 households in the village. Over three years, this gives us a total of Rs 180,000 for a village. This is the economic base on which we have to build out TeleInfoCentres connected into a Village InfoGrid and complemented with Intelligent, Real-Time eGovernance to transform Rural India.

Next Week: Transforming Rural India (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: International Rural ICT Projects

Bridging the digital divide through technology has been the focus of many initiatives worldwide. Madanmohan Rao provides a summary of various such projects in his report on the IT Summit 2002 held in Nepal:

· FarmNet (for agricultural workers in Uganda)
· Nabweru and Buwama telecentres (for economic empowerment of women in Uganda)
· Rural Multipurpose Community Telecentres (libraries and online centres in Benin, Mali, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda)
· MahilaWeb (for information sharing about women and gender in Nepal)
· Pakissan (for farmers in Pakistan)
· PeopLink (artisans portal for 22 developing countries)
· Tortas (e-commerce portal for homemade cakes made by Peruvian women)
· Bankilare (a community network in Niger)
· Across Borders (connecting Palestinians in refuge camps)
· MarketWatch (price information service in Mongolia)
· Nairobits (Web services centre for slum children in Kenya)
· Street Children Telecentre (for IT skills in Ecuador)
· Mountain Forum (for knowledge sharing on mountainous region communities in over 100 countries on topics like renewable energy, agro-industry, potato research)
· Virtual Souk (for underprivileged artisans in the Middle East and North Africa)
· Multipurpose Community Telecentres (in four farming and fishing villages of northern Mindanano in the Philippines)
· GrameenPhone (in Bangladesh)
· HealthInfo (for IT among health workers in Ethiopia)
· Village Leap (for selling scarves made by Cambodian women)
· Metrocomia (outsourced Web services centres in about a dozen countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia),
· Communications Boat Project (to bring IT tools via boats to Amazonian communities)

Malaysia has come up with a number of "demonstration applications" such as Project Cybercare for providing Internet access and educational resources among 26 networked orphanages and a telecentre called e-Bario has also been set up for the Kelabit ethnic community in rural Sarawak.

Examples in India include:

· TaraHaat (for e-marketing in rural areas)
· AkashGanga (for dairy cooperatives in Gujarat)
· Warna Wired Village Project (for sugarcane farmers in Maharashtra)
· HoneyBee Network (documenting grassroots innovations for knowledge on sustainable natural resource management)
· Gyandoot (community centre network in rural Madhya Pradesh).

The National Informatics Centre is proposing a "Rural Studio" initiative for developing reusable software components and services for the rural development sector, and IndianVolunteers.org networks volunteers interested in such initiatives.

Kerala is rolling out an "e-governance grid" via a network of information kiosks providing sales tax forms, income certificates, domicile certificates, ration card forms, and company registration.

We will take a closer look at some of the Indian projects, beginning with the one which has generated the maximum interest – Madhya Pradesh’s Gyandoot.

Tomorrow: Gyandoot

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Gyandoot

Gyandoot was launched in November 1999 as an intranet in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh connecting rural cybercafes catering to the everyday needs of the masses. It has been since extended to other districts in MP. It was awarded the Stockholm Challenge IT Award 2000 in the "Public Service and Democracy" category. Said the citation: "Project Gyandoot is a unique government to citizen Intranet project implemented in a tribal district (Dhar) in Central India, with numerous benefits to the region, including a people-based self-reliant sustainable strategy. Gyandoot is recognised as a breakthrough in e-government, demonstrating a paradigm shift which gives marginalised tribal citizens their first ever chance to access knowledge, with minimum investment."

The Gyandoot website lists the services that are available:

· Commodity/ Mandi Marketing Information System
· Income Certificate
· Domicile Certificate
· Caste Certificate
· Landholder's passbook of land rights and loans Rural Hindi e-mail
· Public Grievance Redressal
· Forms of Various Government Schemes
· Below Poverty Line Family List
· Employment news
· Rural matrimonial
· Rural Market
· Rural News Paper
· Advisory module
· E-education
· Driving License
· Khasra (Land Record) Nakal Avedan
· Varmi Compost Khad Booking

A World Bank summary on the project explains the context and the approach:

The Dhar district in central India has a population of 1.7 million; 60% live below the poverty line. The goal of the Gyandoot project has been to establish community-owned, technologically innovative and sustainable information kiosks in a poverty-stricken, tribal dominated rural area of Madhya Pradesh. During the design phase of the project, meetings were held with villagers to gather their input. Among the concerns highlighted by villagers was the absence of information about prevailing agriculture produce auction centre rates. Consequently, farmers were unable to get the best price for their agricultural produce. Copies of land records also were difficult to obtain. A villager had to go out in search of the patwari (village functionary who maintains all land records), who often was difficult to get hold of as his duties include extensive travel. To file complaints or submit applications, people had to go to district headquarters (which could be 100 miles away), resulting in a loss of wages/earnings.

The Gyandoot project was launched on January 1, 2000 with the installation of a low cost rural Intranet covering 20 village information kiosks in five Blocks of the district. Later, 11 more kiosks were set up. Villages that function as Block headquarters or hold the weekly markets in tribal areas or are located on major roads (e.g., bus stops) were chosen for establishing the kiosks. Seven centers are located in towns (urban areas), 8 in large villages with a population of 5,000-6,000, another 7 in medium sized villages with a population of 1,000-4,000, and the rest are in small villages with population less than 500. Each kiosk caters to about 25 to 30 villages. The entire network of 31 kiosks covers 311 Panchayats (village committees), over 600 villages and a population of around half a million (nearly 50% of the entire district).

Kiosks have been established in the village Panchayat buildings. Information kiosks have dial-up connectivity through local exchanges on optical fibre or UHF links. The server hub is a Remote Access Server housed in the computer room in the District Panchayat.

User fees are charged at the kiosks for the services provided. Local rural youth act as entrepreneurs, running these information kiosks along commercial lines.

Rajesh Rajora was the Dhar district collector who initiated the Gyandoot project. His presentation in a TICAD workshop in July 2002 discusses Gyandoot and other ICT case studies from India. TIME magazine had a story on the project (June 4, 2001 issue).

A report by the Centre for Electric Governance at the Indian Institute of Ahmedabad discusses the project based on a filed study conducted in May 2002. Its conclusions:

As an experiment, the Gyandoot project can be considered path breaking. It attempted to use the ICT in improving the delivery of government services to the rural community. At the time of conceptualization, it was a unique idea, not tried by many in the world. The project was launched during the period when the entire world looked at the web-enabled solutions as a new opportunity of reaching customers directly and improving customer relations.

It is very clear that the power supply, connectivity, and backend support (with new value propositions) are the essential pre-requisites to benefit from such technological advancements. Several such projects in the enterprise sector have failed, resulting in the dot com burst simply because they could not provide cost effective, sustainable solutions with improved value to the customers.

In achieving its intended objects, however, Gyandoot cannot be considered a success. In spite of being in existence for more than two years, the usage of the system has remained far below acceptable levels. The current status of the project illustrates that ICT alone cannot improve the service delivery to rural poor. Significant re-engineering of backend processes and introduction of services that directly contribute to the poverty alleviation are needed to make such initiatives sustainable.

The study team would conclude this report by stating that Gyandoot should address the main objective of servicing the rural citizens through improvements of the back-end processes and involvement of dedicated government officials. Current ICT solutions are too costly for the level of usage being experienced. The challenge for the management of the Gyandoot system lies in enhancing the services to make the system cost effective, while benefiting the rural poor, without worsening the digital divide.

A discussion paper by Naveen Prakash has additional information.

Tomorrow: Bhoomi, eSeva and Information Village

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Bhoomi, eSeva and Information Village

Next, we look to Karnataka’s Bhoomi, Andhra Pradesh’s eSeva and the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation’s Information Village Project in Pondicherry.

Bhoomi

The Karnataka government launched Bhoomi to create a service to computerise land records and make them available to the people for a nominal fee (in this case, Rs 15). Bhoomi is a finalist for the Stockholm Award 2002. Here is a brief overview from the contest website:

Bhoomi is a self-sustainable e-governance project for the computerised delivery of 20 million rural land records to 6.7 million farmers through 177 Government owned kiosks in the Indian state of Karnataka which has eliminated red tape and corruption in the issue of land title records, and is fast becoming the backbone for credible IT-enabled Government services for the rural population.
Rural Land Records are central conduits to delivering better IT-enabled services to citizens because they contain multiple data elements: ownership, tenancy, loans, nature of title, irrigation details, crops grown etc. In addition to proving title to the land, the Land Record is used by the farmer for a variety of purposes: from documenting crop loans and legal actions, to securing scholarships for school-children. These records were hitherto maintained manually by 9,000 village officials who often extracted a price for issuing copies.

