IT has come to play an important role in all issues concerning human life, be it social, economic or political. Information and Communication Technology for Development, commonly referred to as ICT4D, has become an important part of the development agenda. The recently concluded World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), which was a pioneering attempt at working out a global strategy for use of ICT, devoted substantial attention to the use of ICT in tackling issues relating to development.

India has been acknowledged as an IT power and some of this strength has also percolated into the ICT4D sector. ICT has been used in several innovative experiments (see the previous articles in this series, which have analyzed these experiments in sectors such as health, education, and governance ). This has also thrown up a few stalwarts who have creatively visualized and applied ICT in such experiments. In this concluding part of the series, focusing on India-based initiatives that seek to bridge the digital divide in different ways, ITfC spoke to some of these stalwarts who have been working closely with issues related to ICT for Development, about what they feel about the potential of IT, what is really happening, and where we seem to be headed for.

What has been the role of various stakeholders like the government, the private sector, and the NGOs in the scheme of things? Any recommendations for more valuable participation and contributions of the stakeholders?
Frederick Noronha: I think the stakeholders have hardly been doing much and cannot be expected to do much either. NGOs seem to be, unfortunately, focused on the fact that this field is now luring in funds. The real people who could contribute—techies, students, etc.—are yet to properly understand this issue. Links have not been built up.

Sanjay Jaju: The government has been playing a pivotal role in taking IT to the masses, especially through the expansion of rural telephonic exchanges. The private sector has also started playing a major role, but is generally restricted to commercially viable areas. The non-governmental organizations, especially the community-based organizations, offer huge possibilities. This has been already felt by us in the West Godavari project wherein we could rope in their support by giving them stakes in taking ICT to masses.

Satish Jha: While for the businesses, social activities are plainly residual to their cause, it is a key goal of the government to constantly improve the social environment. However, governments are seldom capable of making technology choices, partly because they are not in tune with what is happening in the market place. But using technology to find solutions to address the issue of social good or governance is something they are equipped to deal with.

Satish Jha is a management consultant who founded James Martin & Co in India and is chairman of Digital Partners, South Asia. Digital Partners offers financial and professional support for entrepreneurs interested in utilizing IT to benefit the poor.

NGOs on the other hand are small, have little capacity or resources to bring the necessary experience base to realize their dreams. However, they are actively engaged in seeking solutions that are often way beyond their capabilities. This is generally leading to creating a conceptual framework that is more theoretical and whose practical rendition does not offer any real solution except some hype that does get created around some of these experiments.

Meanwhile, some visionary private sector organizations will be able to take advantage of these opportunities and move on; ITC’s e-Choupal being one such example, which is adding on an average six tele-centres a day. What is needed is that each stakeholder understands its role and brings its complementarity to the table."

Sunil Abraham: The push in IT has been coming mainly from the corporates. They say that the turnover of the Indian government equals the turnover of the nation’s corporate sector. Not surprisingly, this is considered a huge market that exists for hardware, software and connectivity. That is why there is so much excitement over e-Governance. Whether it is Microsoft or HP, all the corporates are talking about the social relevance of IT. The state and civil society organizations (CSOs) are following suit. But the manner in which IT is being applied in villages is often inappropriate—there are speakers but no microphones; there are monitors but no scanners. Most projects emphasize on consumption of information and do not permit information production by the target community. This has had a dis-empowering effect on the rural populace.

Sunil Abraham is the director and CEO of Mahiti Infotech, a Bangalore-based organization. Mahiti provides consultancy, advocacy and networking services for non-profit as well as corporate clients. Abraham is also a strong advocate of FLOSS.

The private sector places ‘profit before people’, but nevertheless they have made a noteworthy contribution, by teaching us to apply entrepreneurship to rural ICT. This process must be accelerated.

The CSOs must try to achieve a balance by focusing on the ‘public agenda’ or the ‘development agenda’. This will mean that all infrastructure must be developed for and owned by the public. By this logic, software infrastructure must be licensed in public domain. Access points created must be affordable by the public.

Rajesh Jain: All the stakeholders need to work in partnership, but projects should be entrepreneur-led. For example, the RISC model coordinates the investments of the private sector, the public sector, and multilateral organizations in rural India.

