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Sandeep Tawde had hit rock bottom. His poultry-farming business was on the verge of bankruptcy. There didn't seem much else he could do any more. Might as well go visit the newly opened Internet café in the village. He did, and it changed his life.

Tawde's café visit might well go down in history as one of the most profitable cyber journeys ever made in rural India. What was then an exotic new tool gave him exotic options, and this B.Com graduate decided to make a drastic change in the kind of birds he reared, moving from poultry to emus. The 32-year-old emu farmer has, in the last three years, made profits of Rs 6 lakh, since that life-altering online quest, by selling more than 1,200 birds.

Says Tawde, "I found out a lot about emu farming from various sites and then started on a 60-acre farm with an investment of Rs 2 lakh. Subsequently, I set up an Internet kiosk in my farm, the first in the whole of Baramati, and have been using Net since then to both market my products as well as acquire information on them. I also started pomegranate farming, again after gathering information about it online, and last year even sold about eight to ten tonnes of pomegranate online to a buyer in Taiwan. Now I get online orders for emus too, from places like Saudi Arabia."

Computer literacy on wheels: a specially fitted bus takes IT literacy to 54 schools in Maharashtra, covering 6,700 students, most below the poverty line. Inside this bus, they learn to use computers  Pandare village, near Baramati, has indeed taken to IT: milkmen use smartcards; kiosks provide agricultural info; even the kids seem to know that they are in the vanguard of change Tech on the Cards: Dattatreya, Dattu, and Prabhakar, milkmen from Pandare, have smartcards to which records of the milk they deliver are updated through a PoS terminal

The "Net" effect: 60% additional profits compared to offline business because of large export orders; more than 27,000 people visiting his farm following online information; and, most importantly, the formation of a Maharashtra Emu Farmers Association with 48 farmers, who use mail and video conferencing to not only share inputs but also sell abroad as a consortium.

Rural Revolution
Tawde's isn't an isolated success story. The Internet revolution is no more merely a hep topic for discussion at seminars held at swank five-star hotels. It has become something more wondrous-it is now the stuff of mundane life in rural India. The digital revolution, mostly in the form of Internet kiosks, has come home to where the majority of India's people live.

Take Mohan Tambe's story. Tambe is a tomato farmer in Pimple-Jagtap, a sleepy hamlet about 100 km from Pune. Last year, most of his tomato crops were damaged, and despite running from pillar to post, Tambe couldn't find any solution to his problem. Finally, he walked into the Internet kiosk run by the Grameen Information Center (GIC) in association with Krishi Vikas Kendra (KVK) in Baramati. Not only did he post his queries but he also showed photos of his damaged crops online to the KVK experts.

"The response I got helped me save crops worth Rs 10-12,000. Also, the medicine the KVK experts at Baramati recommended cost me only Rs 450, while what other sources hereabouts were recommending would have cost me three times as much," says Tambe.

You need to thank the telecom revolution for this, because other vital basic infrastructure is still entirely lacking in many of these villages. There is no motorable road to Tawde's farm: in Pimple-Jagtap this correspondent had to walk through knee-deep slush. And the Net was not working then, since there was no electricity. The radical potentials this virtual revolution embodies can hardly be harnessed without the contiguous development of real infrastructure-power, road and water supply-to support the virtual one already in place.

It's not only agricultural farmers who are reaping the benefits of Internet kiosks. During my journeys through vast expanses of this real India, I met different sections of people who were effectively employing IT for various businesses. Here's a list, culled at random: it includes milkmen, fishermen and even traders in the village mandis. Dattatreya Jagtap, Dattu Bhosale, Prabhakar Bhosale and Dhansingh Bhosale, all milkmen in Pandare, a village near Maligaon, have become digitally empowered thanks to smartcards. Each of them now carries the smartcard when they go to the milk co-operative center to sell their produce. An attendant at this center carries a PoS terminal through which these cards are passed, recording every commercial detail of these transactions. The earlier nightmarish hassles with middlemen or about the quantity of milk sold seem to have fled with the dawning of the IT-empowered day.