Under the Bhoomi (“Land”) dispensation, computerised kiosks offer farmers two critical services (currently): procurement of land records and requesting changes to land title. With 20 million records legally maintained now only in the digital format, Bhoomi has brought the power of IT to dispel the insecurities of the farmers in 27,000 villages. To ensure authenticity of data management, a Biometric Finger Authentication system has been used for the first time in an e-governance project in India. To make the project self-sustaining and expandable, Bhoomi levies user charges. Already, about 1.25 million farmers have paid Rs 19 million. As a pilot for additional cross-selling initiatives, one kiosk is currently being used by citizens, thus validating the potential of this platform.

eSeva

The Andhra Pradesh government has launched eseva, with the aim of providing “one stop non stop service” to the citizens. It is, perhaps, one of the most ambitious projects in India, in the realm of government-to-citizen (G2C) services. It is currently operational through 29 eSeva centres (with 280 service counters) spread over the Twin Cities of Hyderabad and Secenderabad, and Ranga Reddy District. eSeva offers a wide spectrum of services ranging from Payment of Utilities Bills, Certificates, Permits / Licences, Transport Department Services to Reservation, Passport Applications and Downloading of Forms. The government is planning to, according to a report in the Business Line, to “reach out up to all the 1,100 mandals (blocks) across the State, [and] it is proposed to deploy up to village in a phased manner.”

Information Village

The MS Swaminathan Research Foundation has set up an Information Village project in Pondicherry. It won Stockholm Challenge Award under the Global Village category 2001. Here is a description from their website on the project:

In an experiment in electronic knowledge delivery to the poor, we have connected ten villages near Pondicherry in southern India by a hybrid wired and wireless network -- consisting of PCs, telephones, VHF duplex radio devices and email connectivity through dial-up telephone lines -- that facilitates both voice and data transfer, and have enabled the villagers to get information that they need and can use to improve their lot.

The entire project draws its sustenance from the holistic philosophy of Swaminathan, which emphasizes an integrated pro-poor, pro-women, pro-nature orientation to development and community ownership of technological tools against personal or family ownership, and encourages collective action for spread of technology. The bottom up exercise involves local volunteers to gather information, feed it into an Intranet and provide access through nodes in different villages.

Value addition to the raw information, use of the local language (Tamil) and multimedia (to facilitate illiterate users) and participation by local people right from the beginning are the noteworthy features of the project. Most of the operators and volunteers providing primary information are women, thus giving them status and influence. All centres evolved themselves to meet the information demands made by the community.

We have shown that empowering people through access to timely and relevant information can make a difference in the life of the rural poor. We have also demonstrated that new ICTs can play a crucial role in this effort. Information provided in the village knowledge centres is locale specific and relates to prices of agricultural inputs (such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides) and outputs (rice, vegetables), market (potential for export), entitlement (the multitude of schemes of the central and state governments, banks), health care (availability of doctors and paramedics in nearby hospitals, women's diseases), cattle diseases, transport (road conditions, cancellation of bus trips), weather (appropriate time for sowing, areas of abundant fish catch, wave heights in the sea), etc.

A discussion paper by Senthilkumaran and Subbiah Arunachalam provides more information.

Tomorrow: Tarahaat and Drishtee

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Tarahaat and Drishtee

Tarahaat and Drishtee are two projects being driven by non-government organisations, focusing on creating entrepreneur (franchisee) driven information kiosks and community centres in rural areas.

Tarahaat

TARAhaat, named after the all-purpose haat (meaning a village bazaar), comprises “a commercially viable model for bringing relevant information, products and services via the Internet to the unserved rural market of India.” It is set up as a partnership between Development Alternatives (DA), an NGO focused on promoting sustainable development in India, and its rural marketing arm, Technology and Action for Rural Advancement (TARA). It won the Stockholm Challenge Award in the Global Village category in 2001.

Here are more details from the Digital Partners website:
TARAhaat combines a mother portal, TARAhaat.com, supported by franchised networks of village cybercafes and delivery systems to provide a full range of services its clients. The subsidiary units include:

· TARAdhaba - will provide the villager connectivity and access to a new world.
· TARAbazaar - will provide access to products and services needed by rural households, farmers, and industries.
· TARAvan - will deliver goods ordered.
· TARAdak - will connect the rural families to the daughter married far off and to the son posted on the front.
· TARAguru - a decentralized university will provide mentoring and consultancy to village-based mini- enterprises.
· TARAscouts / TARAreporter - will collect relevant information for the portal.
· TARAvendor - will run the store that will cater to products available at Tarabazaar.
· TARAcard - will enable the villager to order goods and services on credit.

The economics of the TARAdhaba franchise are critical to the success of the network. The main costs of running a TARAdhaba are: loan servicing, staffing, utilities and royalties to TARAhaat. Preliminary business plans show that the break-even for a TARAdhaba with two terminals is around Rs. 600 ($15) per day, or Rs. 20,000 ($450) per month. The revenues to cover this must come from several streams. The owner will charge each user for the time spent at the terminal. (In the cybercafes found in cities all over India, the current charges range from Rs. 50 to 100 -- $ 1 to 2 -- per hour).

In addition, the TARAdhaba will charge a brokerage fee for certain kinds of transactions and information delivery. Other revenue sources include displaying ads from local businesses and professionals, downloading educational materials and accessing official information, application forms, etc. TARAhaat's revenues come from the wide range of services it provides to its end-clients, the villagers; its franchises in the form of royalties and service fees; its advertisers; its vendors and its other business partners, all of whom will benefit by the growing market for the their products and services made possible by TARAhaat.

More details are available in a paper at the Digital Dividend website.

Drishtee

Drishtee is “an organizational platform for developing IT enabled services to rural and semi-urban populations through the usage of state-of-the-art software. The services it enables include access to government programs and benefits, market related information, and private information exchanges and transactions.” It builds upon the Gyandoot project of Madhya Pradesh. Here is more:

Drishtee is a platform for rural networking and marketing services for enabling e-governance, education and health services. It is a state-of-the-art software which facilitates communication and information interchange within a localized intranet between villages and a district center. This communication backbone has been supplemented by a string of rural services for example, Avedan, Land Records, Gram Daak (mailing software), Gram Haat (virtual market place), Vaivahiki (Matrimonial), Shikayat (online grievance redressal), Mandi Information System and a host of other customized services.

These services are provided through Drishtee in a village (or a group of villages) by a local villager, who owns the kiosk after having it financed through a Govt. sponsored scheme. The employment thus generated leads to a new breed of IT literate generation who can pay for their meager loans with their earnings and become a role model for the younger generation.

Drishtee’s business model is driven by a village entrepreneur who is suitably trained to handle user-friendly software. The unit revenue earned by this kiosk owner is a few cents per transaction, but the volume of the operations and an intrinsic demand enable viability very early in the operation. This individual, educated to 10th Grade or above, becomes a role model and a messenger of valuable information for the villagers. With a minimum size of 800 families as a prerequisite for a kiosk’s viability, a total of 100 such kiosks or more can be successfully set up within an average Indian District. A small fraction of the combined total revenue of such centers is enough to interest a local businessman to act as a channel partner and invest for the operational cost at the outset. This partner performs the role of a franchisee and adds value in scouting for kiosk owners, developing relations with District government, and maintaining the entire network of operations within the district.

Drishtee’s vision is to set up 50,000 Information Kiosks all over India within a span of six years. These kiosks would potentially serve a market of 500 million people, with aggregate discretionary purchasing power of Rs. 100 billion (USD 2 billion). So far, it has set up 90 kiosks across five Indian states.

Tomorrow: eChoupals

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: eChoupals

ITC is setting up eChoupals across the agricultural belt in India to “offer the farmers of India all the information, products and services they need to enhance farm productivity, improve farm-gate price realisation and cut transaction costs. Farmers can access latest local and global information on weather, scientific farming practices as well as market prices at the village itself through this web portal - all in Hindi. Choupal also facilitates supply of high quality farm inputs as well as purchase of commodities at their doorstep.” A paper describes the phased approach:

In Phase I, the business goal was to create a physical infrastructure of eChoupals at the village level and create local level ownerships through the identified Sanchalaks. At this stage the business goal was supported by creating a local language portal, which provided the required information to farmers such as local weather, market prices and best practices.

In Phase II, the business goal was to get the farmer registered and transacting by selling directly to ITC Ltd. through the virtual market. This goal was supported by creating a B2B site, which integrated the transactions directly to the back-end ERP and ensured that there was no latency in processing any of the procurement by the processing units.

In Phase III, the business goal was to create a full fledged ‘meta-market ’.In this phase, the market would facilitate other operators like inputs providers and rural distributors to work effectively through the eChoupal to deliver and procure goods from every participating village.

The technology road map to support this phase was to have a secure, consolidated Farmers database with all information pertaining to their holdings and credit worthiness to be available online. This database, along with identification provided by smart cards would enable support for online transactions through the eChoupal leading to integration with participating financial institutions such as banks, insurance and credit agencies.

A more detailed description of the ecosystem being created by the eChoupals comes from a note on the World Resources Institute Digital Dividend Knowledge Bank site:

[The business model] centers around the deployment of a network of Internet-connected kiosks, known as e-Choupals, throughout agricultural areas in India. An e-Choupal is a high-tech version of the traditional "choupal," or "village gathering place" in Hindi, where farmers are provided with the latest weather reports, local and international produce prices, and farming best practices. Costing USD 3,000 - 6,000 each to set up, they also serve as procurement and purchase points, allowing farmers not only to sell their produce to ITC, but also to buy agricultural inputs and consumer goods for daily household use.

