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Between The Bytes
Who’s afraid of the digital divide? - III
 Could
information and communication technology (ICT) be that great leveller that has
eluded society from the beginnings of modern civilisation?
At a macro level, it’s pretty well-known how ICT has
impacted and transformed every field from agriculture and medicine to meteorology
and aeronautics. But in the context of ICT for development and bridging the
digital divide, what is really of concern is to extend the benefits of technology
to people who have traditionally been left out of the game. When we talk of
the technology ‘have-nots,’ our goal is not necessarily to get them
all to use and buy computers or mobile phones. Yet there are innumerable specific
areas in which ICT can be used to improve the lives of this underprivileged
lot and provide them with opportunities that would otherwise be unlikely to
come their way. Information technology is also enabling microfinance systems,
which in turn encourage microenterprise, stemming the endless and unsustainable
rural-to-urban migration that’s the bane of the developing world. Here
are but a few examples of how ICT is improving the life of rural populations
in India, which as a country has been witness to the entire range of problems
as well as potential solutions associated with the digital divide.
Telemedicine: Tens of thousands of villages in the
rural areas of the poorer countries remain without adequate healthcare facilities.
Even as primary healthcare centres and makeshift dispensaries are being constructed,
there is a perennial shortage of trained doctors and nurses. For instance, India
has just one doctor for every 15,000 people, and specialists are even rarer.
Almost 70 percent of India’s population is rural, while over 80 percent
of doctors live in cities. But, with videoconferencing and remote diagnostic
kits, thousands of villagers are now inexpensively enjoying the same level of
treatment as their urban counterparts. One company, Neurosynaptic Communications,
has developed inexpensive telemedicine kits with facilities for checking blood
pressure, body temperature and ECG. The kit is also equipped with an electronic
stethoscope, and soon will have other physiological and biochemical tests integrated.
The diagnostic kit is connected to a kiosk with videoconferencing facilities,
and readings are transmitted over low bandwidth links, permitting interaction
between the doctor and remotely located patient, and hopefully, more accurate
diagnosis. Apart from the obvious extension of quality healthcare to areas that
couldn’t before afford it, this system could bring down the cost of rural
healthcare in India by a third.
Transparent governance: Interactions between the citizenry
and government or bureaucracy can often be frustrating, and this is particularly
so in the developing countries where disorder and corruption are relatively
more pronounced. Information technology could take transparency and accountability
of government to new levels because of the increased efficiencies and controls
made possible, and decreased scope for manipulation by corrupt officials. But
it is in responsiveness to the immediate needs of citizens that the impact can
be directly felt. One striking example is the computerisation of land records
in Karnataka. Under the ‘Bhoomi’ project, the state government set
out in 1999 to computerise some 20 million land deeds, and ownership and tenancy
certificates, covering 30,000 villages and nearly seven million farmers. The
service was launched in 2002, and since then land-owning small farmers and others
have been able to check and obtain printouts of their computerised land records
(required for various transactions) quickly and inexpensively. Prior to this,
they were at the mercy of the village sarpanch (headman or accountant) who invariably
made things difficult and extracted varying sums of money for the ‘favour’
of providing them information that’s rightfully theirs. With the new system,
it’s estimated that the farmers collectively save Rs 90 crore ($20 million)
per year in terms of bribes they would otherwise have had to pay. Meanwhile,
Bhoomi earns Rs 12 crore ($2.6 million) a year from the reasonable fees charged
to the farmers for queries and printouts, as well as from additional sums from
charges to companies that wish to mine the mammoth database for commercial information.
 Elimination
of the middleman: A perennial problem for rural producers of food grains,
dairy products and other goods is finding a fair price for their produce. They’re
often at the mercy of middlemen who short-change them mercilessly. During the
early dotcom boom, a widely held view was that small entrepreneurs and craftsmen
would benefit from the Web because they would now have a worldwide customer
base through e-commerce and online shopping. This view proved to be rather far-fetched,
but as e-commerce matures, smart companies in rural India are using kiosk-based
computers to deal directly with farmers to procure oilseeds and other raw material
for the processed foodstuff and other consumer products they manufacture. In
this regard, diversified private sector conglomerate ITC Limited has been hugely
successful with its ‘e-Choupal’ initiative. This digital alternative
has replaced the traditional physical ‘mandi’ marketplace for farmers.
These farmers now check prices on the e-Choupal information kiosks and sell
their soybean, coffee, wheat, rice, pulses, etc. directly to the company (ITC).
By eliminating the middleman, not only do the farmers get a fairer deal, but
ITC has reported that it too saves close to 10 percent on its purchases. e-Choupal
now covers 31,000 villages through over 5,000 kiosks accessible to 3.1 million
farmers across six Indian states. The number of villages in India was 638,365
at last count.
Information revolution: Information kiosks are evolving
as the preferred means of getting relevant information and knowledge to the
technology have-nots without them having to learn how to use complicated, language-specific
interfaces. The kiosks consist of one or more computers (sometimes with touch-screen
interfaces) that are connected to the Internet via a combination of wired and
wireless links, including phone lines, VSATs and Wi-Fi. The kiosk provides information
about weather conditions, fertilisers, crops, healthcare and other village issues.
In some cases, like the e-Choupal, it also serves as an e-commerce hub where
the farmers order seed, fertiliser and other consumer products from ITC and
its partners. The kiosk model is rapidly proliferating throughout semi-urban
and rural India, and there are about 10,000 kiosks deployed, each serving five
or six surrounding villages.
Are all these just exceptional examples, or are they an indication
that technology has reached a level that can make it truly ‘enabling’
for all of mankind? That’s a discussion for the concluding part of this
series, two weeks from now.
Val Souza, Consulting Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com
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