IT helps offshore too. For instance, Muthumaran, a fisherman in Perikalapet village near Pondicherry can drag his boat into the blue waters of Bay of Bengal without the fear of encountering an unexpected storm. He can also sail to the exact spot where he would get a large catch of sardines. All this is possible only because Muthumaran now gets information about how high or low the waves will be, whether there will be any tricky currents and most important of all, the potential zones of fish aggregation from the local phone in his village panchayat office.

Interactive Educational Tool
The amazing thing about this whole endeavor is how far IT has come from being an ivory-tower luxury to an almost commonplace, but nevertheless, vital everyday component of life even in impoverished rural Indian villages. One does not know what to be more amazed at: the ease with which these often illiterate villagers were taking to what was for them a technology unlike any other they might have heard of, or the dogged persistence of those who pioneered the introduction of the technology as well as ways of using it. The wholehearted participation of the Tawdes, Tambes and Bhosales in making IT a grand success story in our villages was indeed an eye-opener.

Huge strides are being made in the imparting of IT eduction and training. I myself came upon three such instances during my Bharat Gram Darshan. One was in the Urdu Medium Baramati Nagar Parishad Primary School No. 1. There I met sixth standard students Bushra Aslam Baghban and Aliya Sayeed who were learning the basics of computers at sleek LCD monitors inside a bus in front of their school. They do this one hour every week when the bus comes to their school. One should not miss the social significance of this particular instance: here it is Muslim girls from families below the poverty line that are being provided with this most modern education. Then there's also Khadija Bibi of Kolmanna, a remote village in Malappuram, one of Kerala's most backward districts. Every evening after working in the paddy fields, she comes to the newly-opened eKendra in her village, where she learns how to email, in Malayalam, her uncle Rashid Baig in Muscat.

If one doesn't get carried away by the politics behind reports on the latest census findings, one can admit that there is something really worrying about the low literacy level amongst females, especially those from the Muslim community. It is facts like this that make the Bushras and the Aliyas and the Khadijas and what is happening with them even more exciting, relevant and important.

Virtual relief: Tambe, a farmer from Pimple-Jagtap, near Pune, was saved from the brink of disaster by remote advice. His tomato crop, worth thousands, would have perished had he not been able to get advice on the Internet based on photos of his damaged crop. Net result: Tambe's crops were saved, and he made a neat 60% profit too Sandeep Tawde, from Maligaon, near Baramati, is in good company. The Internet introduced him to emu farming and he made a fortune. Sandeep's emus go as far as Saudi Arabia while, his pomegranates, another trade-area that he hit upon courtesy the Internet kiosk in his village, are sold in tonnes to Taiwan, via the Net Ramjanam from Goraha village, near Kanpur, got timely medical help and is fast recovering. After months of fatigue and indisposition that local doctors could not treat, he was able to avail medical help from Kanpur through videoconferencing, and was diagnosed as suffering from thyroid disorderttp

While Baramati has its bus, Bithoor near Lucknow has its thela. Five days a week fourteen-year-old Kanhaiya and his friends, who do not even go to the local school, attend the computer education classes, conducted with a computer on a reddle-cart, which teach them the basic applications of word processing, Internet, Excel and PowerPoint, all in Hindi. His elder brother Jeevlal, who has completed these courses, is now learning accounting packages and web designing.

IT also affords "lifestyle luxuries", once livelihood, education and healthcare in these villagers have been taken care of-that is, the relative luxury, in Indian terms, of not queuing up to pay frequent, hassle-prone utility bills. Many villagers in Kolmanna and other Malappuram villages use their eKendras to pay these bills, perform Netbanking, make revenue remittances and so on. While Malappuram is part of the Kerala government's Akshaya project, which offers these financial services routed through an SBI online ePayment gateway, even private players like ICICI are not lagging behind. Says Sharad Rambhau Bhosale, who runs an Internet kiosk in Pandare, "ICICI Bank has started an Internet banking access center in my kiosk, and within 15 days of its opening, I sold 15 ICICI Prudential insurance policies online."