Each e-Choupal is managed by an ITC-appointed "Sanchalak", a respected farmer of the community who takes a public oath of office upon accepting the position. While ITC covers equipment, the day-to-day operating costs, which consist primarily of electricity and Internet connection charges, are covered by the e-Choupal Sanchalak. These costs vary depending on usage, but average about USD 60 and USD 160 per year respectively. Miscellaneous travel and equipment maintenance costs add another USD 20 in yearly fixed costs. ITC, for its part, spends an average of USD 100 annually on each kiosk, which goes toward training and infrastructure management. Such activities include maintaining a helpdesk, addressing equipment and software complaints, and repairing or replacing broken equipment.

This reorganization of the role of middlemen results in lower procurement costs for ITC, despite having to pay higher prices to the farmers. Transaction costs are also minimized for the farmer by buying output at the farmers' doorstep, and through transparent pricing and weighing practices. A substantial quantity (120,000 MT of various commodities) has already been procured through this channel, resulting in overall savings over a million US dollars. The savings are shared between buyer (ITC) and seller (farmer). According to company officials, the average soya farmer saves US$ 5 per ton of beans when he sells through the e-Choupal network. ITC, for its part, saves US$ 4 per ton, even after paying transportation costs.

On the marketing front, ITC is able to maintain and grow the trust of its farmers by enhancing their productivity and wealth. ITC leverages this position of trust among farmers, as well as its distribution capabilities, to market its own consumer good brands and those of partner companies offering products and services that ITC does not. Sales of consumer goods through the e-Choupals have been particularly successful because the cost-savings associated with dealing directly with the manufacturer allow Sanchalaks to offer goods at lower prices than other village-level traders or retailers can afford to do.

The total network already includes 1,286 kiosks, reaching almost a million farmers across some 9,000 villages. Enthusiasm from farmers is helping ITC to rapidly scale up its network. Current plans include diversification into a wider variety of crops in 11 other states across India. Expanding at a rate of 3 to 4 kiosks a day, the company expects to have 20,000 choupals covering 100,000 villages, or one sixth of rural India, within 10 years.

Next Week: Transforming Rural India (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: More Rural ICT Projects

There are many other technology-related projects for Rural India and eGovernance going on across India. Here is a summary of some of them:

Warana Wired Village: “The Wired Village Project (WVP) implemented at Warana was conceived as a pilot project to bring benefits of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to rural India. Warana is a cluster of seventy villages, forty-six from Kolhapur and twenty-four from Sangli district, in the Western State of Maharashtra, India. There are several cooperative societies actively working in Warana complex like Sugar Cooperative, Dairy Development Society, Cooperative Bank, Women’s Cooperative Society, Super Market, Educational Institutions, etc. Sugarcane is the major crop of this area and most of its production in Kolhapur and Sangli districts is processed at the Warana Sugar Co-operative factory. Each village has about 200-300 farmers registered as members of various cooperative societies.” (More, from a discussion paper by DP Bobde, A Deb, RR Rane.)

Media Lab Asia: MLA, a joint iniitative of MIT Media Lab and the Indian Government, is doing a number of projects in the areas of World Computer (“A computer for the illiterate, for communities, for everyone. Language, electrical power, literacy, and personal wealth are some of the problems that prevent participation in the digital revolution. We are creating computers that transcend these barriers to bring digital services to everyone. The design goal of the world computer is a locally localized, grassroots interface.”) and Digital Village (“Realizing Gandhi's vision of a sustainable village through culturally appropriate use of new technologies. Our goal is to create a sustainable digital ecology that maintains traditional values and community while opening economic and expressive opportunities. The twin themes of the Digital Village projects are tools that empower invention and expression, and advanced financial tools for rural markets.”)

Sustainable Access for Rural India: SARI is a project in the villages of Madurai district in Tamil Nadu to offer voice and Internet services. IIT-Madras; MIT Media Lab; Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University Law School; and the I-Gyan Foundation. It is carried out jointly with n-Logue Communicaitons Pvt. Ltd., a rural ISP. Here is a note from the project plan: “A kiosk will be set up in each village to service the needs of the people in that village. Separate connections will be provided to schools, colleges, primary health centres, etc. The project aims at identifying and providing appropriate access technologies and applications that will be of use to the local community. Possible applications are school education, farmers' commodity market information, e governance, local commerce, etc. The project will receive initial funding from outside for procurement of equipment as well as paying for its operation, but will eventually become self-sufficient and pay for itself.” The pilot project aimed at setting up 1000 connections in 350 villages.

FRIENDS and Akshaya: Kerala’s FRIENDS (Fast Reliable Instant Efficient Network for Disbursement of Services) centres accept all utility bills, taxes and fees pertaining to the participating departments and offer quality services to the citizens. FRIENDS has been launched in all 14 district headquarters in the State. Akshaya plans to “develop Kerala's first comprehensive digital network to train at least one member in 64 lakh families in the basics of Information & Communication Technology thus opening a hotline between the citizens, the government and the world.”

Mahiti Shakti Kendras: Started in the Panchmahals district of Gujarat, the Mahiti Shakti Kendras “become a single-window clearance for forms and other information that people in small towns and villages may require. All forms of various district level offices with a checklist giving details of required documents at the time of submission are provided. As many as 200 forms have been made available on-line. Information pertaining to ongoing schemes like those under the District Rural Development Agency and District Planning Board have also been made available. The web-enabled version of the Gujarat Geographic Information System (GGIS) giving details of the resource availability in terms of 95 parameters of every village of the district is available on a query-based system”, according a report in Times of India (Oct 2002). About 80 such centres have been set up so far.

Tomorrow: More ICT Projects (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: More ICT Projects (Part 2)

Setu: An initiative by the Maharashtra government for setting up citizen facilitation centres across the state is Setu. The aim, according to the website is “to create foundation for citizen centric e-governance, at district headquarters and subsequently at taluka headquarters”. Setu offers “single window clearance of 83 important certificates (includes renewal of leases ,permits & licenses), quick redressel of public grievances, common registry of letters, petitions for all sections of the office, On line pendency monitoring of all above”.

Akashganga: Based in Guajarat, “Akashganga [was] conceived with the objective to spread information technology among rural masses. [It] identified milk cooperative society where each family staying in the village is member & visiting the society to sell milk produced by them (through cattle owned) to the society daily twice. Spread of information & technology initiated with automating their routine milk collection process which otherwise was done manually, beginning with computer and software in regional language, weighing scale, card reader & instrument to integrate the full process. Also developed was an accounting system (Rojmel) to automate and integrate their accounting function in the system.” (More)

Educational IT Initiatives

There are several projects centred around Education. These include:

Headstart: It is a project in Madhya Pradesh to provide “computer-enabled education and development of basic computer skills for all students in Primary Schools and Middle Schools through the 7000 Jan Shiksha Kendras (cluster resource centres) located in Middle School premises in 48 districts. It will equip every Jan Shiksha Kendra in the state with computer hardware and multimedia software. It repositions the JSK as a media unit capable of providing computer-aided education for the children of the middle school in which the JSK is located and familiarization to computers to all children in primary schools through simple demos and games to excite their imagination.” So far, about 2,700 Headstart centres have been set up. (More)

AP Schools: In 2002, the Andhra Pradesh government contracted with NIIT for setting up 663 modern computer classrooms with over 8,000 computers and implementation of computer education in high schools to education over 300,000 students. The five-year project was worth Rs 155 crore (USD 30 million), averaging Rs 90 per student per month. (Details)

Vidya Vahini: The Indian government has launched a project called Vidya Vahini to provide for IT and IT-enabled education in 60,000 schools in India over three years (India has about 1.1 million schools), as part of a Rs 6,000 crore (USD 1.2 billion) project. A pilot covering 150 schools is currently underway. “Each of the schools would be provided with a computer lab. The computer lab will also be equipped with Internet, Intranet and television to facilitate video-conferencing, Web-broadcasting and e-learning”, according to the Financial Express.

Community Learning Centres: CLCs are being set up the Azim Premji Foundation in rural Karnataka, with the objectives of “attracting children to schools, creating excitement in and around the school, Simplifying difficult concepts, thereby making learning exciting and fundamentals strong and building a Sound foundation to IT literacy. A CLC has about 6-8 computers in a Government Higher Primary School, used by children of that school during school hours for learning curriculum through interactive games and exercises. They are Used by the community before or after school hours and during holidays.” So far, about 90 CLCs have been set up.

Tomorrow: Sristi and Learnings

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Sristi and Learnings

Sristi

Sristi (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Innovations) is not a technology project per se. Rather, it is a “a non-governmental organisation setup to strengthen the creativity of grassroots inventors, innovators and ecopreneurs engaged in conserving biodiversity and developing eco-friendly solutions to local problems.” Wrote the Far Eastern Economic Review, which awarded Sristi a Gold Award for Innovation in 2000:

After seven years of working in 5,500 villages primarily in the Indian state of Gujarat, Sristi has found a wealth of what it calls "grassroots innovations." Those discoveries are in turn catalogued in a database (current count: 10,000) and shared in a newsletter. Now Sristi is aiming to take the process a step further: One of its offshoots has begun patenting and investing in various creations on behalf of inventors. "There is only one thing in which poor people are rich and that is their knowledge," says Sristi's charismatic founder, Anil Gupta, a professor at the Indian Institute of Ahmedabad.

