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Beyond the ‘Laptop Gowda’

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Intervening in a discussion on the role of corporations in

supporting introduction of IT for rural development at a conference organized by

Seattle-based Digital Partners and the VIIT Baramati, one myopic NGO said,

"What has IT done for India except create Laptop Gowdas"—read

computer toting citizens who have no real feeling for rural development but

treat IT as a fad. Going on to decry the entire Indian IT achievements as moving

from English speaking serfs to the British, to back office clerks to the world,

this gentlemen introduced a strident note of self criticism in what was

otherwise an excellent discussion on the larger benefits of IT.

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If you take the angst out of the "laptop Gowda"

statement, there is a lot to be said for pointing social development through IT

in the right direction through well planned and executed partnerships between

corporations, NGOs, academic institutions, governments and organizations like

Nasscom, CII, Ficci and Digital Partners.

The

future of the world lies in the hands of the market-based social

entrepreneur but these entrepreneurs will need financial,

technological and strategic support from businessmen to make the

real difference
Ganesh

Natarajan

As Akhtar Badshah, the erudite CEO of the Seattle

organization said in his summing up, a legion of computer literate villagers and

farmers could transform the economic landscape of large parts of the country and

create experiments that could be replicated around the world. But for this to

happen, the deep rooted distrust that many struggling NGOs have of the

successful IT sector will have to be replaced by a genuine feeling of trust and

mutual support.

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Look at just the area of setting up and proliferating

Information Kiosks, which was the prime theme of the Baramati conference and the

corporate showcase that followed in Mumbai. ICT kiosks are part of a worldwide

effort to go beyond the urban cybercafe to bring access, information and

education to remote and poor communities that are otherwise unable to

participate in the growing knowledge based economy. Drishti, set up by Satyen

Mishra, shows that village telecentres do not need subsidies and can be self

sustaining in their own right, and can provide e-services and e-information in

varied areas such as health, education, agriculture, commerce and governance.

Worldwide experiments presented at the conference from Chile, Indonesia, Peru

and of course India demonstrated the power of entrepreneur-led kiosk projects.

Perhaps, equally intriguing to understand was the successful

commercial experiments of the corporate sector in India in using Information

kiosks to improve the lot of the common man on one hand and increase shareholder

value on the other. The much lauded e-chaupal experiment of ITC , which has

already covered five states with over three thousand kiosks that enable a

de-layered supply chain for farmer produce to reach the distribution points has

apparently been such a success that the company plans to expand to 15 states

with five times the number of kiosks in the near future.

Can the twain meet—sure enough, as many of the global

delegates pointed out while praising the scale and vision of Indian corporate

experiments.

An interesting construct that emerges, which many of our

e-Governance planners can heed is that, for every self sustaining model like e-chaupal,

there will be others like Drishti and Tarahaat that will be profitable in a few

cases, but will need some support from both IT corporations and the government

for extensive proliferation. Indeed as Bangladesh’s Mohammad Yunus, with his

famous Grameen Bank experiments with micro credit has pointed out, "The

future of the world lies in the hands of the market-based social

entrepreneur," but these entrepreneurs will need financial, technological

and strategic support from businessmen to make the real difference. Our own

experiments in Pune, running Akanksha centers for educating slum children,

supporting self help groups and girl child programs and just providing IT

Education to NGOs and the underprivileged have shown that the potential of IT to

transform large segments of the country’s population is immense.

Ganesh

Natarajan




The author is deputy chairman & managing director of

Zensar Technologies and chairman of Nasscom’s SME Forum for Western India

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