A New Model Walks The Ramp

Influenced by the Internet and Information Technology (IT),
after the spectacular dotcom boom and bust through 1995 to 2000, we are now
passing through another hype-laden phase: the rather SMS-like acronym,
ICT4D-Information Communication Technology for Development. The logic sounds
simple: MNCs and IT companies need constant inflow of human resources, for which
they need to prepare the upcoming generation, a potential countrywide
recruitment center-and nobody seems to envisage any real problem.

The government is happy: it sees more IT in governance, and
the masses getting introduced to IT. Civil society is happy: the flavor is good,
funds are flowing in. And it is only too happy to be part of the rising
cacophony of success stories of integrating ICT into the lives of those who
might otherwise never have been able to afford it.

Without seeking to sound patronising, for the amorphous
masses in India's unlettered villages, seeing, touching, and experiencing
computers is akin to being in the presence of magic. Since the response to ICT
is so compelling among the impoverished, it gives providers, facilitators, and
investors a great sense of achievement, often overriding their desire to see
tangible results sooner rather than later.

The problem is that in mid 2004, after having attended and
participated in scores of conferences on ICT4D, having been member of several
online discussion forums on ICT and various developmental issues, one can
conclude that there is an overdose of talk and spiel on the relevance of ICT in
the development of developing nations (read India). In fact, all calculations
intact, it appears that there is more money being spent on ICT4D deliberations
than on the actual causes.

But, it was good to have had firsthand experience to
discover the reality about 'interventions'. It was discovered that there is
not a single source of information for the most talked-about and influential
ICT4D interventions. The questions, thus, remain:

• What could be the best model?

• What could be the best technology?

• What could be the impact on poverty alleviation?

• What could be the value-proposition for
  entrepreneurship?

• What could be the possibility of sustainability issues?

None of these answers were easy to arrive at, not least
because no organisation was interested in funding exercises to arrive at some
guiding solutions. Somehow, PlaNet Finance India and Digital Empowerment
Foundation banded together to work on capturing firsthand experience of at least
15-20 interventions.

Having been given the scoping-out responsibility, I was
made to travel to 15 states, covering 90 last-mile interventions across at least
80 villages. The journey was, among other things, an adventure, educational, and
provided mind-boggling inputs into grassroots exigencies vis-à-vis so-called
New Age technologies.

The ICT infrastructure scenario across India is
interesting: the country has about 45 mn fixed lines (estimated users could be
as many as 450 mn); there are about 70 mn mobile users; personal computer (PC)
penetration is about 11 mn-roughly 25 mn users, including about six million
Internet subscribers; approximately 10,000 information kiosks (IK) or community
information centers (CISs) reaching more than one crore (10 mn) users; and more
than 10,000 schools in the backyards have about five million students as users.

It is a truism that ICT is nothing, but the fulfillment of
information indispensability. Yet, India-variously hailed, as a paragon of the
developing world-remains one of the information-poorest nations. An
information-exhaustive society is an empowered society, but India has a long way
to go to get to that place in heaven.

Information Hunger, and the ICT Pudding

There are various forms of technological interventions to bridge the
information gap. ICT has two categories of tools: first, IT and Internet tools;
second, radio, TV, telephone, mobile, and satellite. Although IT and Internet
are formidably interactive, they suffer from a perennial lack of bandwidth,
content, and local-language enablement. They also necessitate a certain degree
of training and literacy.

The second set of ICT tools, however, has a remarkably
higher penetration and user-base. Although telephones, radios, TVs, and mobiles
have limited interactivity, they exist outside the paradigm of the cutting-edge
technology barrier, do not require any training, nor education and literacy-
these tools are oral, multimedia, and entirely affordable.

Yet, it has been observed that the Internet, computers, and
IT drive most ICT interventions at the grassroots. Ironically, even though
radio, TV, telephone, and mobile (RTTM) usage is far greater than IT and
Internet, the latter have become more the medium than the message (with all
apologies to Marshall MacLuhan). What is it that really motivates investors,
government, corporates, and other stakeholders to ram through IT paraphernalia
for development?

Analysing the strategies of companies such as Intel,
Microsoft, IBM, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Red Hat, it is interesting to
note that these have there individual agenda: Intel would like to have every box
in the world with its chip in it; Microsoft would like to have its OS and MS
Office as the default platform for all PC users; Nokia would prefer to inundate
the Indian market with its products; HP has already adopted Kuppam-a mandal
headquarters in Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh-to test-bed its emerging
market solution strategy; Cisco has been investing significant amounts to train
networking professionals; Red Hat has bunged in its Linux OS and other
open-source software in various ICT in education projects in schools.
Everyone's fighting for a piece of the pie, if not for the whole pie itself.

Drishtee Soochna Kendra in Tejpur in Assam, one amongst the many serving the needs of the North East populace

The government remains the only significant agency, which
has tried to leverage mass media such as radio and TV to educationally empower
children and teachers in the rural areas, partly because it owns the airwaves,
and partly because the privately-administered FM stations cater to an urban,
quasi-westernised audience.

Who's Playing, Who's Not...

