i4donline: July - August 2003 issue: A vision for rural India: Transforming rural India

India needs creative solutions to start a revolution which can take its villages fast forward in time – converting them into economically viable units and growth engines, harnessing the power of the villagers, and opening up new horizons with the promise of a better tomorrow.

Village vacuum
Little has changed in the villages of India in the past decades. Schools have been built, but many still lack teachers and appropriate teaching methods. There are phone lines in many villages, but getting a dial tone is still a challenge. Electricity supply is at best intermittent. Health care is still limited in its availability.

India’s villages are dependent on agriculture for much of their sustenance. Drought is a common occurrence across much of India. As a result, villagers, for the most part, remain a poor lot - the per capita income of India’s villages is perhaps no more than Rs 12-18,000 (USD 240-360, USD1 = INR50) per annum, as compared to the national average of Rs 25,000 (USD 500).

Perhaps, most importantly, the opportunities available to villagers are not dramatically different from what they were many years ago. Villages in India are where you live if you have no other option.

And yet, India is in its villages. 70% of Indians live there. Even as one India races ahead with optimism towards the future, there is another India which seems to be stuck in the past. If India as a nation has to progress, there is little doubt that India’s villages too have to progress.

Transforming Rural India is a challenge that should focus the best of Indian minds – it is perhaps the single biggest barrier to making India a developed country, and achieving the 10% growth that CK Prahalad talks about. India’s villages need disruptive innovations to make the giant leap forward.

In this paper, I discuss the role that technology can play in transforming Rural India. Of course, one can argue that what the poor need is food, water and electricity more than technology. It is an argument we have been making since our Independence.

India’s solution set for villages has so far been myriad poverty alleviation programmes, subsidies and employment schemes. Corruption is not the only reason they have met with limited success. The question to ask is whether they have changed life for the better, enhanced people’s skills, or exposed them to new worlds. On all counts, the answer is, for the most part, a resounding No.

I agree with Shri Digvijay Singh, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, when he says that people are not the problem, they are the solution. In India, we have always been weighed down by our numbers. After all, with over 700 million across 600,000 villages in India, it is no small measure to upgrade quality of life for so many. And yet, unless we think of ideas which work with the village as a unit, there will be no universal transformation.

The time for incremental innovation is over. India needs creative solutions to start a revolution which can take its villages fast forward in time – converting them into economically viable units and growth engines, harnessing the power of the villagers, and opening new horizons with the promise of a better tomorrow.

Village visits
I am a city-dweller, having spent most of my life in Mumbai. My exposure to village life has been limited to a few weeks. But of late, I have spent quite some time thinking about what can be done to improve life in India’s villages. The immediate reason for this was a presentation. I had to make to the Madhya Pradesh government on e-Governance. And that set me thinking about the state of Rural India.

Once a year, I travel across Rajasthan, visiting various temples. Most of these temples are in villages, scattered across the state. In fact, seeing these temples built many centuries ago (and the new ones being built), I could not help thinking that if we had spent only a fraction of the money on education and healthcare that has been spent on religion, our villages would have made much more progress!

On my last trip to Rajasthan, I also visited the village where my father was born and spent much of his early life. The road from the highway into the village is still dusty. There is now a school in the village – finally. It was built from contributions made by the locals who have since emigrated to the cities and done well for themselves. There are some homes that are tastefully constructed but lie empty – their owners, of course, live in far-away cities. But for the most part, it is like time has stood still in this part of the world.

In Madhya Pradesh, I also spent half a day visiting various villages around Bhopal. I saw a classroom of 24 children (ages 8-9), half of them sitting on 3 computers in groups of four, and learning. The computers are provided as part of MP’s Headstart programme, where over 2,700 schools in villages have been equipped with computers to assist in educating students. The focus is on the “hardspots” of learning.

Seeing the children there, operating the keyboard and mouse with ease, I realised that they (and I) could have been in a school in Mumbai or anywhere else – for them, the digital divide had been bridged through these computers. Children everywhere have the same levels of curiosity. They can learn with quick pace as their city brethren. For them, the computer is an ally, a friend, a window to a new world. And then the reality sinks in. This effort is but a drop in the ocean. There are 50,000 villages just in MP.

There are over 600,000 villages in India. We are touching, but a handful of people. It will take many-many years at the current pace of roll-out to reach out all the children. And by then, India would have lost yet another generation.

IT for the masses
My time and meetings in Madhya Pradesh set me thinking. We in India do not lack in ideas. What we lack is the vision to think big. We think in terms of pilot programmes to cover tens or hundreds of villages, when the need is to do a roll-out in months or a few years across a nation on a scale many thousand times bigger.

There are plenty of small-scale success stories – in fact, I would argue that at a small scale, we can get anything to work. What is missing is the ability to think of solutions which can be replicated across India between two elections (5 years) rather than two generations (25 years).

