|
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 |