What critical lessons emerge from the existing models and approaches to deploying IT for development?
Rajesh Jain: There have been various initiatives to take IT to the masses in India. Some well-known examples are Gyandoot, eSeva, Drishtee, Tarahaat, Bhoomi, and eChoupal. At best, these have been success stories limited in size, scale or scope. The digital divide is far from being bridged. Where is the problem? There certainly does not seem to be a lack of vision, ideas or even resources. And yet, what is missing is a solution that has been rolled out on a mass scale to make a difference to millions—not between two generations (25 years), but between two elections (five years).

As we see it, the problems are as follows:

Government as Financer
This is perhaps the single biggest issue that limits scalability. The government can fund 100 or even 1,000 centers or kiosks

costing Rs 100,000 ($2,000) each. But the need is for many more access points. That is where the government-funded model becomes impractical—there simply isn’t enough money to set up so many centers across a state or a country. And so, without the scale, costs of operation are high, and villagers have to walk many kilometers to get to the nearest centre.

Demo Mentality
The thinking when the plans are drawn up is to create ‘pilots’. The reasoning goes: let us do 10 or 50 or 100 such demonstration centres, or showcases. Once the proof-of-concept is there, we can look at scaling it up. However, this approach can result in only short-term successes; it will not be useful in the long term. This is because it is much easier to put in all that it takes to make a few centers work, as the aim is not to prove commercial viability but to showcase a local success to funding agencies or key decision makers. The approach is not geared to creating solutions that can be scaled up rapidly.

Silo Solutions
Many approaches think of the problem too narrowly. We think of solving a telemedicine problem, a land record problem, an e-mail and Internet access problem, a literacy problem or the voting machine problem. The computing infrastructure required for solving these problems is almost identical. And yet, we think of each in isolation, trying to create economic models that will work in the silos.

Internet-driven
Many of the current solutions assume the existence of an Internet connection, essentially for functioning as an Internet kiosk. This is a big limitation, because connectivity is one of the biggest bugbears in rural areas. Without connectivity, the computer iscrippled, and its usage gets seriously limited. While transaction services like bill payments and railway bookings, which need real-time Internet connectivity, can offer immense benefits to villagers, these services can be hobbled by the lack of connectivity.

Incrementalist, not Disruptive
The need of the hour is for disruptive solutions. Yet, the thinking that percolates is very incrementalist. That may be because there is an interest in keeping things nearly the same, or because we look only at the technology that exists today, and not at what the future is bringing. The solutions tend to be driven more by what may have worked in the developed world or in the urban areas, because that’s where the agencies or companies that are either funding the solutions or providing the technologies are based. The need is for a completely fresh and bottom-up analysis of the rural markets, keeping in mind the emergence of ‘cold technologies’ which reduce the total technology spend.

Satish Jha: The government agencies are singularly incapable of delivering on the promise of putting IT at the service of society. Some of them have been seen as exceptions, such as Bhoomi in Karnataka, and in such cases, it will be helpful to learn the right lessons from them and share rather than dictate those lessons to other state governments.

Sanjay Jaju, an IAS officer is currently serving as district collector, Eluru, West Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh. Jaju was one of the pioneers of e-governance in AP and is responsible for the Saukaryam and e-Seva (West Godavari) projects.

The NGOs need tremendous management support across the nation, and there needs to be a mechanism to build capacity among them. It’s cheaper, cost effective, engaging and generally a lot good to make the whole engagement participatory, provided the organizational skills to engage in such developmental activities are put in place first.

The government must not engage directly in building solutions with information technologies. Most likely, they will not get it right the first time.

On the other hand, the private corporate sector should realize that unless it allows several of these experiments to flourish, it will not be in a position to create or support viable projects that utilize information technologies.

Sanjay Jaju: The design of a project should be fairly simple. For example, it should be able to spread the need for IT solutions and back-end computerization among the various government departments as well as provide access to various government services for citizens.

The paucity of funds and limited understanding of IT solutions are major constraints in implementing such projects.