I am heavily biased towards technology and computers. I believe that by empowering people with access to computing and the Internet, we can create a bottom-up revolution across India. These connected computers themselves will not work wonders, but they will open the minds of people, especially the young, to new ideas and new worlds. Computers will enable them to learn new skills, which could be harnessed in many different areas.

For example, farmers could use the connected computers to get commodity prices faster, or get information on new agricultural techniques. The youth would get details on job opportunities across the state. The district administration could get details of problems in near real-time. The eligible could search for matrimonial matches across adjacent villages. The voters would communicate their concerns to the politicians and bureaucrats electronically, with a trail of the communication. The village officials could share governance best practices faster among their counterparts elsewhere.

Many of these and other activities could doubtless be performed without computers. But there is a pain in those processes. That is where technology can make a difference. Computers have been the disruptive innovation of the past two decades. And yet, they have barely made a difference to the lives of people in most of the developing markets of the world.

I believe that the time has now come to take computers and allied technologies to every village of India and the world. Only through such a mass-scale deployment we can create a platform on which other programmes can be layered, whose power now can be amplified dramatically.

Young kisok users in a village
From primary education to adult literacy, from providing a two-way flow of information to enabling transactions, from increasing governance transparency to reducing corruption, from jobs to marriages, computers can indeed be the manna for the world’s villages.

By themselves, computers will do little. They need applications to make a difference. They need change in government’s processes. But by making computing available to every citizen, they will force a seismic change through the lines of governance. They will become platforms on which an entire range of different services can be built.

Computing as a utility in every village is at the heart of my vision of transforming Rural India. As we shall see, a combination of innovative ideas can make this a reality in a commercially viable business model – one where the government is not a funder, but an enabler.

A wider view
In a world of "cold technologies" (ones that shrink the revenue pie like Linux and Outsourcing), the search is on for technology’s next killer applications and new markets. The schism in the world could not be more stark: there are about 500 million users of computers spread across much of the developed world and the elite among the developing markets. This is now a saturated market in terms of technology consumption. Yes, they will continue to buy new computers, cellphones and the like, but this is an “upgrade” market. They have current solutions, and are looking for incrementally better ways to do their activities. And then, there is the Rest of the World, spread across the world’s developing markets. India, China, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Africa, the Eastern European countries – they are among today’s “nonconsumers”. This is a world of 4 billion people at the bottom of the pyramid that subsists on less than Rs 100 (USD 2) a day. Pricing has been one of the primary reasons they have been left out of much of technology’s value chain so far. They cannot afford computers which cost almost as much as a year’s earnings. Technology is a distant, non-existent dream for them.

And yet, if we think about it, they are the ones who perhaps can do the most with technology because it opens up options and creates opportunities which hitherto did not exist. Computers and the Internet can break barriers of geography which have existed since time immemorial. For them, computers are not going to be an alternative, they are perhaps the only instrument for progress and growth, a passport to a better life. The problem is that the benefits of (arguably) the world’s greatest invention have so far been unimaginable to these mass markets.

The digital divide is thus a hard reality. But there is also another digital divide – between the envisioners who dream about what technology can do, the technologists who understand what technology can do, the funders who have the money but do not necessarily know how best to spend it, and the implementers on the field who know what solutions are needed. These divides have prevented appropriate and affordable technology solutions benefiting the world’s poorest.

India can become the first market to try out a set of new ideas to bridge the digital divide. India is large and diverse – it is in fact a collection of many smaller “micromarkets”. India can become technology’s next big market. There is an optimism in its people for the first time in many generations that tomorrow will be better than today. There is a positive energy as people see symbols of the New India coming up even as the Old sustains and endures. Indians also have the requisite technology skills to put together solutions.

Transforming lives and landscapes
So far, much of India’s IT industry has focused outward – making India as a destination for outsourced services. The time has now come to look inward – what can we do for, in the words of CK Prahalad, the “India Inside”. If these ideas can work in India’s villages, they can work in the rural areas of the world’s developing countries, opening up markets for technology which are presently invisible. The bottom of the world’s pyramid waits anxiously.

Indian pyramid economics
Consider the Indian pyramid from the needs of technology. Right at the top are today’s computer users, numbering about 10-15 million. They have computers at home, or at the workplace, or use them from cybercafes across the country. India’s present computer base is about eight million. The last three years have seen computer sales stagnate somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million.

In the pyramid, the middle tier is the one which wants computers – they understand its value, but cannot afford the Rs 30,000 (USD 600) price point. This segment consists of about 40-50 million households or about 160-200 million people – they are the ones who have access to telecom (either a landline or a cellphone) and cable television.

