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The stereotypical image of the illiterate villager shuffling
around the corridors of babudom in search of documents of
records could well be in for a makeover. The Indian village
is getting wired for empowerment. In what must be an unpleasant
experience for them, middlemen and petty bureaucrats are finding
themselves sidelined as people in a Madhya Pradesh district
have begun dealing directly with the government online. The
soochanalaya set up in Dhar district has, for the first time,
enabled villagers to check up prices in other mandis before
selling their crop. For example, the villagers were told by
the local trader that the asking price for a quintal of potatoes
was Rs. 200. On the Net, the villagers confirmed what they
knew all along, that they were being ripped off by at least
Rs. 200 per quintal. Another problem farmers in the district
faced was that of getting land records in order to raise bank
loans, a process which involved running around the local tehsils
and greasing numerous palms. Now applications for all sorts
of certificates and records can be sent online and villagers
are assured of a response within 10 days for as a little as
Rs 10. Special medical advice and referral services are also
available at the click of a mouse, The Madhaya Pradesh experiment
is a refreshing change from our hackneyed thinking that information
technology is a luxury that a poverty-stricken country like
India cannot afford. In fact, we tend to sheer back in horror
at the prospect of even providing telephones for people when
they have not first been provided safe drinking water and
functional schools.
It is precisely this attitude of waiting for everything
to fall in place before taking the next step that has left
India so far behind in the IT revolution. Why, for example,
have we not thought of utilishing the Internet for education?
Instead of whining about non-existent classrooms and the poor
quality of teachers, the government could have set up small
cyber classrooms in remote villages using a dedicated power
line. A pilot experiment in Delhi in which an Internet terminal
was set up in a slum showed that illiterate children were
able to handle it in no time and began surfing for sites that
they found particularly interesting. For the first time ever,
the marginalished villagers has a chance to access knowledge,
something which has been denied to him for millennia. At last,
he faces the real possibility of extricating himself from
the clutches of the middleman and petty officials who have
exploited him and kept him in bondage. With information technology,
geographical inaccessibility and social disparities will lose
some of their salience. This is not to say that rural India
will suddenly be liberated. For 50 years we have been talking
of bridging the rural-urban divide. The chasm has only widened.
However, the case with which the people of Dhar have taken
to using information technology shows the paradigm shift which
can be effected with minimum investment. The whole district
has been wired for as little as Rs.25 lakh. This model should
ideally be replicated in as many rural areas as possible.
the only people complaining will be superfatted bureaucrats
and lethargic politicians rendered increasingly irrelevant
by the spreading web of information.
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