A lot of effort has gone into getting rural areas Web-enabled. We figured long ago that the Web is not for the urban elite, and so came initiatives to get the Net to villages across the country. This, despite huge challenges such as suspect power conditions, expensive technologies, language barriers, and untrained manpower.

And there has been an impact. Information centers or kiosks have come up helping villagers to access information which was not easily available earlier. As of April 1, 2008, there are more than 113,000 common service centers (the governments name for such kiosks) the have been set up through public-private partnerships. The initiative, Agmarknet, is helping farmers track prices of produce so they can charge better prices from buyers, in their own language. An e-governance project under the NREGA (National Rural Employment Act) acts as a transparent way to allot 100 days of guaranteed wage employment to every BPL (below poverty line) household.

But there is plenty more to do. Millions of villagers are still unaffected by the boons of information technology. Voice activation at different levels has been around for many years on smartphones. What is interesting is extending that to Web browsing, and that too in multiple languages.

One such initiative has come up from IBM as part of its Spoken Web project. The India Research team is leading this project which will enable people to browse Voice Sites through Voice Links using their phones. According to Bloomberg, IBM estimates that 1 bn people will surf the Internet through phones by 2011. And IBM intends this to be a project which will propel mobile e-commerce, but, for now, a pilot project is on in South India to enable villagers to browse information similar to what is available on the Web. A toll-free number has been provided for this.

For India this is great. Phones are cheaper and more accepted in India. And literacy is a big challenge.

So, what information can the rural audiences access? There is a huge range of possibilities. From business related information, weather forecasts, healthcare services and much more. Will the villagers have to use something like an IVR, or would they get to speak to a real person digging up the info they need, and conveying that to the callers? If its an automated system, then one hopes that the menus would be less winding and confusing than the present patience testers that work in all call centers.

Shyam Malhotra

For the pilot, IBM would have worked out the language issues, but for its wider implementation, a realistic look at how languages and dialects will be handled is critical. And while voice recognition will be part of this, the software makers will have to be careful with how they handle not just dialects but also a lot more varieties of tones and nuances that urban India may not have.

But, by far the most critical thing for widespread deployment of such a service, would be rural teledensity. It now stands at 7.9%, while urban tele-density was 60.04% in November 2007. Out of the total 22.71 lakh PCOs in India, only 2 lakh are in rural areas. The government aims to increase rural teledensity to 25% by the end of the Eleventh Five Year Plan. It also plans to set up and manage 7,871 infrastructure sites over 500 districts in 27 states to deliver mobile services.

So if some of these plans fruition well in time, services like Spoken Web can be deployed.

There is only one note of disquiet. Pilots remain in the air for too long. Will these get to the ground soon enough?

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