The Pioneers
One thing that surprised me was that most of the endeavors I encountered were not part of the standard e-governance projects all states showcase. Critics complain that not only are most such projects irrelevant, they mostly never make it beyond the pilot phase. In many instances, it was private organizations and NGOs initiating them in collaboration with the government or some philanthropist. However, funding becomes a problem in many of these cases after the initial hoopla. Corporate support is a solution, especially since it implies a wider publicity blitz. Perhaps, in future, a more balanced public-private association will be the order of the day.

Some beginnings in this direction have already been made. The now defunct Media Lab Asia's association with the various IITs was one such effort. In Maharashtra, the Vidya Pratishthan Institute of Information Technology (VIIT), the Krishi Vigyan Kendra in Baramati and the Pune-based Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture (MCCIA) have been in the vanguard of similar cooperative projects, with Uday Borwake, chairman, MCCIA and Dr Amol Goje, director, VIIT, being the driving force behind one of these initiatives.

Not only is VIIT running the Pandare smartcard application, it is maintaining 30 Internet kiosks connected through WLL in different gram panchayats within a 40 km radius from Baramati. It provides consultancy on agriculture to farmers through videoconferencing and is now setting up an FM community radio station at an investment of Rs 2 lakh to disseminate agricultural infomation eight hours everyday. VIIT has also started a mobile computer classroom project with an investment of Rs 70 lakh. It has developed content in both Marathi and English for classes V-VIII using SCORM technology that enables the teacher to add his own content. Currently, this is being done for 54 schools, with a total of 6,700 students, 60% of them being girls living below the poverty line. This project also covers 870 Adivasi students in Ambergaon too.

MCCIA, for its part, has launched the GIC running on a wireless operation model across 172 kiosks with a subsidy of Rs 1 crore from the Maharashtra government. Following the success of its pilot project at Chale village, this one now runs from a Wi-Fi campus at Vigyan Ashram in Pabal village. While exemplary successes have been recorded from the seven villages of Pimple-Jagtap, Kendur, Uralikanchan, Karoos, Rajgurunagar, Retawdi and Khed, this effort also covers farmers in 110 villages in the three talukas of Shirur, Rajgurunagar and Handoli. 34 of these villages have Internet connectivity while the rest are connected by VPTs.

Telecom has a stellar role in each of these cases. While both Pabal and Baramati use wireless technology, the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) uses CorDect technology in its initiatives in Perikalapet, Veerampattinam and Nallavadu, all coastal villages in Pondicherry. This is part of the Info Village project started by MSSRF, which connects 10 villages near Pondicherry through a hybrid wired and wireless network consisting of PCs, telephones, VHF duplex radio devices and email through dial-up telephone lines, facilitating, thus, both voice and data transfer. The Info Villages, which provide life-changing information, use two technologies, VHF and Spread Spectrum, to establish connections between the Knowledge Centers, which are small hubs housing computers fitted with wireless sets.

Silent Revolutionaries
We must not let the legionnaires who actually make possible this silent coup remain nameless. Since it is hardly possible to name everyone, we shall have to remain content with a couple. There's Prashant Tambe, who operates the Pimple-Jagtap kiosk. There's Shantanu Inamdar, the IIT Powai-Media Lab Asia representative who has worked for three years in the Pabal Vigyan Ashram. While Tambe gave up a Rs 10,000 job at Tata Motors and now earns half of that, Inamdar initially had to visit villages by cycle, get all the agricultural queries that villagers had, get the answers from KVK, and finally, go back with the answers. There's Sharad Rambhau Bhosale, who conducted a guidance camp for 60 farmers in Pandare to provide information on fertilizers and seeds through videoconferencing. There's Chandrakant Dikshit, the teacher in the bus at the Baramati school.

The digital divide is a myth. The dreams of the digital empowerment of rural India aren't dreams any more. They are slowly taking real shapes in the hands of our rural poor, who, with luck and IT on their side, will not remain impoverished much longer.

Rajneesh De With inputs from Nanda Kasabe in Pune, Jasmine Kaur in Delhi and Nisha Kurian in Chennai

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