Sunil Abraham: In the first wave of ICT experiments, there was a big fetish for Internet connectivity, with everybody wanting to connect the local village to the global village. Today, when we are more aware of the potential dangers of globalization, many of us in the ICT4D field now say, local connectivity before global connectivity; intranet before Internet; internal commerce before e-commerce, and so on.

The second fetish is to be PC-centric. The next round of development will see greater use of mobile telephones, which will create new spaces, be less power intensive, and have an advantage over the PC because of authentication by voice.

Frederick Noronha, Frederick Noronha, a Goa-based freelance journalist, started off as a reluctant IT user. As co-founder of BytesForAll, a forum for ICT4D, he is deeply influenced by Free/Libre and Open Source Solution (FLOSS) and its immense potential for India.

Fred Noronha: Keep the big money out. Building better links is a must. Study of smaller projects is essential. Hype and hope need to be separated. More critical studies are needed.

What is your perspective on the IT for socioeconomic development scenario in India?
Satish Jha: The IT for development segment in India is in a nebulous state. It is clearly at a stage where the critical mass to intervene in the developmental process is far from being achieved.

Currently, those with a passion for development do not have the experience to intervene effectively. As a result, there are hundreds of initiatives that amount to little. True, a number of people who are addressing these issues today are learning fast. But what are they learning? Quite often, they end up looking at the wrong way of doing things and are unable to figure out ways that can work. As of now, we have a number of passionate people who want to do something with the aid of IT, but they are all caught up in learning rather than delivering. And what is being delivered is little more than an equivalent of school projects in the global IT space.

Frederick Noronha: Lot of potential. Lot of hype. A field still little understood. Everyone is chasing the big few stories. Techies who can contribute are not successfully roped in. Excessive funding could distort this sector, rather than let it grow naturally.

Rajesh Jain: ICT holds the promise of immense benefit to the rural poor, specifically in India, and more generally in other parts of the developing world. Focus on the rural population should be greater because the incidence of poverty is higher there than in the urban population. There’s a lot more ICT can do... it needs to be a means to the end.

Suggestions for the maximization of benefits while using IT for development in India
Sunil Abraham: There’s a need for the greater use of Free Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and creation of an open content consortium, given that the 200 or more ongoing ICT experiments across the nation show ‘lack of content’ as the major crib. And finally, there is a need for more joyful computing. Most development and e-governance applications fail because they are uninteresting. For example, many people living in slums may not be able to afford a square meal a day but they make sure that they pay their cable TV operator. Therefore, while developing computing applications, the potential of religion and entertainment must not be underestimated. We must stop being prescriptive in our interventions and listen more carefully to the needs of the user community.

Rajesh Jain, MD, Netcore Solutions, believes in tapping the entrepreneurial skills of Indians to promote rural tele-centers, and is involved with the Rural Infrastructure and Service Commons (RISC) project for building rural ICT infrastructure.

Rajesh Jain: The first application is the use of ICT in providing education, specifically primary and secondary education, and in increasing literacy and providing vocational education. The second application relates to expanding market access for agricultural and non-agricultural products. This will increase rural incomes and thus alleviate income poverty. The Internet can efficiently provide access to a vast market for traditional handcrafted goods, which can be sold worldwide. This can be an effective way of integrating the rural population with the globalized marketplace.

Satish Jha: Let various experiments being carried out by NGOs flourish. Please do not subsidize them but offer all other support that is necessary. Surely, do not shut them out.

The experiments will create the ground for the next round of mature work to emerge and they will need more resources and management support to be piloted and rolled out. The government will be in a better position to select what may work and thereby reduce the risk of making a wrong choice.

The significant solutions will not emerge until the next stage. Whatever is done in the initial stages will go to fertilize the development of real solutions. It is important to appreciate it also because in the field of information technology incrementalism is very expensive. A bad application developed today will take a lot longer to fix.

Frederick Noronha: Let’s share information seamlessly, and learn from each other; rope in many more to make this field touch critical mass; and keep a lot of space for people to exercise their creativity. Top-down solutions simply won’t work.

RESHMI SARKAR The author is the program coordinator of IT for Change,a non-profit organization in Bangalore. ITfC supports the info-com needs of other NGOs and undertakes research on the social dimensions of ICT.