Tech Revolution -Intranet takes root in India's villages
Gyandoot Homepage
gyandoot.net
(Village cyber cafes save time, money and red tape)
By Patralekha Chatterjee
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
DHAR, India, Feb. 27 - In this poor, tribal backwater of central India, where Lalita Rathod lives, Pentium and modem are rare, exotic items. The 35-year-old illiterate woman knows nothing about computers or connectivity. But she has intuitively grasped this relation between them and profits: Ever since Dehrisarai, her village, was "wired," she has made more money selling fruits and vegetables.
SHEER CURIOSITY drove Rathod, a widow and mother of four, to the village council office, where a Pentium Celeron was installed this January. A huge crowd had flocked to see Digvijay Singh, the state chief minister, alight from a helicopter. The occasion: the inauguration of the Gyandoot intranet project. "Gyandoot" in Hindi, the local language, means messenger of knowledge.
One evening, a few days later, she walked to the information kiosk inside the village council office. "It was snazzier and smarter than my black-and-white TV set," she said, recalling her first encounter with the wired Pentium.
"I asked for the price of apples at the Dhar wholesale market. The coordinator pressed some buttons, and there it was on the screen! I cannot read, but he told me it was 50 rupees cheaper per crate than the rate in the village market. Next morning, I traveled to Dhar to buy fruits."
These days, Rathod and other vendors at Dehrisarai keep track of the latest rates of fruits and vegetables in the wholesale markets in the neighborhood. If the prices are lower than in the village mart, they pool their resources and catch a bus to the place offering the best deal. Even after factoring in the travel costs, the price differences mean higher earnings.
Dehrisarai is one of 21 villages in Dhar district in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh that have been hooked up through Intranet to the district administrative headquarters. The Intranet connects the rural "cyber cafes" strategically housed in the village council office and is linked to the Internet in the district headquarters and a Web site, gyandoot.net.
"Wired India" evokes images of dot-commers in Bangalore, a Silicon valley wannabe, and "laptop chief minister" Chandrababu Naidu of Andhra Pradesh, the man who changed the idiom of state capital Hyderabad from minarets to Microsoft. But in a country of almost 1 billion people, the per capita income is still barely $400, and out of every thousand people, only three have access to computers, and fewer than 20 are near a telephone.
MINIMUM COST TO VILLAGES
Wiring villages where illiteracy co-exists with abysmal poverty and where they have yet to see a decent road or a doctor may seem an outrageous plan. But Internet technology as a cottage industry to lift the rural economy is an idea bursting with possibilities. Seventy percent of Indians live in villages.
"The Gyandoot Intranet project at Dhar aims to achieve precisely this," said Amit Agrawal, CEO of the district council. Agrawal, who has been actively associated with the wired village project in Madhya Pradesh, is convinced that it can revolutionize life in India's poor villages with minimum cost to the government exchequer.
The entire tab for the Gyandoot project, aimed at half a million villagers, costs a little more than $57,000. The cost has been borne by the elected village councils - an upshot of the decentralization drive embarked on by Madhya Pradesh. The state government says it plans to wire other districts with private sector help.
The coordinator, selected from among the local youth, is not a government employee, Agrawal stresses. The village council offers him a place to sit in its premises, a computer , a modem and a printer. He is responsible for everything else. How much he earns depends on his enterprise. The district administration only wants a 10 percent commission on his income earned through user fees.
Some village soochanalayas, or coordinators, are functioning better than others.
In Bagri village, 20 year old Deepak Patel, the cyber cafe coordinator, has begun offering computer classes to village boys on the side. Patel borrowed the equivalent of $500 from his father and bought a computer. Already he has five students, each paying less than $10 a month for computer lessons one hour a day, six days a week.
FLOW OF STUDY MISSIONS
The Gyandoot Intranet project in Dhar is likely to benefit half a million people, most of whom are farmers. Its key utility is in drastically cutting down the time and money an average villager spends accessing the most basic information or trying to get through to government agencies. A key service is an on-the-spot copy of land records, which spares the villagers the tortuous, meandering journey through the corridors of power.Cultivators require such documents to get crop loans.
A farmer pays a nominal amount - less than 50 cents for the use of the Intranet - to access such records. Villagers can also use the facility of online registration of applications for income and domicile certificates. A reply is sent by e-mail to the soochanalaya when the certificate is ready. This way, villagers waste minimal time.
Apart from information, the Intranet project is also a fast-track way to get redress for public grievances.A digitized complaint form ensures a hotline to the concerned authorities.
"It works!" said Mahendra Sadhu, a schoolteacher in Tirla village in Dhar. Last week, Sadhu lodged a complaint about a malfunctioning hand pump. The virtual hotline to the top officials of the district administration ensured that a mechanic was soon dispatched. In Tirla these days, Sadhu is a hero.
Dhar's experiments with wiring villages has generated a lot of interest within India. Hardly a day passes when visitors from other states in the country are not arriving on study missions. But few think rural India's journey on the information highway will be smooth.
With a different set of people running things, the project may not get the support it is currently receiving. Then there are the usual snags. Though many of the villages have been electrified, there is an acute power crisis. Dhar has worked out a temporary solution: each cyber cafe is armed with an uninterrupted power service that swings into operation during the powerless hours. But the final solution to bad roads, power breakdowns and so on is not in sight.
(Patralekha Chatterjee reports on India for MSNBC.com.)
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