Finding ethical ways to share such local inventiveness and expertise was what first drove Gupta to start Sristi's informal predecessor, the Honey Bee network, back in 1990. A scientist respected for his work in economics and ecology, Gupta nevertheless felt troubled. Nearly all of his studies were published in English, inaccessible to the people who had helped him to write them. By using their knowledge to further his research, Gupta wondered if he wasn't impoverishing them in the process.

The eventual answer was Sristi, which not only seeks out innovation, but spreads it in six Indian languages as well as English and Spanish. Its quarterly newsletter, Honey Bee, is based on the philosophy that exchanging knowledge can benefit both the source and the community, just as a bee taking pollen from a flower in no way diminishes it.

Learnings

A paper by Subba Rao discusses knowledge management in India’s rural community projects, and provides snapshots of select projects. The paper concludes that the community network centres can play a key role in meeting the socio-economic aspirations of rural communities by successfully addressing the “8Cs” of success in the digital age: connectivity, content, community, commerce, capacity, culture, cooperation, and capital.

· Publishing and publicity of the projects is very minimal. With no comparative study or linking across projects the lessons learned by one project are not transmitted to the others. Appropriate technologies are rarely evaluated and financial sustainability, scalability and cost recovery are seldom addressed.

· Project plans frequently ignore the harsh realities and very few have substance for implementation.

· Economically responsible projects are already proving more successful than charitable or free models. Projects that identify and cost the services they provide are also more successful.

· Projects initiated following consulting at grass roots level is essential — top down approaches do not work. An intimate understanding of the social and economic parameters of rural India gives connectivity providers a significant advantage.

· Initial information requirements may change over a period of time and therefore periodic assessment must to be undertaken.

· Content creation in local language is a prerequisite for project success. It is imperative to develop locally relevant content in the local language and to present it intelligibly as well as offering suitable and adequate training.

· The scope of IT must be seen as reaching beyond that of just computers and the internet to include radio, TV, microchip technology etc. The use of automated butter fat assessment equipment as part of the Akashganga project is a classic example.

· Egovernment is one of the most promising sectors for exploring the uses of ICT. It involves two distinct activities: the computerisation of government functions; and the provision of G2C and C2G connections through which citizens can obtain access to a variety of information.

· Rural entrepreneurs and crafts persons are saving time, travel and effort. Greater benefits will be felt when wired micro-credit accounts come into use for online or distance transactions amongst or within village communities.

· ICT projects have assisted rural communities by providing them with news, information, advice and knowledge that has hitherto been inaccessible to them. This information has allowed rural citizens/consumers to make more informed economic decisions: landless labourers have negotiated their daily wages more effectively; and tractors, threshers, old television sets, cattle and motorcycles have all been traded across towns and villages due to online advertisements.

· Until the cost of basic IT devices which deliver the ‘last mile’ of connectivity and local language software is lowered, the goal of wiring rural India will remain a dream.

Tomorrow: The Conundrum

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: The Conundrum

There have been various initiatives to take IT to the masses in India – Gyandoot, eSeva, Bhoomi, eChoupals are some examples. At best, these have been success stories limited in size, scale or scope. The digital divide is far from being bridged. Where is the problem? There certainly does not seem to be a lack of vision, ideas or even resources. And yet, what is missing is a solution that has been rolled out on a mass scale to make a difference to millions.

As I see it, the problems are the following:

· Government as Financer: This is perhaps the single biggest issue which limits scalability. The government can fund 100 or even 1000 centres or kiosks costing Rs 100,000 (USD 2,000) each. But the need is for 50 times as many access points. That is where the government-funded model becomes impractical – there simply isn’t enough money to set up these across a state or a country. And so, without the scale, the costs of operation are high, the villagers have to walk many kilometers to get to the nearest centre and that is simply not going to happen.

· Demo Mentality: The thinking when the plans are drawn up is to create “pilots”. The reasoning goes: let us do 10 or 50 or 100 such demonstration centres, or showcases. Once the proof-of-concept is proved, then we can look at scaling these up. This approach is one which is setting itself up only for a short-term success; it will not succeed in the long-term. This is because it is much easier to put in all that it takes to make a few centres work because the aim is not to prove commercial viability but to showcase a local success to funding agencies or key decision-makers. The approach is not geared to creating solutions that can be scaled out rapidly.

· Silo Solutions: Many approaches think of the problem too narrowly. We think of solving a “telemedicine” problem or a “land record” problem or an “email and Internet access” problem or a “literacy”problem or the “voting machine” problem. The computing infrastructure required for solving each of the problems is almost identical. And yet, we think of each in isolation trying to create economic models which will work in the silos.

· Internet-driven: Many of the current solutions assume the existence of a Net connection, essentially functioning as Internet Kiosks. This is a big limitation, because connectivity is one of the biggest bugbears in the rural areas. Without connectivity, the computer is crippled, seriously limiting its usage. While transaction services like bill payments and railway bookings which need real-time Internet connectivity can offer immense benefits to the villagers, these services can be hobbled by the lack of connectivity.

· Incrementalist, not Disruptive: The need of the hour is for disruptive solutions. Yet, the thinking that percolates is very incrementalist. That may be because there is an interest in keeping things nearly the same, or because we look at technology that exists today, and not at what the future is bringing. The solutions tend to be driven more by what may have worked in the developed world or in the urban areas, because they are the ones who are either funding the solutions or providing the technologies. The need is for a completely fresh and bottom-up analysis of the rural markets, keeping in mind the emergence of “cold technologies”.

Thus, the result is that the thinking – and therefore the solution – is flawed. We need to think in terms of millions of villages worldwide as the potential addressable market, and yet work on making each village commercially viable.

Tomorrow: Rethinking ICT Solutions

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Rethinking ICT Solutions

Let us look at the requirements for the ICT (information and communications technology) solutions for the rural markets:

· Mass-market: The solution needs to address the needs for tens of millions people. In India, this has to be a solution which can in a short period of time penetrate into each of the 600,000 villages to make a difference to hundreds of millions of people. It is a solution on a scale that has perhaps never been thought of before.

· Scalable: Being able to scale out the solution is very important, else we will have created yet another “demo wonder”. Scalability will mean that there has to be a decentralisable element in the solution.

· Emergent: Going hand-in-hand with scalability and decentralisation is the need for the solution to have emergent properties – where it is driven from the bottom-up, and the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. This can only happen if the solution is driven not by government, but by small entrepreneurs who see a commercial motivation to own, deploy and grow the solution.

· Low R&D Costs: There is little time to go out and develop new solutions. The approach should be that of aggregation, not re-creation. This means looking around and pooling together existing ideas and technologies which may be just good enough, rather than spending years on creating what could be the perfect solution.

· Extremely Affordable: We are talking of the world’s poorest markets. Affordability needs to be redefined keeping in mind these customers. These are segments of society we don’t ordinarily think about. But they are the ones who are the world’s next markets. Costs have to be a fraction of what we are otherwise used to considering or paying.

· Technologically Forward-looking: The solution needs to look to the future rather than into the past. What is there under the hood is not as critical as giving the same kind of features and performance as the ones in the developed world are used to. In some ways, there is an advantage in terms of legacy – there simply isn’t an “existing solution to upgrade” so there is no need for backward compatibility. This gives us an opportunity to “leapfrog”.

· Platform Orientation: The solution must create an ecosystem in which multiple players can thrive. The approach must be that of creating a platform that others can build upon, without having to redo the groundwork from scratch.

· Consider the Constraints: We cannot forget the limitations and realities of the rural markets – intermittent and fluctuating power, connectivity which probably isn’t there, a market which does not necessarily speak or understand English, and one which has been largely ignored and forgotten by the world (except the politicians who need votes in a democracy). Since connectivity is not a guarantee, the initial focus should be on information and offline communications services, rather than real-time, database-driven transactional services.

· Commercially Viable: Above all, the solution needs to be economically sustainable, given the constraints of the rural markets. It must provide the rural entrepreneurs with a business model which enables them to not just make money but also grow the business with their own initiative and innovation.

As we think of the solution, we should keep these words by Stuart Hart and CK Prahalad (writing in Sloan Management Review) in mind: “Disruptive Innovations compete against nonconsumption – that is, they offer a product or service to people who would otherwise be left out entirely or poorly served by existing products and who are therefore quite happy to have a simpler, more modest version of what is available in the high-end markets.”

Next Week: Transforming Rural India (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Village Vision

Let us start by outlining our vision for the solution that we want to offer at the village-level from the viewpoints of the four stakeholders: the villagers, the village administration, the district administration and rural marketing organisations.

Today, the village is singularly isolated. It is not part of a larger community. Its interaction with the external world is quite limited. In a sense, it is an idyllic world, unspoilt by modernity. Yes, villages can now watch TV, talk on phones, and get newspapers and magazines. But by and large, the village voice is silent, except when it comes to the ballot box. What is needed is an interactive solution, with the villagers having a say in what they do and how they grow.

