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Farmers' Aid
Mohan Patedar of Tirla, Dhar, went the
cyberkiosk way to complain of a non-functional handpump.
PCs help farmers of Warana, Maharashtra, get good
prices. |
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That was when he was
on the verge of giving up plans of going to college for
a degree in history as he had no money to buy books.
That was also when the Madhya Pradesh government began a
project called Gyandoot to fund rural networked
cyberkiosks through panchayats in backward Dhar to offer
villagers a range of services through an Intranet based
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at the district HQ.
Some 1,700 km
away, in Pondicherry's Veerampattinam, a fishing hamlet on the
shores of the Bay of Bengal, G. Balaraman is preparing to set
out for the day's trawling. But unlike his father, he won't be
scanning the skies alone to hazard a guess about possible
storms. Suddenly, the loudspeakers dotted around the village
crackle to life, announcing the weather forecast. The
announcer also gives details of the tide, wind direction and
height of the waves.
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This is part of a
two-year-old project started by the Chennai-based M.S.
Swaminathan Research Foundation to transmit critical
information to six villages in the area. "Now we are
always prepared," says Balaraman, before setting sail.
"The information is very useful during rough and stormy
weather."
Suddenly, |
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Net Gain
Fishermen of Veerampattinam, Pondicherry,study a
computer-generated 'sea report' obtained from their
local information centre |
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the digital divide
doesn't seem to be a yawning chasm any more. To be sure, India
has just three phone lines per 100 people against 11 in China.
It has a paltry five PCs per 1,000 people compared to 14 in
China. Infrastructure is crummy, so power outages remain the
norm rather than an exception in villages. Still, infotech has
gone grassroots and begun transforming lives of ruralfolk like
Govardhan and Balaram. They are participants in a few
committed efforts at wiring up villages, disseminating
information, simplifying procedures and eliminating middlemen.
"These kinds of projects demonstrate that rural consumers can
and will benefit from connectivity," says Aditya Dev Sood, who
works with the Bangalore Centre for Knowledge Societies and is
working on rural connectivity projects. "They will enjoy new
access to agricultural inputs, new markets for their products
and in a few years from now, will find new educational and
employment opportunities through these human-mediated
Inter/Intranet access projects."
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travel west to Warana, in Maharashtra's sugarcane belt,
some 400 km southeast of Mumbai. Septuagenarian cane and
dairy farmer Mahadeobhau Chowgule is happy with a PC
installed in his Pargaon village, which gives him
information about the harvesting time for the crop, the
results of crop sampling (a field officer from the
cooperative takes a sample of the crop of every farmer
which is tested for the volume of sugar and quality) and
a forecast about the expected yield. It also keeps
records of all his transactions with the local sugar and
milk cooperatives. The modestly well-off farmer, whose
10 acres generate some 500 tonnes of cane every year,
used to travel a dozen times every year to the Warana
Sugar Factory, the local cane growers cooperative, some
five km away, to obtain this critical information till
two years ago. |
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The Old and the New When she
didn't get her pension for four months, Rami Bai
of Premnagar in Dhar, MP, e-mailed the
authorities. The next day, officials turned up to
redress her grouse. |
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Now he trusts the
computer in Pargaon, one of the 70 villages that
are part of the Warana Wired Village project. "I
get my information so quickly without much effort
these days," he says. "This is a boon."
In
Thiruvarur, the rice bowl of Tamil Nadu, the boon
promises to reap benefits for all its residents.
For this is possibly India's first electronic
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where infotech is
slowly reinventing the stodgy, colonial district
collectorate into a modern, service-oriented edifice.
Today, Thiruvarur residents access old-age pension
payments and records, land records, community, birth and
death certificates in a jiffy thanks to large-scale
computerisation. The results have begun to show. K.S.
Ratna, a 31-year-old farmworker of Nanilam, had been
trying to get a government loan for over eight months.
When the e-governance scheme began and records were
computerised, he got it in three weeks flat.
The
fading away of the middlemen and a check on corruption
in local bodies is possibly the best thing infotech is
doing to these wired villages. Mohan Patedar, a
40-year-old soyabean farmer from Tirla in Dhar, sold his
last crop at the district mandi directly for Rs 600 to
Rs 700 a quintal after checking the rates in different
markets on the Intranet at his village cyberkiosk. He
just pays Rs 5 for the service. A year ago, things were
vastly different: Pateder would spend Rs 10 on bus fare
and endure a 30-minute back-breaking journey to Dhar
just to find out crop prices in the wholesale
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(middleman) who picked up his crop would pay at
least Rs 50 less per quintal. Now Patedar wants to
rent a truck and ferry his crop to the Baroda
mandi, more than 300 km away, because he has
accessed the highest price—a cool Rs 900 per
quintal—from his village kiosk. Infotech has also
made farmers vastly ambitious: Kaluram Patedar, a
soyabean farmer from Aahu, |
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Field Study
District collector Uma Shankar uses a laptop
to explain harvest and cultivation methods to
farmers of Araviru village near Thiruvarur, Tamil
Nadu |
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is cajoling the
local cyberkiosk operator to hook up to the Internet so
that he can get the D-oil cake prices—the international
price of D-oil cake, a soyabean byproduct, has a direct
bearing on crop prices in India—in the benchmark Chicago
markets which "will let me know what price to expect in
the Indian mandis in the near future". Says he: "Mujhe
Chicago market ka bhav chahiye (I want the price in the
Chicago market)."
