Her zest for work, familiarity with the computer and confidence in her abilities as a professional are no different from that of the young talent in IT corridors across urban India. Information technology makes youngsters tick here. IT makes her tick too, e-mail enables her to communicate and a tryst with the computer earns her a salary.

GENTLE MOVES: "Villagers used to think I was a nurse. No women would visit the kiosk. I began showing them Santoshi Maa on cable TV and formed my friends’ circle. We now have a few girls dropping in. And they call me ma’m," Rajni Yadav, Gramdoot, in Mallikpur, Rajasthan

Twenty-year-old Rajni Yadav comes from Sargut, a small village 20 km from Jaipur in Rajasthan. Even as she prepares for her MA in public affairs, Rajni earns Rs 2,000 per month operating a multi-service Internet kiosk, part of Aksh Broadband’s Gramdoot project in Rajasthan. Rajni landed this job after paying Rs 1,500 per month for a year-long "basic computer course". The only girl from her village to have studied this far, Rajni says she wants become an "IT professional".

After Dataquest met Rajni, we were tempted to project her as the classic success story of Indian IT’s journey to the masses and the fruition of the Gramdoot project. It would have been wonderful to say that villagers in Rajasthan check mandi (wholesale market) rates and file online complaints with the help of local youngsters like Rajni. It would have been wonderful to say the hub of activity in rural Rajasthan is not the local grocery shop, but the Gramdoot office and that information technology has truly transformed the lives of its citizens.

But that would have been less than a half-truth.
Dataquest’s visits to villages (unannounced and not accompanied by Aksh officials) proved that far from being the hub of activity, Gramdoot offices were extremely difficult to locate. Worse, there was barely a trickle of visitors using the facilities available at these kiosks. For instance, the Gramdoot office in Devguda village had registered just one complaint in three weeks.

"Weeks of waiting yielded no reply from the government and other villagers saw no reason to use the online complaint redressal system. It also creates bad word-of-mouth for the the kiosk," Rajendra Kumar Kumawat, ‘Gramdoot’ at Devguda, told Dataquest. If Gramdoot offers cable TV connections at Rs 105 per month, Kumawat says other cable operators in the village are willing to dip as low as Rs 50 per month in order to gnaw at the marketshare! If Gramdoot offers photo prints in a few days using a digital camera, others are willing to hop across to Jaipur and get the same done in under three days!

"But the Net connection is down so often, people visit the kiosk a couple of times and then just lose interest. There’s often a problem opening the Gramdoot site itself," says Devender Singh of Amer, who is now posted as a ‘Gramdoot’ in Chandwaji village. Prakash Chand Sharma too, has a similar story to tell—that of a virus-infected PC that has not been repaired for weeks.

This feedback, gleaned during unannounced and un-accompanied village visits, was in stark contrast with a demonstration at the IT hub of the project in Rajasthan’s Sitapura district. Every Gramdoot introduced to Dataquest said he had 30-35 visitors at his center per day using services ranging from sending online complaints related to water and electricity and preparing caste/income and domicile services to checking bus time-tables and mandi rates online.

However, this doesn’t mean that the Gramdoot project be written off. Despite these shortcomings and the obvious under-utilization of the services it offers, it has succeeded in providing employment to youngsters and creating openings for an IT-literate workforce across rural Rajasthan.

Rajni’s example dispels a few myths that could have held back propagation of IT for the masses:

n Awareness about job opportunities that IT education opens up is high among rural students, as are aspiration levels to "learn computers". Says Kumawat, "A lot of children in villages want to learn computers, and state governments have introduced the subject in schools. But schools cannot afford a computer for every student... therefore, private computer classes remain the purview of the creamy layer of the village community."

n High fees for IT training courses are not a deterrent. Computer education is a priority. "In fact, qualitative data from IDC India indicates that the number of student registrations in rural as well as ‘B’ and ‘C’ class cities have been higher than in metros," says Sowmiya Venkatesan, analyst (software and services research) at IDC India.

n One need not wait to thoroughly meet citizens’ needs of food, water and electricity before introducing them to IT. The impact of television, Bollywood and telephones makes a case for IT penetration as well.

n With aspirations running high, there’s a growing number of students from small villages moving to tehsils and small towns for computer education. And as is the case in urban India, there’s a growing student populace creating e-mail identities to make sure they are connected with friends in far-flung areas. However, despite stray stories like Rajni’s, the cost of using IT remains prohibitively high for most of the "other India".

Malls versus meager means
So why is IT yet to reach the masses? One, India is forced to use solutions that are developed for richer nations, and priced in dollar terms. Two, vendors are are yet to create or think of solutions relevant for developing markets like ours.

"The multiplicity of duties and taxes levied on computer hardware, plus exorbitant software licensing costs, have also stunted computer usage," says Kishore Dumblekar, V-P (corporate affairs), Cressanda Solutions. The IT industry has always focused on increasing value per rupee invested. For the same price-point, you now get increased processor speeds, faster DRAMs, higher-capacity hard disks and more functionality in software. "In their constant quest to keep up with the competition, vendors pump in heavy dollars into R&D. Naturally, they have to recover these costs through product pricing," says Anil K Jain, GM (marketing, business development and innovation), at Wipro Technologies.

As a result, potential IT users are left out...
The developed world and the higher end of the market in developing countries regularly upgrade their computing devices, instal software created using cutting-edge technology and adopt smarter, better and safer ways of storing and protecting their information. Even as they generate mounds of e-waste in the process, developing markets in countries like India, China, Brazil, Mexico and Russia hover in a state of eternal aspiration. For most people in these countries, buying a computer would amount to almost as much as a year’s earnings.