What is needed is for the village and its people to have greater access to new opportunities. Even as the nation moves ahead, the village for the most part has remained an island of its own. This is what has to change. The village needs to become a self-sustaining unit, and at the same time integrated with the rest of the ecosystem. The underlying idea is to use the solution to put more power and responsibility into the hands of the local community at the village, by providing them with the right technology and information they need to make decisions.

From a villager’s point of view, this is what he would like to see:

· A connected computer which provides access to computing resources and the Internet.
· A programme to ensure that he and his family can be made literate and e-literate. At the minimum, there should be at least one person in the family who knows English and can use a computer.
· An email ID, ensuring that he can be reached electronically.
· Storage Space for keeping electronic copies of key official documents (eg. land records, certificates) and other information (eg. medical records).
· Access to various eServices for government interactions – from accessing information to doing transactions. This should be combined with service-level guarantees from the government departments.
· Computer-enabled education for his children in schools, so they are comfortable with technology from an early age.
· Access to electronic markets where he can sell his products directly without being dependent on middlemen who take away much of the profit.
· Programmes to upgrade his and his family’s skillsets, so they can become better at what they are doing and learn new skills.
· Protection of data, so that unauthorised access does not happen.
· All of this to be available for a monthly basic fee of no more than Rs 20 per family.

Tomorrow: Village Vision (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Village Vision (Part 2)

From a village administration viewpoint, the solution should:

· Help in village planning and monitoring. It should assist in identifying and tracking the resources that a village has. In case any of these resources has a problem, there should be a way the village can notify the appropriate government department for action.
· Share and discuss best practices with other village administrators. This is a “peer-to-peer” interaction model which is not possible today, except for sporadic gatherings. Think of this as a community weblog (like Slashdot.org) which helps bring out good ideas and success stories from what others are doing.
· Provide a microcredit facility to enable villagers to save money and get loans when required.

This is what the state administration would like to see in the solution:

· Two-way information flows: the administration can update the village and its residents on various government programmes and schemes (this is typically done through the publishing of gazettes), and in turn get regular updates from the village on progress on key parameters reflecting the “health” of the village (this is typically done by sending government officials for periodic visits to the village).
· Electronic accounting for the funds which are disseminated by the state/district administration for village activities.
· Ability to provide better services to the citizens (for example, telemedicine).
· Provide comparisons across villages on various parameters, to be able to identify success stories and enable their replication across other villages. [In a way, this is akin to how Walmart uses business intelligence from its various stores to identify consumer purchase trends.]

Rural marketing organisations would like to:

· Use a medium by which they can reach out to villagers for their products and services.
· Get a distribution point for eCommerce (delivery could take place through the postal system).
· Have a mechanism by which they can collect payments for their offerings.

One can think of the state (or district) as managing an enterprise with multiple branch offices (the villages). To ensure a successful and profitable business, there needs to be a right mix of centralisation and decentralisation. This is what the solution will have to offer. This is the first step towards the transformation of the rural economy and its people.

There are three key ideas in using technology to transform Rural India. First, set up a TeleInfoCentre in every village. Next, network these TeleInfoCentres to create a Village InfoGrid to ensure a peer-to-peer communication network between villages. Finally, computerise key government operations in an eGovernance initiative, starting with those that can have the greatest impact for the villagers.

We’ll begin by first looking at the TeleInfoCentre.

Tomorrow: TeleInfoCentre

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: TeleInfoCentre

The TeleInfoCentre makes possible the vision of “a connected computer accessible to every family”. What makes the TeleInfoCentre unique is its approach to solving the rural computing challenge. It brings together a number of innovations to help create an infrastructure that is both affordable and user-friendly.

The three innovations that it leverages are: server-centric computing to enable the use of low-cost computers as thin clients, Linux and open-source software to bring down the cost of software, and WiFi to solve the connectivity problem. (As we will see shortly, WiFi will currently get used as a LAN solution to extend the reach of the TeleInfoCentre beyond a single room, and later will be used as a wide area network solution to provide a high-bandwidth solution to inter-connect multiple villages.)

The TeleInfoCentre consists of a computer-cum-communications centre. It has 3-5 computers connected together in a LAN, in a single room. The multiple computers ensure that the computers themselves do not become a bottleneck – villagers should be guaranteed to get access to a computer whenever they want it. Also, by locating them in the village, we ensure that they do not have walk much to use them – access to computing is no more than a few minutes, rather than a few kilometres. This will make them think of computing as part of their lives – a utility, available on-demand.

One of the computers in the TeleInfoCentre computers works as a “thick server”, and does the processing and storage. The others are low-cost, low-configuration “thin clients”. The idea of server-centric computing using thin terminals as desktops is not new. Mainframe computing uses a similar approach. Even in the Novell era of the late 1980 and early 1990s, PCs would boot off the server. This approach on thin client-thick server computing simplifies the management dramatically – desktop hardware never needs to be upgraded, software and content updation only needs to happen in a single place on the server, and all the thin client desktops can be administered from the server.

By using a server-centric computing architecture, it becomes possible to bring down the incremental cost of each new client computer from Rs 25,000 to as little as Rs 5,000. The thin client works as a network device. It “lights up” in the presence of a network, just like a cellphone or cable-enabled TV. In this case, the network is the LAN, requiring the presence of a thick server at the other end. Think of the thin clients as Rs 5,000 PCs or 5KPCs. The question is: how do we get PCs at these price points?

One approach is to look at (re-)using older computers. Since the thin client requires little more than a 100 Mhz processor and 32MB RAM to provide the performance of a new 2 or 3 Ghz desktop, one can consider recycling Pentium I and II machines from the developed world as thin clients. Countries like USA and Japan are disposing a few years old computers in the millions annually as they upgrade to newer desktops. These trashed systems become e-waste in those countries and create an environmental problem in their disposal. They can now be shipped to countries like India where they get a new life as thin clients. These PCs are available for prices ranging from USD 60-70 (excluding shipping and local duties).

Tomorrow: TeleInfoCentre (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: TeleInfoCentre (Part 2)

Computers and monitors do not go bad in 3-4 years, which is the typical upgrade cycle in the developed world. They can easily be used for many more years, provided the processing and storage can be moved to the server. The thin clients become graphical terminals – or more appropriately, PC Terminals.

The second approach to sourcing low-cost computers is to use computers with the VIA chipset and motherboard. VIA is the third company after Intel and AMD which makes x86-compatible CPUs. Their cheaper, lower-speed CPUs bring down the cost of the client, making it possible to get a new computer (excluding monitor) for prices as low as Rs 6,500 (USD 130). An old monitor costs Rs 2,000 (USD 40) while a new one costs double of that. A TV could also be used as a monitor, in case prices have to be brought down further.

The third approach is to use handheld computers, PDAs or cellphones as thin clients. The Simputer project in India has created a Linux PDA which is a full-fledged computer, at prices starting at Rs 10,000 (USD 200). Perhaps, it could be simplified further to work in a LAN environment as a thin client to bring the cost down to a more affordable Rs 5,000. Of course, this will mean that the users will get a smaller screen as compared to a 14-inch monitor from a regular desktop computer used as a thin client.

On the software front, the thin clients support all the basic applications that users would need: an email client, a web browser, an Office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation application), instant messaging, printing and the ability to read/write PDF files. There should be support for both English and local languages for each of the applications.

The software platform used is Linux, along with various open-source applications. This ensures a lower cost of ownership, along with the freedom to customise applications for the local needs. The various applications on Linux have become more than good enough in the past year, and can provide a desktop almost as good as Microsoft Windows.

For every key Windows application, there is an equivalent Linux application. Evolution from Ximian offers a mail client and personal information manager, creating an alternative for Outlook. Mozilla and derivatives like Phoenix and Galeon are web browsers which rival Internet Explorer. The OpenOffice suite of applications (Write, Calc and Impress) offers much of the functionality found in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). More importantly, it can read and write most MS-Office file formats. In addition, since it uses XML for native file storage, OpenOffice can be extended to build custom applications easily. OpenOffice also has a built-in utility to create PDF files.

GAIM is a unified Instant Messaging application which can connect to the IM platforms of Yahoo, AOL, ICQ and MSN. Adobe Acrobat is available on Linux. Multimedia support is available in the form of mplayer. Gimp is an image-editing software. Java and Flash work on Linux. Open-source databases are also available, in the form of MySQL and PostgreSQL.

The total cost of putting this suite of applications together: zero.

The combination of server-centric computing, low-cost clients and open-source software is the foundation for creating an affordable solution for the computing infrastructure at the TeleInfoCentre.

Tomorrow: TeleInfoCentre (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: TeleInfoCentre (Part 3)

The User Interface is an area which has tremendous scope of improvement. Today’s interfaces (both Windows and the Linux Desktops of KDE and GNOME) follow similar approaches – using files, directories, menus and icons. Little has changed in the user interface arena over the past decade. For the villagers and especially the younger generation, one could learn from the success of video games and create richer and more interactive interfaces, which are more far intuitive to use for those with very limited exposure to computers.

