There is a growing development gap between the societies and communities that have been able to utilise communication technologies to access and create relevant information and content and the ones that are still isolated with weak knowledge-exchange systems. In fact, the links between information, development and livelihood have been largely demonstrated over the past decades in India, especially through ICT projects in rural areas that have brought them access to the markets, empowered local producers, spread location-related knowledge and improved local governance. Providing Internet access with appropriate tools and services to underserved and isolated communities is then paramount to produce a leveraging effect on their development and reduce inequalities that are due to information access.

In order to bring the benefits of Internet to the masses, solve the lack of circulation of information in rural areas and foster their access to markets, health, education and public information, Digital Empowerment Foundation came up with the concept of Local Area Portal (LAP) during the ICT for Development visioning workshop organized by the UN Solution Exchange in Puducherry, India at the end of 2007. The LAPs are community-driven web portals designed to work as two-way mediums to share information, services and content between the government, businesses and villagers at the Panchayat level. There are today more than 270,000 Panchayats in India mapped by NIC and Ministry of Panchayati Raj but only few of them are using Internet to bring benefits to the villagers. For this reason, LAP focuses on locally produced content, in order to gather the existing information and knowledge and make it accessible to the entire local community. LAPs both push and pull information by digitising and globalising the local knowledge and by collecting and organising the national and international knowledge of local relevance available on the web- such as information about government schemes or international market prices for crops. In this sense, LAPs are part of the gLocalisation process, in which there is a growing interaction between local and global knowledge.

Local Area Portal objectives

Local Area Portals are run by the communities themselves - in local languages and English - and are customisable and sufficiently flexible in terms of services, languages and information to fit into the local environment and cater to the specific community requirements. LAPs were designed to provide villages an information-rich platform, which could bring three main benefits:

• inclusion of rural economies into the markets
• circulation of information and knowledge at the village level
• transparency in public and administrative processes

Creation of digital local knowledge repositories

Connectivity has been growing at an impressive pace in India over the past few years and today, it has become the fastest-growing telecommunications market in the world. Mobile phone penetration has been steadily increasing – more than 10 million new subscribers per month - and there are today more than 330 million mobilephone subscribers in the country. However, Internet penetration remains very low and only 5 to 6 percent of the Indian population, mostly located in the cities, use Internet regularly. Even though Common Service Centres and other ICT kiosks have been reaching rural areas, their impact is still limited due to the lack of adequate content for the rural reality.  In fact, the focus on rural connectivity was given to infrastructure and so little attention has been given to fostering local content creation to provide useful and pertinent information and services in local languages to rural areas across the country. In fact, Internet continues to be English-medium and even Hindi – which is the third most spoken language in the world - does not appear on the list of the top ten languages used on Internet.

Through their Local Area Portal, people from the villages can upload, manage and update content on the platform and use it as a digital hub for all their activities to gain in efficiency. Each LAP is a bottom-up platform capable of gathering local repositories of knowledge and information, which are easily retrievable and updatable. By aggregating the experiences of the village in terms of problem solving in the medical and agricultural field and sharing them with other villages through the LAP, community members are able to find answers and solutions to their daily queries and problems. This knowledge base has direct impact on people's livelihoods as it saves them money and time finding solutions that someone has already found.

India has been a country with immense traditional knowledge, resulting from interaction with a variety of cultures, which has produced an array of music styles, literature and other forms of documented and undocumented knowledge, danceforms, cuisines, agricultural and artisanal practices over the centuries. Much of this traditional wisdom has been disappearing over time as most of it is transferred from one generation to another through oral transmission, without being collected, documented or stored anywhere. The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted in 2001 recognises the importance of ICTs in preserving and disseminating local knowledge to enable intercultural dialogue. In fact, the Internet offers the possibility of gathering immense quantities of knowledge in a variety of formats - audio, video and texts – than can be used to promote local cultures and traditions. Gathering this knowledge under LAPs would not only make Internet relevant to local communities and fill the content gap, but would also contribute to foster tourism and generate revenue opportunities for artisans and local producers.