Digital empowerment is also
prodding slothful administrations to become more
accountable. In Premnagar, Dhar, Rami Bai, 87, a
destitute widow, and two neighbours didn't get their Rs
150-a-month old-age pension for four months last year.
The three trudged to the nearest cyberkiosk and paid Rs
5 each to e-mail their complaint to the
administration.The next day, a team of officials landed
up at the village and found out that 47 other villagers
where sharing Rami Bai's plight.
Since
Gyandoot kicked off a little over a year ago, over
6,000 e-mail complaints have poured into the
central server of the district administration at
Dhar. The citizen-administration electronic
interface is not limited to MP. "I thought it must
be just a fantasy to expect the government to be
responsive. But I was proved wrong," says T.
Manickam of Valangaiman, in Tamil Nadu's
Thiruvarur district, of the online governance in
his area.
The cyberkiosks themselves
present employment opportunities for local young
men and women. In Pondicherry's Embalam village,
50 per cent of volunteers who run the kiosks are
women. In Dhar, home to possibly the best-designed
empowerment project, which has won the prestigious
Stockholm Challenge Award, 33 youngsters operate
government-funded kiosks, usually out of
panchayat-owned buildings, and charge villagers
anything between Rs 5 and Rs 15 for an impressive
range of 17 services—from crop prices to land
records to caste certificates to e-mailing
grievances to matrimonials to electronic sales of
farm equipment. |
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Central
Server Life at Nalcha in Dhar
spins aroundthe 'soochanalay'. So much so that
even matrimonial ads are posted on it.
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During the lean crop
season, operators make up to Rs 10 a page typing
villagers' applications, giving Rs 250 worth of
computer lessons to local kids and even churning
out Rs 50 worth of astrological charts and
forecasts.
That's not all. In the
villagers' rush for on-time critical crop and
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information
which helps them get better prices and make a
better living, prejudices and retrograde customs
are being given the go-by. In Embalam, villagers
have allowed the use of the local temple to run
the information booth for fishermen. Ironically,
the lower castes and menstruating women continue
to be shut out at one of the temple's two
entrances. The other entrance leading to the
makeshift information booth allows one and all to
access information!
But the roadblocks to
digital empowerment remain. In Dhar, for example,
five-hour power cuts are a daily feature. All the
kiosks are equipped with uninterrupted power
systems which supply six to seven hours' back-up
power. Connectivity is another bugbear: kiosk
operators planning to offer Internet services fear
slow download speeds. Dhar's Gyandoot project is
trying to beat the connectivity problem and
soaring local phone bills innovatively: adapting
the Wireless Local Loop technology which will
offer hassle-free bandwith of 70 kbps round the
clock, up from 32 kbps now over phone lines. The
other option is to adopt the Warana example of
expensive v-sat technology, which cost the project
close to Rs 3 crore compared to some Rs 20 lakh
for the Dhar wire-up. Then there is babudom.
"There's still some resistance to computers in the
administration," confesses Dhar collector Rajesh
Rajora. "But the bureaucrats know this time around
non-performance is going to be recorded. We can
find out easily how fast the complaint was
redressed."
Clearly, the grassroots
infotech revolution is beginning to take off. By
end-June, Dhar will have around 80 cyberkiosks
(many privately run now), up from 33 covering five
lakh villagers in 400 villages. Emulating the
Gyandoot example, six similar cyberkiosks
supplying essential information have opened in
MP's Ratlam district. In apple-growing Hamirpur,
Himachal Pradesh, the government is starting 40
rural cyberkiosks to benefit farmers. Ten such
kiosks are planned in Sonepat and Sirsa in
Haryana.In Kerala, work is on to network the
state's 1,215 local bodies to the state planning
board and other key government agencies. Forget
the shrill infotech naysayers and proselytisers
who debate endlessly on the possibility of a rural
infotech revolution. It has already arrived
silently—and even begun kicking.
With
Charubala Annuncio in Warana, Vatsala Kamat in
Pondicherry, A.S. Panneerselvan in Thiruvarur and
Venu Menon in Thiruvananthapuram
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