The clients should also support multimedia with the use of webcams and microphones for recording and playback of audio and video. This is important in the context of the villagers because they may not easily adapt to the largely text-driven world that we exist in today. Using multimedia also gets over the language and usability barriers. It is what Prof. Ramesh Jain terms as “folk computing”.

In addition, over time, the thin clients should be able to accept voice input also – this will entail leveraging innovations in speech recognition. To a small extent, we are already seeing this happen in cellphones in India, with an increasing array of interactive voice services.

As far as possible, the TeleInfoCentre should be able to work in the offline mode – that is, its dependence on Internet connectivity should be minimal. The server should mirror key applications and relevant data, making it possible for the clients to work without the need for an Internet connection. In fact, even the assumption that a TeleInfoCentre may have a few hours of Internet connectivity daily could be far-fetched. This makes the application development challenging, but it becomes an important pre-requisite given the realities of Rural India.

The offline mode entails updating through CD (or an alternate such device – eg. USB Memory Key). A CD will get written daily at the village TeleInfoCentre which has the day’s emails and requests which cannot be served locally. This CD would then be sent by courier or through the postal system to the next level in the hierarchy, which is likely to have better Net connectivity. Similarly, a CD from there would bring updates to the village.

Over time, solutions like WiFi will solve the wide area network (WAN) connectivity bottleneck. The advantage of WiFi is that it used open spectrum – in the 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz bands. The specifications are outlined in the IEEE 802.11 standards, which specify operating speeds of 11-54 Mbps. The computer industry, led by Intel, is rapidly adopting WiFi as a wireless LAN standard, driving down incremental costs to near-zero. Companies like Vivato are also working to extend the range of WiFi beyond a few hundred metres. While WiFi may not be a reality today in India, it is definitely going to be a workable and affordable solution within the next 18-24 months.

In fact, in India, Media Lab Asia has tested WiFi solutions which work over 20-30 kms (line-of-sight, with directional antennae on towers). Another solution which is being tested is DakNet, where a mobile van goes from village to village and offers connectivity while it is there. But these solutions are still in the R&D stage. Today’s reality entails serious consideration of offline usage.

Next Week: Transforming Rural India (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: TeleInfoCentre (Part 4)

WiFi can play a role today as a Wireless LAN, thus making it possible to locate the thin clients anywhere in the village in a 100-300 metre radius, with the hub (the wireless access point) being at the TeleInfoCentre. Thus, 5KPCs (Rs 5,000 personal computers) could be at nearby health centres or the homes of some of the villagers who could afford the solution. They would use the connectivity, computing and storage facilities provided at the TeleInfoCentre.

Besides the computers, the TeleInfoCentre also has other facilities. It has a printer for printing documents. It has a scanner to ensure that documents could be digitsed and then sent across as email attachments. In a way, this approach could replace fax using a store-and-forward approach, because the phone line may not be present or may not work. In fact, the scanner-printer combo would also work as a photocopying system.

A key issue which needs to be addressed is how the TeleInfoCentre will be powered. Electricity is intermittently available in much of Rural India. Without electricity, the TeleInfoCentre becomes a museum of digital gadgets! There are a few ideas on how we can consider solving the electricity problem.

The first approach could be to look at what the Jhai Foundation has done in Laos to power computers in remote areas. It is using a car battery with “pedal power”, via stationary bicycles imported from India. One minute of pedaling yields five minutes of power, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

The second approach is to create a 12-volt supply directly, powered by car batteries. Computer power supplies use 230/115 volts because they are meant to plug-in directly into the mains. In the case of the TeleInfoCentre, since all the devices are in a single room, one can look at directly using the 12 volt supply from car batteries (as in the first approach) without converting to the mains voltage. This will probably mean a slight redesign for the 5KPC, but the benefits would be well worth it.

The third approach is to consider the use of solar power. Much of Rural India is blessed with plenty of sunlight round-the-year. Can this be converted into a solution which can generate power cost-effectively? Talk about Solar Energy has been around for many years, but there have been few solutions which have become commercially available for electricity generation. So, I am not too confident that this will work, but it definitely should be considered.

A big consumer of power in the computer is going to be the monitor. The question is: can this be reduced? One could look at using smaller screens, but they would then take away the full-fledged desktop experience that we are trying to provide.

So, provisioning power for the TeleInfoCentre is a key challenge which needs to be addressed, along with that of connectivity.

Tomorrow: TeleInfoCentre Applications

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: TeleInfoCentre Applications

The TeleInfoCentre fulfills a multi-centric role: it is a computing and communications centre, has a digital library of documents, complements the teachers for school and adult education, and serves as a small business office for entrepreneurs. Its real value comes, of course, from the applications that it can enable for citizen services and government interactions, making it an eGovernance touch-point for the villagers.

As was discussed in the Village Vision segment, the TeleInfoCentre caters to the needs of four constituencies: the villagers, the village administration, the district and state administrations, and the marketing organisations. The various applications available at the TeleInfoCentre can be categorised as follows:

Information: The TeleInfoCentre enables two-way information flow. Commodity prices, weather information, crop planning, literacy programmes, exam results, health information, school curriculum, government notifications, downloadable forms which could either be printed or filled online, and employment opportunities are all examples of what the TeleInfoCentre can provide. All of this information should be available on the server so the need to connect to the Internet is not there. Updates can be done via CD (or Internet connectivity, if available) every few days. In turn, the villagers and the village administration also provide regular updates on the health of the village and its resources, which is sent to the district administration.

Communications: Email (be it text or audio/video) will be the primary driver. In fact, the ability to communicate with other villages and with government officials is going to be perhaps the “killer app” for the initial use of the TeleInfoCentre. As WiFi becomes a reality, Voice-over-IP (VoIP) will become an important driver.

Community: At present, interactions between village residents are limited to gatherings at the local choupal (meeting place). Distance makes interactions between residents of different villages rare – except for business or matrimony. The TeleInfoCentre can now help build out communities across villages, independent of distance, based on interest areas. Thus, farmers could form an online community, and teachers could do the same. Community weblogs are an excellent platform to amplify the flow of ideas without the constraints of time and geography. One section could contain classified ads narrowcast to specific audiences.

Transactions: While providing eServices like land records and birth/marriage/death certificates are important for the village residents, they may require the presence of a real-time Internet connection (unless the service can be formulated as an offline request). Transaction services like bill payments and railway bookings which require queries to centralised database servers can only become possible when connectivity improves.

A basket of applications should be made available to the villagers for a flat price – Rs 20 per family per month, as we discussed earlier. The question is: what will make each family pay a monthly subscription fee of Rs 20? My view on this is that they will pay if it can:

· Offer hopes of additional income (growth in livelihood)
· Remove pain from their lives (government interactions)
· Improve their skillsets (learn to do things better, retraining)
· Make them more productive (agriculture, crafts)
· Offer their children a brighter future (education, jobs)
· Provide them a voice to and response from government within a specified time period

Once the TeleInfoCentres start being rolled out and their usage begins, local content developers and software companies will realise that there is an excellent platform for offering value-added services – much like what we are seeing with the SMS services on cellphones today. These service providers should be able to distribute their applications and content to the TeleInfoCentres easily. Getting new services is critical for building out an ecosystem around the TeleInfoCentre foundation.

Tomorrow: TeleInfoCentre Economics

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: TeleInfoCentre Economics

How much does it cost to setup a single TeleInfoCentre? Assuming 3 computers to begin with (2 thin clients and a server, which can also be used as a client), the costs are as follows:

· Thick Server: Rs 30,000 (any standard desktop can work as a server; also has a CD-writer to write CDs for offline data distribution)
· 2 Thin Clients: Rs 20,000 (over time, we will get to the Rs 5,000 per PC price point)
· Software: Rs 7,500
· LAN Networking, Modem, Telephone Line (if available): Rs 12,500
· Scanner, Printer, Webcam, Speakers: Rs 10,000
· Power Supply: Rs 10,000

This brings the total set-up costs to Rs 90,000 (USD 1,800).

Monthly Operating Costs are as follows:

· Operator Salary: Rs 2,500
· Connectivity: Rs 1,000
· Consumables (Paper, CDs): Rs 500
· Maintenance: Rs 500

This totals Rs 4,500 (USD 90) per month.

Assuming the set-up costs can be amortised over three years (through a bank loan or some other form of financing), the monthly cost on account of the upfront investment comes to Rs 3,000. Add to this the Rs 4,500 monthly operating costs and we get a figure of Rs 7,500 per month as what is needed for break-even.

The assumption made here is that space costs are zero – that is, the space is provided by the entrepreneur or the village at no charge for the TeleInfoCentre.

The question is: how does the TeleInfoCentre generate a minimum monthly revenue of Rs 7,500?

As we had discussed earlier, if the TeleInfoCentre supports a village of 250 families (1,000 people) and each family pays Rs 20 per month as a subscription fee for a basket of services, then this generates a monthly income of Rs 5,000. The deficit is still Rs 2,500 – how does this get covered?