Enhancement of local governance

In a recent study conducted in seven Indian states-Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa - by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and funded by the UNDP, more than a 30% of the respondents were not even aware of how often the Panchayat met and thought that the Panchayat did not work for the local community. The lack of involvement of local communities in the functioning of their Panchayats and the lack of documentation about government schemes and activities has been affecting Panchayats' legitimacy at the village level. LAPs are essential to rebuild confidence between the citizen and Panchayat authorities by bringing transparency in information, fostering their accountability to all stakeholders and creating participation mechanisms. The National Knowledge Commission (NKC) recognises the utility of public portals to ensure that people exercise their rights by having access to transparent information. In this sense, Local Area Portals are essential to enhance the application of the Right To Information (RTI) Act that came into effect in 2005, functioning as neutral platforms where information about public action could be available at the village level and bringing awareness on public schemes and programmes. Gathering this information will enhance the public monitoring and surveillance of the Panchayats' functioning. In fact, LAPs are also useful to build mechanisms of citizen participation by offering an online grievance service and direct contact with Panchayat authorities. With the possibility of taking better-informed decisions, LAPs will give Panchayats the means to strengthen the decentralisation process.

Moreover, it is largely known that lack of adequate data is one of the main problems that policymakers face while designing programmes and schemes for rural areas. In fact, the data available is often outdated, hardly reflects the situation of the studied areas and its collection is extremely costly for the government. LAPs encourage data gathering at the local level, by the villagers themselves who feed data about the village infrastructure, facilities, needs, demography and economy. This process enhances villagers' knowledge about their own resources and necessities and creates awareness among the community on the real issues faced. If data about village's necessities, health statistics, education, agriculture and production is regularly collected, trends could be traced and be used as inputs into the policy-design process. By training young users in data gathering, LAPs could also provide employment opportunities at the village level.

Taking Local Area Portals to the village level

Which infrastructure to bring the services?

LAP can be implemented through the Common Service Centres (CSC), Community Information and Resource Centre (CIRC), Village Knowledge Centres and other Telecentres existing in rural areas. The implementation of LAPs involve a variety of stakeholders from the private and public sector. In fact, the 100,000 CSCs coming up under the frame of the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) are planned to be run in a Public-Private Partnership (PPP). The village entrepreneurs shall be able to provide the necessary inputs into the portal and to be the essential link between computer-illiterate villagers and services and information. The offices of the elected representatives will provide information regarding public administration and the main schemes and programmes being run at the community level to guarantee that every villager has access to this type of information. Finally, villagers have to be sensitised about the creation of content and some of them could be trained to work as village reporters to provide the inputs coming from the bulk of the population.

Another way to reach the more isolated villages is to make the Local Area Portal available to them through a multi-purpose ICT vehicle (MICTV). This vehicle would cover backward regions of India over a period of 6 or 7 years to take content generation and dissemination across the country to the next level. The MICTV is planned to promote awareness in the villages and launch information campaigns about development schemes, policies and facilities to encourage villagers to ask for their rights and make government officials accountable. Data from different villages will also be collected to document their needs and requirements and serve as inputs into policy-making.

Involving and training all the stakeholders

Capacity building and establishing contact with the main village stakeholders is essential to ensure LAPs success and sustainability in rural areas. Government agencies, elected representatives, local administration officials, NGOs and local community leaders shall be involved in the process from the beginning to make LAPs the interaction hub for all of them. Digital Empowerment Foundation, with the support of Micro Associates of Mumbai and Pune's SMSOne identified 50 Panchayats from Maharashtra and invited them to participate in a workshop organised in February 2008. The focus of this workshop was to raise awareness within the different Panchayats on the importance of digitising their activities – through text, video and audio - and the way of running their own portal and upload, update and manage content on it. The Panchayat representatives were also sensitised about the kind of content and services that would serve the communities' needs and make their processes more transparent and efficient:

RTIs, available schemes, grievance systems, local news, information on markets and entrepreneurial opportunities and cultural content.