Swaminathan using IT for rural development

M S Swaminathan, the father of the Green Revolution has now started using IT to spur rural development. G SANKARANARAYANAN takes a peek at the continuing legacy of a living legend

If used intelligently and innovatively, information technology can form an integral part of development projects, say S Senthilkumaran, associate director, Honda Informatics Centre, and Subbiah Arunachalam, fellow of the
M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF). They are talking about the Info Village project, which started in 1998 in Pondicherry. It connects 10 villages through a hybrid wired-and-wireless network consisting of PCs, very high frequency (VHF) duplex radio devices, and related equipment to facilitate both voice and data transfer. The project creates content for villagers to obtain the information they could use to make improvements in their living conditions.

The Info Village project has won two international awards, the Motorola Dispatch Solution Gold Award 1999 and the Stockholm Challenge Award 2001 under the Global Village Category. It involves local volunteers who gather information, feed it into an intranet in the local language (Tamil), and provide access through nodes in villages

The Info Village concept, which is funded by organisations like the International Development Research Centre and the Canadian International Development Agency, is the brainchild of M S Swaminathan, chairman, MSSRF. In his words, "The entire project is based on a pro-poor, pro-women and pro-nature orientation to development, and community ownership of technological tools, as distinct from personal or family ownership."

The project, which has won two international awards, the Motorola Dispatch Solution Gold Award 1999 and the Stockholm Challenge Award 2001 under the Global Village Category, works with a bottom-up approach. It involves local volunteers who gather the information, feed it into an intranet in the local language (Tamil), and provide access through nodes in villages. With help from Honda Informatics Division of MSSRF, value addition to raw information is done, and the data is presented in a multimedia form for the benefit of unlettered users.

Says Senthilkumaran, "Most of the operators and volunteers providing primary information are women, which gives them status and also influence in the project. All the centres have evolved to meet the increasing information demands of the community."

Hub-and-spokes model

Info Villages use two technologies, VHF and Spread Spectrum, to establish connection between the knowledge centres, which are the village houses where the wireless-set-fitted computer hardware is kept. The knowledge centres are operated at the houses of the volunteers, who provide access to users—people of all castes and ages—without any discrimination, and guide them in using the systems.

The project follows a hub-and-spokes model for information management and co-ordination of voluntary activities that take place across the centres. Villianur, a strategically-located village, functions as the hub centre, and is being run by the MSSRF staff. Other Info Villages were set up on the basis of the community’s willingness. In some villages the info centres were established on demand from the local people.

There were some initial hiccups, recollects Senthil kumaran. These pertained to discriminating practices in local society. "We had to close the centres functioning in private houses at three villages because volunteers did not allow socially underprivileged people in, did not maintain regular hours of operation, and were not keen to share
the information with the entire community."

After the initial failures, MSSRF realised that community ownership is very important to start village knowledge centres. "We understood that the community as a whole must endorse it. For this to happen, the usefulness of the project is more important than the use of the latest technology," says Senthilkumaran, who emphasises that the centres are not associated with one group or caste, but allow everyone to take part.

MSSRF carried out participatory rural appraisals prior to setting up the village knowledge centres. In each case the community provided an accessible rent-free building, electricity and volunteers. The community chooses the volunteers, men and women, and manages the centres on a voluntary basis. MSSRF pays no money to them, but provides the necessary equipment, training and helps in collecting data.

Ready-to-use information

The Info Villages provide locale-specific information to villagers related to prices of agricultural input (seeds, fertilisers, pesticides), agricultural output (rice, vegetables), markets (potential for export), entitlement (the different schemes of central and state governments, and banks), health care (availability of doctors and paramedics in nearby hospitals, women’s diseases), cattle disease, transport (road conditions, cancellation of bus trips), weather (appropriate time for sowing, areas of abundant fish catch, wave heights in the sea), etc. Unique to the project is the fact that most information is collected and fed in by the local community itself.

"Based on the requirement of the local community, we developed about a hundred databases under the categories of current information, long-term information, citizen’s charter, cattle and feeds, health information, agricultural information, educational information, and general information to fulfil the villagers’ requirements," says Arunachalam.

The villagers use these databases. Many people take the addresses of doctors, especially specialists and ambulance services, for their family, and addresses of veterinarians for their livestock. Young people access the education database to know about the various courses available in nearby schools and colleges, and also those in neighbouring states; cost information is also given in the database.

An online daily news bulletin, Farmers’ Diary, was recently launched. It provides information on technologies relevant to agriculture and animal husbandry. A print-out of this daily is taken and put up on the notice boards of each centre. "The aim of the diary is to alert farmers by giving them information on agriculture, farming practices, integrated pest management, integrated crop management and integrated nutrient management relevant to the main crops like paddy, sugarcane, cotton, pulses and cereals, and also horticulture crops," explains Senthilkumaran.

In addition, the project has created rural yellow pages for two villages on an experimental basis. The yellow pages provide a ready reckoner for the people in and around the village to locate the right person for the right work. Farmers can now find out things like who rents agricultural equipment in a particular village, the names of cattle agents and brick sellers, and the location of cattle feed centres and pesticide shops.

IT Training

The latest initiative of the project is the introduction of short-term IT training courses for village students. Training is offered in Windows 95/98, MS Office, HTML coding, recording voice, zip/unzip and wireless data transmission. Advanced training in Adobe PageMaker, Visual Basic, VC++ and Photoshop is also conducted for free to increase self-employment opportunities. MSSRF has provided three computers to each centre for training purposes.

Online Community Banking System

MSSRF conducted project feasibility studies in the late nineties prior to the implementation of the project, and found out that these villages had just one phone per 500 people. More than a third of the households were below-poverty households, meaning that their total income was less than one US dollar a day.

To increase the earning potential of the villagers, MSSRF facilitates the formation of self help groups (SHGs) for micro-credit, helps villagers in the identification of income-generating activities, and provides the necessary logistic and management support to start such micro-enterprises. There are now a large number of SHGs involved in micro-enterprises like mushroom cultivation.

As part of the Info Village project, MSSRF developed a pilot Online Community Banking System (OCBS). Senthilkumaran elaborates: "The OCBS input form contains details about groups, group members, monthly subscription, member loans, member accounts, group loans from banks, member closing and group closing. The system automatically maintains records of money transactions between the member and the group, group history, individual history, group credit, group personnel, and bank loans. It also generates weekly, monthly and yearly reports. Now five SHGs and the District Rural Development Agency are testing the system."

Prior to the project—according to MSSRF studies covering 10 percent of the resident families—the predominant sources of commercial information were the local shopkeepers, the market place and the input suppliers. Now close to 90 percent of the information needs of the villagers have been met by the knowledge centres.

Today, all the village knowledge centres take care of the cost of furniture and electricity. Around five villages have become self-sustainable, so they pay the telephone bill and Internet cost themselves. Two villages have moved beyond this: they raised money and built a new building for knowledge centres.