There are multiple ways by which the TeleInfoCentre can generate additional revenue:

· It can take up data entry jobs or other such work to better leverage the computers that it has.
· The state / district can pay for some of the services that it uses. For example, on account of the TeleInfoCentres, the information collection and dissemination costs can be reduced. Part of those savings could be channelised through to the TeleInfoCentre.
· Some funds could be allocated from the village for the operation of the TeleInfoCentre, since the village administration will also be a significant user and beneficiary.
· Additional services can be offered for the villagers beyond the base set, which can result in more revenue.
· Ads can be shown on the screens to create a revenue stream from companies interested in reaching the rural markets.

In addition, the amortisation (or loan payback) period could be extended from three years to four years, resulting in bringing the break-even figure down to under Rs 7,000. Also, if older PCs can be re-used or duties on new computers can be reduced, that would lower the start-up costs by Rs 10,000 or more.

The monthly gap can thus be narrowed and even eliminated. Over time, as the villagers realise the benefits of the TeleInfoCentre, usage will increase. Also, as content developers and software companies realise the potential of the audience being created, additional revenue-generating services will get created. The aim should be to get the per capita income of the villagers to increase, since that will mean that they would be willing to spend some more money at the TeleInfoCentre.

The TeleInfoCentre should be the responsibility of a local entrepreneur. There should be no government subsidies in their set-up or operation. The role of the government should be that of an enabler, not a funder.

Tomorrow: TeleInfoCentre as a Business

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: TeleInfoCentre as a Business

The Entrepreneur is the key in proliferating TeleInfoCentres. What an entrepreneur does is bring in the right zest and drive to keep up service levels and innovations. In fact, if we look at India and see the two grassroots technology revolutions in telecom and cable over the past two decades, they were both entrepreneur-driven.

In the 1980s, Sam Pitroda’s dream of making telephony accessible to the masses was realised by tens of thousands of individuals and small businesses who set up a PCO (public call office). India may have only 40-odd million phone lines for a population of 1 billion, but the nearly million PCOs that dot the landscape across the country have made telecom access to almost everyone across the country. (In fact, the TeleInfoCentre can be thought of as a computer PCO.)

In the 1990s, another revolution at the grassroots brought cable television into millions of homes across the country. With satellite dishes to catch the signals from the air and wires strung from building to building and, the cable entrepreneurs revolutionized television entertainment and gave birth to India’s TV software industry and the dozens of channels that we now see.

So, who will be the TeleInfoCentre Entrepreneur? Where will he raise the initial capital from? Where will he locate the centre? How will he grow it?

The TeleInfoCentre Entrepreneur must be from the village. He (or She) could be a shopkeeper or a school teacher or one of the youngsters. It must be someone with some flair for the New. What is most important is that the Entrepreneur have an open mind because for the immediate future, he is the one who is opening up the village to the outside world. In Madhya Pradesh, for example, each village has a prerak or “Info Leader”, who has played a lead role in increasing literacy by educating the villagers. Such a person could be a good candidate for becoming the Entrepreneur.

The initial capital of about Rs 90,000 for setting up the TeleInfoCentre will have to come from various institutions: local banks, microcredit institutions, panchayats or NGOs. This money is not a donation – it is a loan to be repaid in a period of 3-4 years. As far as possible, the state government or the district administration should not be involved in the business of financing the TeleInfoCentre.

The TeleInfoCentre should be located in a neutral zone, given the realities of India’s caste system that is still in existence in some form in many villages. A school is an ideal location because it is already seen as a bastion of knowledge, and is respected by one and all. One of the classrooms could be converted into a TeleInfoCentre. For the time that the school is in session, it becomes a computer education centre for the students. Before and after school hours, it offers services to the village residents.

For any business, growth is essential. The Entrepreneur must see potential in the business – that each successive month will be better than the previous one. For this, it is important to keep layering additional services at the TeleInfoCentre. This is going to be driven both by the Entrepreneur’s own marketing skills and the nature of requirements that the villagers have.

Tomorrow: TeleInfoCentre Differentiators

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: TeleInfoCentre Differentiators

What makes us think that TeleInfoCentres can work as a model to transform Rural India, where previous initiatives have met with only limited success? The TeleInfoCentre aggregates a number of innovative ideas and is different from previous approaches:

Presence in each village vs Sharing across villages: To succeed, access to the centres (or kiosks) must be such that villagers do not have travel significant distances at all. They should be able to use it multiple times a day, and on demand. This means the centres have to be present in each village.

Multi-functional vs Uni-functional: Most current approaches tend to work in silos, thus necessitating duplication of expensive infrastructure. As envisioned here, the TeleInfoCentre becomes a platform for various services which are applications on top of the basic “computing grid”.

Offline vs Internet-centric: The TeleInfoCentre can begin operations simply with periodic CD-based updates, and without the need for a telephone line or Internet connection.

Information-centric vs Transaction-centric: The initial focus is more on information, communications and community services which do not require real-time Internet connectivity, rather than transaction-oriented services which assume the presence of Internet access.

User-generated content vs Top-down broadcast: The TeleInfoCentre encourages users to generate their content and share it across vertical communities of interest and practice, to complement the information that is sent from the state and district headquarters.

Rs 5,000 computers vs Rs 50,000 computers: Most existing approaches tend to use new desktops with MS-Windows and MS-Office software resulting in a per PC cost of Rs 50,000 or more. (It is hard for the government and its agencies to pirate software so they have to buy legal copies!) The TeleInfoCentre approach uses thin clients for a fraction of the cost.

Multiple Computers vs Single Computer: The TeleInfoCentre has at least 3 computers available for use at any time, thus diminishing dramatically the chances that a villager will come in and not find a computer to use.

Linux/Open-source vs Proprietary software: The use of open-source software eliminates licence fees, while at the same time maintaining compatibility with file formats for document exchange with the external world.

Wireless vs Wired connectivity: The use of WiFi in the months to come can dramatically cut connectivity costs, and at the same time eliminate dependency on unreliable, wired telephone lines. (Cellular phones are still far away from making their presence felt in India’s villages, especially those away from urban and semi-urban areas.)

English and Local Language support vs English only: Support for at least one local language is important. People need to be able to interact with others in the language they feel most comfortable in.

Subscription model vs Pay-per-service: The TeleInfoCentre approach calls for each family to make a fixed monthly payment for a basic set of services, encouraging increased usage. The alternate pay-per-service model actually inhibits usage. That may be right when computing is a scarce resource but with cheap and multiple computers available at the TeleInfoCentre, one needs to take a user-friendly approach.

Taking all these factors into consideration, the TeleInfoCentre is a more practical approach given the realities and constraints of Rural India.

Next Week: Transforming Rural India (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Rural Tech Innovations

The TechInfoCentre can be created using today’s technologies. However, a few innovations can be very helpful as we look at a large-scale roll-out, especially in some of the more infrastructurally-poorer parts of India.

Power: There is a need to use “pedal power” or solar energy or other alternate energy sources to power the computers and other devices at the TeleInfoCentre. Another idea which needs some thought is the use of a12-volt supply directly feeding the computers.

Connectivity: WiFi is undoubtedly the future. The question is: how can WiFi be made to work as a wide area network? Using directional antennae (or even perhaps Pringles cans as has been tried out in some cases) can increase the distance for line-of-sight communications.

Thinner Clients: The aim is to make the thin clients as thin and as cheap as possible. Ideas from embedded computing can be applied here to make for sub-Rs 5,000 (USD 100) devices, which come alive in the presence of a network.

TV as Monitor: The moinitor cost (Rs 2-4,000) is a significant component of the thin client cost. Can this cost be reduced? Cheap TVs are available in plenty. The question is: how can TVs be made into higher resolution (800 x 600 pixels or more) displays?

Server Redundancy: The thick server is now the most critical component in the TeleInfoCentre value chain. If it fails, then the entire centre is unusable. How can we introduce redundancy in the servers, and yet keep the costs low? Dual CPUs, two hard disks with data mirroring, two motherboards, clusters, and blade servers are some ideas which need to be explored further.

Client-Server Connectivity: At present, the assumption is that there is a LAN (10-100 Mbps) between the thin clients and the thick server. If the clients can be made to work on lower speeds, then it may become possible to use a thick server across multiple villages connected through WiFi, thus further simplifying management and reducing set-up costs of the TeleInfoCentres still further.

Desktop Interface: Video Games offer a natural inspiration for rethinking the desktop. How can desktops be made richer, more interactive, more 3D-like such that language and learning does not become a barrier to usage?

Multimedia: There is a need to go beyond just text for communications and interactions. With falling costs of peripherals like digital cameras and webcams, plentiful storage and broadband connections, multimedia is going to be an important driver in applications.

Visual Biz-ic: This is a term I have coined to denote a Visual Basic-like development environment for applications involving business processes and workflows. How can ideas from web services be used to create reusable libraries of governance processes which, with only little modifications, can then be leveraged across TeleInfoCentres for use in different states and countries?

Thus, there is still plenty to do to bring forth the next generation of TeleInfoCentres, which will set new benchmarks in affordability, connectivity and usability.

Tomorrow: Village InfoGrid

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Village InfoGrid

TeleInfoCentres in every village are the starting point. As we’ve discussed, these centres are not critically dependent on connectivity. They should be able to function well independently and offline. But as the options for connectivity grow, networking them together into a grid – call it the Village InfoGrid – is the next step. What the Village InfoGrid does is create a peer-to-peer network of the TeleInfoCentres, allowing for near real-time communications between them. This opens up a range of activities and applications that have previously not been there.

