TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
INDIA USING COMPUTERS TO IMPROVE CONDITIONS IN RURAL AREAS

Author: By Marion Lloyd, Globe Correspondent Date: 05/06/2000 Page: C1 Section: Business

BAGDI, India - For hundreds of years, farmers in central India were locked in a battle against three seemingly invincible foes: drought, poverty, and corrupt middlemen.

Now, thanks to a new computer network, they are on their way to minimizing the third evil - and they are better equipped to combat the other two.

Madhya Pradesh state launched the experimental network in this remote farming district, giving villagers access to everything from copies of land titles - a must for securing yearly bank loans - to rural water supply plans.

No bribes, no lines - just a modest 10-cent fee, per use.

"It's a wonderful thing," said farmer Kaluram Verma, clutching a computerized blueprint of his farm that will allow him to get a loan for a well.

The pilot project covers 600 villages in Dhar district, one of dozens of poor tribal areas in Madhya Pradesh. It is part of a push by the state's chief minister, Digvijay Singh, to find low-cost ways of overcoming the state's lack of infrastructure and improving conditions in rural areas.

The project has been so successful that the federal government announced last week that it was considering expanding it nationwide. The goal is to try to wire India beyond its cities to the countryside, which still contains 70 percent of India's 1 billion population.

The potential of the system is apparent here. Previously, farmers were hostage to infamously corrupt lands-record men, who would often charge as much as $100 - two months of earnings for farmers - for a copy of a land record. The official also had the power to revoke land ownership with the flick of his pen, local farmers say.

"It's been that way for hundreds of years, but everyone was too afraid to complain," for fear that they would lose their land, said Kaluram Verma, who owns a five-acre farm eight miles outside Bagdi. The town, where bottled water is rare and the roads are passable only by Jeep or ox cart, is home to oneUse of uninitialized value at /data/commerce/bg_archives/newarch.cgi line 725. Use of uninitialized value at /data/commerce/bg_archives/newarch.cgi line 725. No recipient! of 21 computer network centers that service surrounding areas.

The system is linked to district headquarters, allowing villagers to appeal to the local government without leaving town. The Bagdi center has forwarded dozens of complaints about broken hand pumps and absentee teachers, as well as requests for medical advice to urban hospitals. Most get replies within a week.

"When you think about it, it's damn cheap," said Suresh Verma, a grain merchant who uses the system to check produce rates at markets across India. He said it would cost him $2.50 per call to survey the market centers. The same service costs 10 cents from the computer, which he and other villagers refer to as "the magic box."

His enthusiasm was somewhat ironic, considering the system has reduced farmers' reliance on traders, who would quote them rates far below market prices and then pocket the difference. But Verma said he could still turn a large profit by being more discriminating about which markets he chooses for his goods.

The financial benefit can be enormous. Last month, farmers who could afford it trucked their crops 400 miles to Bombay, to take advantage of 40 percent higher prices for garlic and wheat, staple crops of the area. Others can wait to take their produce to local markets when prices are highest.

It's the kind of project President Clinton had in mind last month, when he urged the government to make sure its booming information technology industry benefited the country's impoverished masses, not just the Western-educated elite.

"Millions of Indians are connected to the Internet, but millions more are not yet connected to fresh water," he told 1,200 entrepreneurs in the southern city of Bangalore, home to one of the country's largest information technology centers.

He was on a weeklong tour of the Indian subcontinent, aimed largely at boosting ties between Indian software engineers and US-based information technology companies, which are critically short of manpower. The US Congress recently voted to increase the number of visas for foreign skilled workers from 65,000 to 200,000, a move that will primarily benefit Indian software programmers. India's own IT industry is expected to expand exponentially in the next eight years, with projected growth in software exports going from the current $5.7 billion a year to $40 billion. Most of those products will be destined for the US market.

But Clinton also sounded a note of caution, lest India's IT boom further widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. He pointed out that while India supplies 35 percent of the world's software engineers, it also accounts for 25 percent of the world's poor.

"Our challenge," he said, "is to turn the newest discoveries into the best weapons humanity has ever had to fight poverty."

Chief Minister Singh, the man behind the computer network in Madhya Pradesh, agrees.

"Information technology should be for the people. It shouldn't be confined to the upper echelons of society," Singh said in an interview in the state capital of Bhopal. The city was the site of one of the world's worst industrial disasters, the 1984 gas leak at a fertilizer factory run by US-based Union Carbide. More than 16,000 people died after the fa