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Influenced by the Internet and Information Technology (IT), after the spectacular dotcom boom and bust through 1995 to 2000, we are now passing through another hype-laden phase: the rather SMS-like acronym, ICT4D-Information Communication Technology for Development. The logic sounds simple: MNCs and IT companies need constant inflow of human resources, for which they need to prepare the upcoming generation, a potential countrywide recruitment center-and nobody seems to envisage any real problem.

The government is happy: it sees more IT in governance, and the masses getting introduced to IT. Civil society is happy: the flavor is good, funds are flowing in. And it is only too happy to be part of the rising cacophony of success stories of integrating ICT into the lives of those who might otherwise never have been able to afford it.

Without seeking to sound patronising, for the amorphous masses in India's unlettered villages, seeing, touching, and experiencing computers is akin to being in the presence of magic. Since the response to ICT is so compelling among the impoverished, it gives providers, facilitators, and investors a great sense of achievement, often overriding their desire to see tangible results sooner rather than later.

The problem is that in mid 2004, after having attended and participated in scores of conferences on ICT4D, having been member of several online discussion forums on ICT and various developmental issues, one can conclude that there is an overdose of talk and spiel on the relevance of ICT in the development of developing nations (read India). In fact, all calculations intact, it appears that there is more money being spent on ICT4D deliberations than on the actual causes.

But, it was good to have had firsthand experience to discover the reality about 'interventions'. It was discovered that there is not a single source of information for the most talked-about and influential ICT4D interventions. The questions, thus, remain:

• What could be the best model?

• What could be the best technology?

• What could be the impact on poverty alleviation?

• What could be the value-proposition for entrepreneurship?

• What could be the possibility of sustainability issues?

None of these answers were easy to arrive at, not least because no organisation was interested in funding exercises to arrive at some guiding solutions. Somehow, PlaNet Finance India and Digital Empowerment Foundation banded together to work on capturing firsthand experience of at least 15-20 interventions.

Having been given the scoping-out responsibility, I was made to travel to 15 states, covering 90 last-mile interventions across at least 80 villages. The journey was, among other things, an adventure, educational, and provided mind-boggling inputs into grassroots exigencies vis-à-vis so-called New Age technologies.

The ICT infrastructure scenario across India is interesting: the country has about 45 mn fixed lines (estimated users could be as many as 450 mn); there are about 70 mn mobile users; personal computer (PC) penetration is about 11 mn-roughly 25 mn users, including about six million Internet subscribers; approximately 10,000 information kiosks (IK) or community information centers (CISs) reaching more than one crore (10 mn) users; and more than 10,000 schools in the backyards have about five million students as users.

It is a truism that ICT is nothing, but the fulfillment of information indispensability. Yet, India-variously hailed, as a paragon of the developing world-remains one of the information-poorest nations. An information-exhaustive society is an empowered society, but India has a long way to go to get to that place in heaven.

Information Hunger, and the ICT Pudding
There are various forms of technological interventions to bridge the information gap. ICT has two categories of tools: first, IT and Internet tools; second, radio, TV, telephone, mobile, and satellite. Although IT and Internet are formidably interactive, they suffer from a perennial lack of bandwidth, content, and local-language enablement. They also necessitate a certain degree of training and literacy.

The second set of ICT tools, however, has a remarkably higher penetration and user-base. Although telephones, radios, TVs, and mobiles have limited interactivity, they exist outside the paradigm of the cutting-edge technology barrier, do not require any training, nor education and literacy- these tools are oral, multimedia, and entirely affordable.

Yet, it has been observed that the Internet, computers, and IT drive most ICT interventions at the grassroots. Ironically, even though radio, TV, telephone, and mobile (RTTM) usage is far greater than IT and Internet, the latter have become more the medium than the message (with all apologies to Marshall MacLuhan). What is it that really motivates investors, government, corporates, and other stakeholders to ram through IT paraphernalia for development?

Analysing the strategies of companies such as Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Red Hat, it is interesting to note that these have there individual agenda: Intel would like to have every box in the world with its chip in it; Microsoft would like to have its OS and MS Office as the default platform for all PC users; Nokia would prefer to inundate the Indian market with its products; HP has already adopted Kuppam-a mandal headquarters in Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh-to test-bed its emerging market solution strategy; Cisco has been investing significant amounts to train networking professionals; Red Hat has bunged in its Linux OS and other open-source software in various ICT in education projects in schools. Everyone's fighting for a piece of the pie, if not for the whole pie itself.

Drishtee Soochna Kendra in Tejpur in Assam, one amongst the many serving the needs of the North East populace

The government remains the only significant agency, which has tried to leverage mass media such as radio and TV to educationally empower children and teachers in the rural areas, partly because it owns the airwaves, and partly because the privately-administered FM stations cater to an urban, quasi-westernised audience.