Ironically, it is these people that technology can affect the most.

A dream gone sour
Because of its sheer volume, however, this forgotten global market represents a huge opportunity. Akin to the dot-com wave, there was a period that saw ‘IT for the masses’ initiatives being launched at a furious pace. The idea of a computer transforming the life of Indians at the grassroots appealed to governments and NGOs alike. But barely a trickle of that enthusiasm translated into results.

Clearly, something’s amiss
"Let’s get off this romantic image of digitized connected villages. Some things work, others don’t. It’s time to see what does work and follow that route," quips Steven Rudolf, educational director at Jiva Institute. Rudolf should know, having been there and done that. So what went wrong?

"People were too myopic about the application of technology. Most were looking at quick solutions, especially at the low level. There’s also been a gross misunderstanding of the capabilities of people in villages. Rural Indians are not ignorant, empty vessels waiting to be served by technology. I am certainly not against technology, only against overly idealist usage of it," declares Rudolf.

Social mores in villages are such that if one person accesses information on weather conditions or crop rates, he is bound to share it. There’s no reason why others would pay for the same information! So what are people ready to pay for?

"Communication, health, entertainment and employment generation," says Rudolf.

"Liquor, matrimony-related services, religion and entertainment. Or else, applications that have their livelihood depending on them," adds Dr Sugata Mitra, NIIT chief scientist and vice-president.

What would also work would be initiatives aimed at the individual work, not social- and community-oriented programs.

"Projects cannot be sustained on their curiosity value alone. We generated a lot of interest with video cameras. After a few days, villagers lost interest and walked away. What has worked is our experiment with PDAs—noting down medical histories of patients on PDAs, consulting doctors in cities and delivering reports/medicines," adds Rudolf.

Sui, kaanta and dawaai
Does bridging the digital divide mean that students from under-privileged sections begin to use computers, or that these youngsters are seamlessly absorbed into the IT industry? Dr Mitra’s team, while studying cognitive learning, found that children developed their own terms to describe what they encountered while working at the Internet kiosk. The arrow cursor was called a sui (needle, in Hindi), the crosshair kaanta, daabna (clicking the mouse), sabse rangeen button signified the ‘Start’ button on the taskbar, damroo was the hourglass icon, kaam kar raha hai when the hourglass rotates and macchar ki dawai (insecticide spray) for the spray tool in Paint.

This brushing away of the "English-only" barrier can be likened to franchisee-led IT education, especially in smaller towns.

Apart from the names of icons, software packages and certain technical terms, there are cases in which virtually all the training is imparted in the regional language. So does that mean that the focus should not be on English education, but multi-lingual education with a "working knowledge of English related to computer usage?"

As a result of such bi-lingual computer education, small towns also have a burgeoning population of "computer professionals" now. This may go down well with anti-English lobbies, but puts the same students in a quandary when they step into the competitive IT services job market. These students will not make it to the larger Indian or multinational IT companies on account of "inadequate soft skills". Smaller IT companies may absorb these students for back-end work, but come client-facing roles or overseas assignments and the "communications skills" issue sticks out a mile.

What more can be done?
"An isolated instance of someone donating x number of computers to schools is unlikely to convince people to start using them. Mass-scale usage will force costs down, fueling demand and driving costs down further. That cycle needs to be kickstarted," says Dilip Dhanuka, GM (products and technology group), Patni Computer.

"The monopoly of software companies like Microsoft has kept prices artificially high. For example, when the latest processor is introduced, the price is pegged marginally higher than its predecessor and then the price of the preceding chip falls while the new chip is slowly made available at prices equal to the original price of the preceding one," points out Nitin Shah, managing director of Allied Digital. Shah stressed on the need for an organized active secondary market that can offer used and refurbished machines to end-users. "We have seen how effective even a semi-organized used car market has been in India to bring costs down."

The dreamy side of computing
The lukewarm response to past initiatives has not deterred fresh initiatives taking shape. "There are plenty of small-scale success stories. In fact, on a small scale, we can get anything to work. What’s missing is the ability to think of solutions that can be replicated across India between two elections (five years), rather than two generations (25 years)," says Rajesh Jain, MD, Netcore Solutions.

On the e-governance front, initiatives like Khazana and Bhoomi in Karnataka and e-Seva in Andhra Pradesh have been well publicized. Promising among the little-known ones is a road-mapping and maintenance project for Navi Mumbai Muncipal Corporation. The basis of these civic projects is detailed mapping of the area in question. "Using 3-D modelling, our software gives mapped lines and streets, the width of the pavement and how much material will go into constructing/repairing a particular stretch of road," says Ian Heming, executive V-P (APAC) at Bentley Systems, who is working with the corporation.

"If a citizen has a complaint about a particular patch on a roadmap, he approaches the ward office. By clicking on that particular patch on the digital map, the ward officer can access the database at the back end, get the history of the maintenance of that road and prioritize funds accordingly. The corporation has invested Rs 50 lakh in the project, which should be up and running by June," says Sandeep Srivastava, MD (South Asia), at Bentley Systems.

Meanwhile, Aksh also plans to extend its Gramdoot project to telemedicine. "An ultrasound machine costs Rs 5 lakh and the probe alone costs Rs 70,000. We could just have a technician operating the probe at the patient’s end in villages, remotely connected to a machine at the doctor’s end in the city. This will bring down travel and logistics costs and make it possible for doctors to conduct more ultrasound procedures across villages," says Aksh president Rajnish Bhandari

This may just work. And why not? Even if there have been non-starters or slow-starters, there’s hope only as long as their are dreams and initiatives. After all, the greatest successes once started out that way.

Manjiri Kalghatgi

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