This is India’s aspirational middle class. This segment needs computing for which they are perhaps willing to pay Rs 500-700 (USD 10-14) a month, which is about half of today’s EMIs (equated monthly installments) of Rs 1,000-1,500 (USD 20-30) over a 36-42 month period.

They could get access to consumer finance, but probably feel that the cost of the computer is still too high to justify a purchase. These users need English and support for at least one other Indian language.

The bottom of the pyramid in India is in its 600,000 villages, numbering about 150-200 million households (600-800 million people). Few among them have seen or heard of a computer. For the most part, they live on less Rs 50 (USD 1) a day. This segment could use computers for land record details, for grievance redressal, for getting commodity prices, for literacy, and many other reasons. Unfortunately, it has little or no access to computing – cybercafes cannot be found in villages.

This is a segment which can pay a few rupees each time they access a service. But very quickly these rupees start adding up, limiting usage. The question is: how much money can be invested by such a household for access to computing? This answer will determine what is required to make an economically sustainable model. The assumption we will make for now is that they are convinced that like health insurance, paying for computing is necessary because it will guarantee a better future.

Assume on an average each Indian village has about 1,000 people (or about 250 households). The per capita income for Rural India is perhaps no more than Rs 1,000 a month (Rs 12,000 or USD 240 a year). For a family of four, this works out to about Rs 4,000 a month. Let us halve that for the bottom of the pyramid. This gives us a figure of about Rs 2,000 (USD 40) a month. Will this household spend Rs 20 a month (1% of their income) on technology?

Let us, for a moment assume, they will. (We will come back to why they will do so a little later.) This gives us an income of about Rs 5,000 (USD 100)per month from the 250 households in the village.

Over three years, this gives us a total of Rs 180,000 (USD 3600) for a village. This is the economic base on which we have to build out TeleInfoCentres connected into a Village InfoGrid and complemented with Intelligent, Real-Time E-Governance to transform Rural India.

The conundrum
There have been various initiatives to take IT to the masses in India – Gyandoot, E-Seva, Bhoomi, E-Choupals are some examples. At best, these have been success stories limited in size, scale or scope. The digital divide is far from being bridged. Where is the problem? There certainly does not seem to be a lack of vision, ideas or even resources. And yet, what is missing is a solution that has been rolled out on a mass scale to make a difference to millions.
As I see it, the problems are :

Government as Financer: This is perhaps the single biggest issue which limits scalability. The government can fund 100 or even 1000 centres or kiosks costing Rs 100,000 (USD 2,000) each. But the need is for 50 times as many access points. That is where the government-funded model becomes impractical – there simply isn’t enough money to set up these across a state or a country. And so, without the scale, the costs of operation are high, the villagers have to walk many kilometers to get to the nearest centre and that is simply not going to happen.
Demo Mentality: The thinking, when the plans are drawn up, is to create "pilots". The reasoning goes: let us do 10 or 50 or 100 such demonstration centres, or showcases. Once the proof-of-concept is proved, then we can look at scaling these up. This approach is one which is setting itself up only for a short-term success; it will not succeed in the long-term. This is because it is much easier to put in all that it takes to make a few centres work because the aim is not to prove commercial viability but to showcase a local success to funding agencies or key decision-makers. The approach is not geared to creating solutions that can be scaled out rapidly.
Silo Solutions: Many approaches think of the problem too narrowly. We think of solving a "telemedicine" problem or a "land record" problem or an "email and Internet access" problem or a "literacy" problem or the “voting machine” problem. The computing infrastructure required for solving each of the problems is almost identical. And yet, we think of each in isolation trying to create economic models which will work in the silos.
Internet-driven: Many of the current solutions assume the existence of a Net connection, essentially functioning as Internet Kiosks. This is a big limitation, because connectivity is one of the biggest bugbears in the rural areas. Without connectivity, the computer is crippled, seriously limiting its usage. While transaction services like bill payments and railway bookings which need real-time Internet connectivity can offer immense benefits to the villagers, these services can be hobbled by the lack of connectivity.
Incrementalist, not Disruptive: The need of the hour is for disruptive solutions. Yet, the thinking that percolates is very incrementalist. That may be because there is an interest in keeping things nearly the same, or because we look at technology that exists today, and not at what the future is bringing. The solutions tend to be driven more by what may have worked in the developed world or in the urban areas, because they are the ones who are either funding the solutions or providing the technologies. The need is for a completely fresh and bottom-up analysis of the rural markets, keeping in mind the emergence of "cold technologies".

Thus, the result is that the thinking – and therefore the solution – is flawed. We need to think in terms of millions of villages worldwide as the potential addressable market, and yet work on making each village commercially viable.