The TeleInfoCentre enables communications between the village and the district (and beyond). The Village InfoGrid becomes the platform for inter-village communications. This is interesting because so far in India, there has not been much interaction between villages because of the limited options involved. Typically, villagers have interacted with either only nearby villages or with the district, which is one-level up the hierarchy. The network connecting up the TeleInfoCentres now makes each village a peer, and equidistant in the electronic world. Geography is no longer a barrier for interaction.

What will be the impact of connecting up hitherto isolated people? Clay Shirky discusses this from the angle of social software and the politics of groups:

Prior to the Web, we had hundreds of years of experience with broadcast media, from printing presses to radio and TV. Prior to email, we had hundreds of years experience with personal media -- the telegraph, the telephone. But outside the internet, we had almost nothing that supported conversation among many people at once. Conference calling was the best it got -- cumbersome, expensive, real-time only, and useless for large groups. The social tools of the internet, lightweight though most of them are, have a kind of fluidity and ease of use that the conference call never attained: compare the effortlessness of CC:ing half a dozen friend to decide on a movie, versus trying to set up a conference call to accomplish the same task.

The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time. To get a conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing those restrictions, the interent has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog.

The thing that makes social software behave differently other communications tools is that groups are entities in their own right. A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit be behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation, peculiarly social effects like flaming and trolling or concerns about trust and reputation.

Consider the possible impact of interconnecting the villages into an InfoGrid: villagers can now share best practices with others across the state or the country, they can benchmark themselves on a wide range of metrics and discuss ways by which they can improve, they can find out about opportunities elsewhere, they can create vertical “communities of practice” to share knowledge and innovations, and they can voice their opinions via community weblogs. This is just the starting point. As people in the villages start using the network, they will come up on their own with the ideas on how to make it more effective and useful.

Tomorrow: Village InfoGrid (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Village InfoGrid (Part 2)

One set of institutions which need to be part of the Village InfoGrid are engineering colleges, which can play an important role in both developing software applications relevant for the rural segment, as well as providing technical support to nearby villages. By stimulating the creativity of the young human mind, we can create a win-win situation for students looking for interesting and practical projects to do in their final year of college, and the needs of the villages looking for technology talent to create content and software for the TeleInfoCentres and the InfoGrid.

An interesting idea to make villages attractive by clustering them together is outlined by India’s President APJ Kalam. It is a scheme called PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas), and aims to “to make rural areas as attractive to investors as cities are. Then, rural areas too will generate urban-style employment to halt (if not reverse) rural-urban migration”. The scheme envisages:

Linking a loop of villages by a ring road about 30 km in circumference with frequent bus services. That will integrate the population of all connected villages into one market. Then, those villages become a virtual city with a potential to expand and accommodate 3-5 lakhs population.

Compensating farmers for the land acquired from them NOT by a lump sum but by an annual fee equal to twice the price of the produce they grow. That gives farmers a perpetual inflation protected income.

Sub-leasing the land to employers both for business and for employee residences within walking distance of each other. That will virtually eliminate daily commuting to work, an unavoidable evil in city living.

The President wrote recently in India Today on PURA: “The model envisages a habitat designed to improve the quality of life in rural places and makes special suggestions to improve urban congestion too. As against a conventional city, say rectangular in shape and measuring approximately 10 km by 6 km, this model considers a ring-shaped town integrating a minimum of 8 to 10 villages in the same area. This model provides easy access to villages, saves transportation time, cuts costs substantially and is more convenient for the general people. Such a model of establishing a circular connectivity model of rural village complexes will accelerate rural development process by empowerment.”

On this idea, overlay technology with TeleInfoCentres connected as part of the Village InfoGrid, and we have an architecture that now fully integrates the village into the networked world, both physically and virtually.

By building a technology centre in the villages and connecting these together, we are leapfrogging a whole set of people from an era where they could interact with only a handful of people to one where they can peer with many more like them irrespective of distance. It is much like how the Internet connected diverse and isolated networks in its early days. The Village InfoGrid is the first step towards making the global village a reality.

Tomorrow: Intelligent, Real-Time Governance

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Intelligent, Real-Time Governance

A Government is very much like a large, multi-locational Enterprise. If we think of intelligent, real-time enterprises, we can also apply the same ideas to enable intelligent, real-time governance.

A real-time enterprise, as Ray Lane says, is “a company that uses Internet technology to drive out manual business processes, to eliminate guesswork, and to reduce costs. The key feature of a real-time enterprise is spontaneous transaction flow.”

In other words, think of a real-time enterprise as having the following characteristics:

· Computing and Communications available to every employee
· Superior Information Availability across the Value Chain
· Streamlined Business Processes using the Web
· Lower Inventory through improved Analytics
· Data entered only Once
· Single Interface to all Applications

This is exactly how governments need to think of themselves. It is about creating “a corporate atmosphere with a social bias.”

The villages are part of the real-time governance supply-chain. A supply chain is only as good as its weakest link. Today, isolated villages are the equivalent of unconnected small and medium enterprises in supply chains. The TeleInfoCentre and Village InfoGrid bring the villages into the governance network, enabling a two-way near real-time flow of information. They form the endpoints, the spokes, the front-office if you will. They need to be complemented with the automation of the back-office – the heart of the government which lies in the state capitals and district headquarters.

What governments need is a four-step action plan to move towards the vision of architecting an intelligent, real-time information flow architecture:

Messaging and Internet Access for all employees: Every government employee should have an email ID and access to Instant Messaging. Each of the government locations should be networked. There should be integration of the messaging infrastructure with cellphones to enable delivery of real-time alerts.

Computing for all: Every government employee needs to have a computer on their desk. The same ideas that are applicable for a TeleInfoCentre (low-cost computers, server-centric computing, open-source software, and support for English and local languages) can be used to build out the computing infrastructure. Computer training and usage must be made mandatory for salary raises and promotions. The monthly cost to make computing available to every employee will be no more than Rs 500-700. If employees and government processes can be made just 5% more productive, the investment will pay back immediately.

Collaboration and Knowledge Management: Once the computing and messaging infrastructure is in place, the next step is to make people individually more productive and make teams work together more efficiently. This can be done via the use of workflow software and tools to aid decision-making. Every employee’s computer desktop should have a Digital Dashboard – a single screen of information which shows the key indicators and events that need attention. Tacit knowledge within government employees should be harnessed through the use of enterprise weblogs.

Business Process Automation: The essence of governance is about managing money (think of it as accounting) and interacting with citizens and businesses (akin to customer relationship management). The focus needs to be on the core business processes, creating an event-driven architecture with the focus being not on routine information management but on handling exceptions. The OHIO (only handle information once) principle should ensure an integrated backend database. One of the first places that governments can begin using Internet and Web ideas is in eProcurement.

The result of building out the government as an “eBusiness” will be to enable the creation of an Emergent Democracy.

Tomorrow: Emergent Democracy

Tech Talk | PermaLink

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India: Emergent Democracy

If India is to realise the vision of its Prime Minister and President (echoing the feeling of its populace) that the country should become a developed nation by 2020, the need is for a bottom-up revolution, which does not stop at India’s villages, but starts with them. The need is to consider people not as our biggest problem, but our greatest strength. What has been missing so far has been a framework in which the mix of villages, people and technology can be magically combined to build a New India – an India which is transformed from a democracy into an Emergent Democracy.

An Emergent Democracy is one in which people across the chain, from the villages to the cities, are empowered and have a say in governance – not just through their vote, but by active participation in discussion and execution. By leveraging the power of the people in a bottom-up manner where the whole mass is much greater than the sum of the individuals. It is a nation which truly makes governance of the people, by the people and for the people.

The ideas that we have discussed here – a network of TeleInfoCentres in every village connected together into a Village InfoGrid, and complemented by Intelligent, Real-Time Governance – will lead to reduced information asymmetry between administration and the citizens. It will provide for real-time feedback on schemes and problems, with solutions also being provided by people themselves.

It will also increase efficiency, transparency and accountability and reduce corruption. In addition, it creates a local technology ecosystem that is not just beneficial as India seeks to deepen and widen its technology base and build out a knowledge-driven society, but also self-sustaining, replicable and viable.

Last Word

Writing in his book “The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change”, Gurcharan Das has a section on “The Ambiguous Village”. There are two diametrically opposite views on India’s villages. He writes:

Mahatma Gandhi was a man of the city but he had the most romantic view of the countryside. He dreamt of building a modern India around self-governing village republics: ‘My idea of village swaraj is that is a complete republic independent of its neighbours for its own vital wants and yet inter-dependent for many others.’

Jawaharlal Nehru disagreed with Gandhi, saying that ‘a village, normally speaking, is backward intellectually and culturally and no progress can be made from a backward environment.’

Urban India wants this century to belong to India. No nation can progress leaving behind more than two-thirds of its populace. The tools of technology in the form of TeleInfoCentres, the Village InfoGrid and Intelligent, Real-Time eGovernance are at hand. The choice of transforming – or ignoring – Rural India is in our hands.

Tech Talk | PermaLink