Other India and The Road Ahead

his writer recently traveled to Erode, a dusty district in Tamil Nadu, five hours away from India's Silicon Valley-Bangalore. Large parts of the district lack modern sanitation but the few bookstalls dotting the part-developed, part-rustic landscape proudly display Bill Gates' The Road Ahead. The situation, not without its inherent irony, is symbolic of a nation rife with contradictions trying hard to carve a silicon grail in the midst of poverty, starvation, squalor and less than adequate infrastructure. But the slow and gradual changes sweeping "other India" reveal that despite being leagues away from equitable diffusion of technology, the digital revolution is not a socialist developmental fantasy, high on hope and rhetoric and low on delivery.

A large number of non-profit organisations, individuals and State governments have taken on themselves the challenge to carve digital highways across the nation and make technology accessible among hitherto isolated semi-developed and underdeveloped hamlets of the country. Thanks to these efforts, tribal farmers in Raichur, Madhya Pradesh can log on to the net for just Rs 5 and check prices of commodities in the neighboring market, fishermen in Kerala use cell phones to do better business, Kholapuri chappal makers have found a place on the net and Maniben an embroidery worker from Kutch became the first woman in Gujarat to receive an online order to make Millennium ties when she was featured by peoplelink.org.

These examples, evidence of the humanising and empowering efforts of digital technology, provide hope in a country like India, where the literacy level is pegged at 44 per cent and no of PCs per 1,000 hovers at a dismal 5, that these efforts can be replicated on a larger scale. That is exactly what Tarahaat.com,an e-commerce initiative launched by Development Alternatives in Tikamgarh District Madhya Pradesh, is trying hard to do. Launched in January 2001, with the aim of providing rapid, low-cost information, the portal offers information on jobs and mandi prices and educates villagers about health, information, governance, law, the importance of voting and property rights. An investment of Rs 3 crore is envisaged in the first year of operations, which is already seen the opening of a dozen Tara kendras in the Bundelkand region spread across, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bhatinda (Punjab). Similarly, ikisan.com forecasts weather, provides commodity news pronounces product availability and arrange online loans for farmers. In Pondicherry, India the MS Swaminathan foundation has set up rural information centers for local communication and Internet access using only solar and electric power and wired and wireless communication. Farmers can download satellite images that indicate where fish shoals are.

Apart from these initiatives, certain government initiatives in hinterland India are trying hard to bring about a convergence between the needs of the poor and digital technology. Last year the Madhya Pradesh government launched an e-governance project appropriately named Gyandoot (Ambassador of Knowledge) in the largely tribal and impoverished district of Dhar. Run buy local youth, the shoochalyas has brought about a paradigm shift in the way the administration is responding to citizen's needs. In Warna, in the Kohlapur district of Maharashtra, the National Informatics Centre is exploiting information technology to modernise the cooperative movement. The program aims to increase productivity of the existing cooperative enterprise by setting up a state of the art computer communication network and by providing agricultural, medical and educational information to villagers at facilitation booths in their villages.

The Gujarat based National Development Dairy board has been helping cooperative unions across the country to set up a computerised milk connection and distribution system. Dairy farmers are paid based on the weight and fat content of their milk which can be tested instantly using low-cost equipment. Earlier middlemen could cheat these farmers by fudging fat content but no longer. Inspired by the success of these initiatives, the Ministry of Information Technology has ambitious plans to convert over 6,00,000 public call offices (PCOs) into public 'tele-info-centres' offering a variety of services such as Internet browsing, fax, e-mail, and DTP. The Karnataka Telecom Circle is seeking franchisees for Internet dhabas while the Maharashtra state government is said to have plans to link 40,000 villages with Agronet, a specially developed software package for farmers, which aims to provide the latest information on agriculture, including the crop pattern.

These inventive efforts to increase income through connectivity are being backed by scientists to develop economical non-IT computer applications. Academics in the Indian Institute of Science and engineering at the Bangalore based Encore Software have designed the Simputer priced at Rs 9,000 or less than $200. Based on the Linux open source operating system, the first version of the Simputer provided Internet and e-mail access in local language with touch screen functions and microbanking applications. Future versions provide speech recognition and text to speech software for illiterate users. In 1999, the Indian Institute of Technology created a low-cost Internet access system and needs no modem and eliminates expensive copper lines. At the core is a wireless local loop developed in collaboration with Midas Communication Technologies in Madras and US based Analog Devices.

And yet the road ahead continues to be bumpy on account of low teledensity and even lower PC Penetration. Consider this: the number of mobile connections in India is only 3 million plus as compared to China's 70 million, the number of PCs per 1,000 people is 5 as compared to 555 in the US and electricity is virtually non-existent. Internet access costs, in most places, continue to be Rs 20-30 an hour.. For most rural families, this amounts to 50 per cent of their daily income. Remember farmers in Karnataka, the State which boasts of housing the Silicon Valley of India, ended their lives because they could not repay debts of Rs 30,000, after mortgaging their land and homes. Most software engineers earn the equivalent of a farmer's life time debt in a month!

Apart from non-existent infrastructure, tapping the potential of these technologies to a great extent will depend on their adaptations to local conditions. For example 90 per cent of the content on the World Wide Web does not cater to specific local needs. In rural India, where a large section of the populace subsists on agriculture, the rural populace would need information on soil conditions, animal care and pest control explained simply in the local language. This content is largely unavailable.

If this is not done, information technology which has the potential to bridge these disparities can also accentuate these very divisions and create a new class of "techno Brahmins." Corporate India can speed up the process if it realises it is in its interest for governments to speed up e- initiatives and create a market for products within India. With a population of 1 billion, Indian presents a most challenging opportunity for the software industry, only if on the road ahead we take the "Other India" along.

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