Who's Playing, Who's Not...
The players on the ground trying to address developmental issues by means of information empowerment and using ICT tools range from corporates to civil society, government, entrepreneurs, international agencies, and new economy companies dominated by IT companies.

An analysis of every intervention has left a huge impact-mostly positive-but there are questions of sustainability, long-term impact, and whether it is holistically integrated with the other relevant necessities of the local lifestyle.

• Azim Premji Foundation: The Azim Premji Foundation (APF) has a focussed purpose: to target issues prevalent in the education system, primarily content. Started with school-based Computer Learning Centers (CLC) bundled with in-house content, APF has had consummate success, working with the government and having programmes in more than 14 states.
  Many of its centers in Karnataka also double as kiosks after school hours, earning the schools substantial revenue. The APF's interventions have been instrumental in increasing the enrolment and improvement in attendance in schools with computer aided learning centers. Children have learnt to use many applications and create a huge, dynamic databank of content. The problem: the content remains unused and has not been shared. The potential! leverage the content to create a children's portal.

• Hole in the Wall Education Limited (HiWEL)-NIIT: The HiWEL experiment proved that with minimum or no interference, children could learn faster, better, and can teach other members of their peer group. Based on nationwide experiment, the company came up with a unique concept called 'Minimal Invasive Education'.
  Taking up a cost-ratio analysis of education, the company concluding that out of every Rs 100 spent on education, only Rs 15 hits the target. It has informed the government that, using its HiWEL model, they would be able to actually reverse the investment pattern so that Rs 85 reaches the beneficiary and the supply chain consumes only Rs 15.

• Aarohi Project, Uttaranchal: This is perhaps the government's only project where it has covered all the government primary schools and government-aided high schools, installing three to five computers on each campus. The project is headed towards using the infrastructure to build students-and-teachers' portals, with content being the responsibility of the users.

  n-Logue Information Kiosk in Trivarrur near Chennai in Tamil Nadu run by a women entrepreneur from the local village

• Soochna Kendras-Drishtee: One of the largest diffusions of information kiosks, or soochna kendras, by a private company began as a first-generation entrepreneurial initiative: Drishtee has learnt a lot in its endeavor to reach the rural market with its bouquet of services, spread across education, commerce, and governance. The organization was also the first to anticipate that its own IK operators, or entrepreneurs, commercially unconstrained by organizational loyalty, could turn into local business threats and competition. So, the company has been constantly innovating to retain the entrepreneurs and overcome the attrition rate. Fortunately, since it has all the revenue earning services in its bouquet, Drishtee has good chances of remaining relatively unwounded. The challenge for the company lies in how soon it can convert its mature kiosks into a local BPO (which it is planning to do). Perhaps Drishtee should explore the possibility of integrating its services with mobiles, and expand across other platforms such as Linux.

• e-Choupal-ITC: With the largest base-6,000 e-Choupals and counting-of the ICT platform in the rural areas, ITC is sitting on a goldmine, both from the point of view of being a business enabler and community-empowering agent. Each of the e-Choupals is enabled with VSAT-connected multimedia PC and printer. And the 'sanchalak'-a farmer with decent landholding and production capacity, and extremely conversant with the Internet, e-mail, and printing-is the link between the other farmers and the private ICT mandis. Each sanchalak earns a commission from the business he forwards to ITC mandis and from the sale of FMCG products. The e-Choupals are value adding to their commercial work with education and entertainment.

Impact, Sustainability, Takeaway Learning
India's villages are so disconnected from the mainstream that and any and every ICT intervention looks extremely successful. Children and the youth are in the forefront of the avidity of interest. But not only is there is an abysmal inadequacy of content, there is also no effort whatsoever by the facilitators to accumulate the little content made by the children.

However, at the level of business, it is governance-related services, and educational offerings that attract the most attention-and people are ready to pay for these two services. ICT interventions have also created village-level entrepreneurship that has created many jobs and business opportunities. There is formidable proof that ICT interventions can be economically viable even in the short-term for business investors. The indicators seem to be that it will take at least five investors to build the market to the level that the ICT interventions, especially information kiosks, will be able to ensure business sustenance.

Akshaya Kiosk in Malappuram district of Kerala is run by women entrepreneurs of a family, is an extension of a typewriter school. According to the entrepreneurs, they still earn more money from the typewriter school than the ICT kiosk of Akshaya. (Top) Photograph of the ICT Kiosk (Below) the typewriter school located in the same house

The trend shows that-much like the Internet-driven dotcom boom that created a huge market base and a spirit of entrepreneurship among the urban educated-ICT4D will boost the rural market high enough to create micro entrepreneurship, village BPOs, and a huge human resource base for employment in India and abroad. It's a paradise for the taking.

Osama Manzar
The author is Director, Digital Empowerment Foundation,
who has conducted India wide research of projects pertaining to e-Governance and ICT for Development
mail@dqindia.com

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