The players on the ground trying to address developmental issues by means of
information empowerment and using ICT tools range from corporates to civil
society, government, entrepreneurs, international agencies, and new economy
companies dominated by IT companies.

An analysis of every intervention has left a huge
impact-mostly positive-but there are questions of sustainability, long-term
impact, and whether it is holistically integrated with the other relevant
necessities of the local lifestyle.

• Azim
  Premji Foundation: The Azim Premji Foundation (APF) has a
  focussed purpose: to target issues prevalent in the education system,
  primarily content. Started with school-based Computer Learning Centers (CLC)
  bundled with in-house content, APF has had consummate success, working with
  the government and having programmes in more than 14 states.
  
  Many of its centers in Karnataka also double as kiosks after school hours,
  earning the schools substantial revenue. The APF's interventions have been
  instrumental in increasing the enrolment and improvement in attendance in
  schools with computer aided learning centers. Children have learnt to use
  many applications and create a huge, dynamic databank of content. The
  problem: the content remains unused and has not been shared. The potential!
  leverage the content to create a children's portal.

• Hole
  in the Wall Education Limited (HiWEL)-NIIT: The HiWEL
  experiment proved that with minimum or no interference, children could learn
  faster, better, and can teach other members of their peer group. Based on
  nationwide experiment, the company came up with a unique concept called
  'Minimal Invasive Education'.
  
  Taking up a cost-ratio analysis of education, the company concluding that
  out of every Rs 100 spent on education, only Rs 15 hits the target. It has
  informed the government that, using its HiWEL model, they would be able to
  actually reverse the investment pattern so that Rs 85 reaches the
  beneficiary and the supply chain consumes only Rs 15.

• Aarohi
  Project, Uttaranchal: This is perhaps the government's only
  project where it has covered all the government primary schools and
  government-aided high schools, installing three to five computers on each
  campus. The project is headed towards using the infrastructure to build
  students-and-teachers' portals, with content being the responsibility of
  the users.

• Soochna
  Kendras-Drishtee: One of the largest diffusions of information
  kiosks, or soochna kendras, by a private company began as a first-generation
  entrepreneurial initiative: Drishtee has learnt a lot in its endeavor to
  reach the rural market with its bouquet of services, spread across
  education, commerce, and governance. The organization was also the first to
  anticipate that its own IK operators, or entrepreneurs, commercially
  unconstrained by organizational loyalty, could turn into local business
  threats and competition. So, the company has been constantly innovating to
  retain the entrepreneurs and overcome the attrition rate. Fortunately, since
  it has all the revenue earning services in its bouquet, Drishtee has good
  chances of remaining relatively unwounded. The challenge for the company
  lies in how soon it can convert its mature kiosks into a local BPO (which it
  is planning to do). Perhaps Drishtee should explore the possibility of
  integrating its services with mobiles, and expand across other platforms
  such as Linux.

• e-Choupal-ITC:
  With the largest base-6,000 e-Choupals and counting-of the
  ICT platform in the rural areas, ITC is sitting on a goldmine, both from the
  point of view of being a business enabler and community-empowering agent.
  Each of the e-Choupals is enabled with VSAT-connected multimedia PC and
  printer. And the 'sanchalak'-a farmer with decent landholding and
  production capacity, and extremely conversant with the Internet, e-mail, and
  printing-is the link between the other farmers and the private ICT mandis.
  Each sanchalak earns a commission from the business he forwards to ITC
  mandis and from the sale of FMCG products. The e-Choupals are value adding
  to their commercial work with education and entertainment.

  n-Logue Information Kiosk in Trivarrur near Chennai in Tamil Nadu run by a women entrepreneur from the local village

Impact, Sustainability, Takeaway Learning

India's villages are so disconnected from the mainstream that and any and
every ICT intervention looks extremely successful. Children and the youth are in
the forefront of the avidity of interest. But not only is there is an abysmal
inadequacy of content, there is also no effort whatsoever by the facilitators to
accumulate the little content made by the children.

However, at the level of business, it is governance-related
services, and educational offerings that attract the most attention-and people
are ready to pay for these two services. ICT interventions have also created
village-level entrepreneurship that has created many jobs and business
opportunities. There is formidable proof that ICT interventions can be
economically viable even in the short-term for business investors. The
indicators seem to be that it will take at least five investors to build the
market to the level that the ICT interventions, especially information kiosks,
will be able to ensure business sustenance.

Akshaya Kiosk in Malappuram district of Kerala is run by women entrepreneurs of a family, is an extension of a typewriter school. According to the entrepreneurs, they still earn more money from the typewriter school than the ICT kiosk of Akshaya. (Top) Photograph of the ICT Kiosk (Below) the typewriter school located in the same house

The trend shows that-much like the Internet-driven dotcom
boom that created a huge market base and a spirit of entrepreneurship among the
urban educated-ICT4D will boost the rural market high enough to create micro
entrepreneurship, village BPOs, and a huge human resource base for employment in
India and abroad. It's a paradise for the taking.

Osama Manzar

The author is Director, Digital Empowerment Foundation,

who has conducted India wide research of projects pertaining to e-Governance and
ICT for Development

mail@dqindia.com