Re-thinking ICT solutions
Let us look at the requirements for the ICT (information and communications technology) solutions for the rural markets:

Mass-market: The solution needs to address the needs for tens of millions people. In India, this has to be a solution which can in a short period of time penetrate into each of the 600,000 villages to make a difference to hundreds of millions of people. It is a solution on a scale that has perhaps never been thought of before.
Scalable: Being able to scale out the solution is very important, else we will have created yet another “demo wonder”. Scalability will mean that there has to be a decentralisable element in the solution.
Emergent: Going hand-in-hand with scalability and decentralisation is the need for the solution to have emergent properties – where it is driven from the bottom-up, and the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. This can only happen if the solution is driven not by government, but by small entrepreneurs who see a commercial motivation to own, deploy and grow the solution.
Low R&D Costs: There is little time to go out and develop new solutions. The approach should be that of aggregation, not re-creation. This means looking around and pooling together existing ideas and technologies which may be just good enough, rather than spending years on creating what could be the perfect solution.
Extremely Affordable: We are talking of the world’s poorest markets. Affordability needs to be redefined keeping in mind these customers. These are segments of society we don’t ordinarily think about. But they are the ones who are the world’s next markets. Costs have to be a fraction of what we are other wise used to considering or paying.
Technologically Forward-looking: The solution needs to look to the future rather than into the past. What is there under the hood is not as critical as giving the same kind of features and performance as the ones in the developed world are used to. In some ways, there is an advantage in terms of legacy – there simply isn’t an “existing solution to upgrade” so there is no need for backward compatibility. This gives us an opportunity to “leapfrog”.
Platform Orientation: The solution must create an ecosystem in which multiple players can thrive. The approach must be that of creating a platform that others can build upon, without having to redo the groundwork from scratch.
Consider the Constraints: We cannot forget the limitations and realities of the rural markets – intermittent and fluctuating power, connectivity which probably isn’t there, a market which does not necessarily speak or understand English, and one which has been largely ignored and forgotten by the world (except the politicians who need votes in a democracy). Since connectivity is not a guarantee, the initial focus should be on information and offline communications services, rather than real-time, database-driven transactional services.
Commercially Viable: Above all, the solution needs to be economically sustainable, given the constraints of the rural markets. It must provide the rural entrepreneurs with a business model which enables them to not just make money but also grow the business with their own initiative and innovation. As we think of the solution, we should keep these words by Stuart Hart and CK Prahalad (writing in Sloan Management Review) in mind: "Disruptive Innovations compete against nonconsumption – that is, they offer a product or service to people who would otherwise be left out entirely or poorly served by existing products and who are therefore quite happy to have a simpler, more modest version of what is available in the high-end markets."

Village vision
Let us start by outlining our vision for the solution that we want to offer at the village-level from the viewpoints of the four stakeholders: the villagers, the village administration, the district administration and rural marketing organisations.

Today, the village is isolated. It is not part of a larger community. Its interaction with the external world is quite limited. In a sense, it is an idyllic world, unspoilt by modernity. Yes, villages can now watch TV, talk on phones, and get newspapers and magazines. But by and large, the village voice is silent, except when it comes to the ballot box. What is needed is an interactive solution, with the villagers having a say in what they do and how they grow.

What is needed is for the village and its people to have greater access to new opportunities. As the nation moves ahead, the village for the most part has remained stationary. This has to change. It needs to become a self-sustaining unit, integrated with the rest of the ecosystem. The idea is to use the solution to put more power and responsibility into the hands of the local community at the village, by providing them with the right technology and information they need to make decisions.

A villager would like to see:

A computer which provides access to the Internet.
A programme to ensure that he and his family can be made literate and e-literate. At the minimum, there should be at least one person in the family who knows English and can use a computer.
An email ID, ensuring that he can be reached electronically.
Storage space for keeping electronic copies of key official documents (eg. land records, certificates) and other information (eg. medical records).
Access to various e-services for government interactions – from accessing information to doing transactions. This should be combined with service-level guarantees from the government departments.
Computer-enabled education for his children in schools, so they are comfortable with technology from an early age.
Access to electronic markets where he can sell his products directly without being dependent on middlemen who take away much of the profit.
Programmes to upgrade skillsets, so they can become better at what they are doing and learn new skills.
Protection of data, so that unauthorised access does not happen.
All of this to be available for a monthly basic fee of no more than Rs 20 per family.

From a village administration viewpoint, the solution should:

Help in village planning and monitoring. It should assist in identifying and tracking the resources that a village has. In case any of these resources has a problem, there should be a way the village can notify the appropriate government department for action.
Share and discuss best practices with other village administrators. This is a "peer-to-peer" interaction model which is not possible today, except for sporadic gatherings. Think of this as a community weblog (like Slashdot.org) which helps bring out good ideas and success stories from what others are doing.
Provide a microcredit facility to enable villagers to save money and get loans when required. This is what the state administration would like to see in the solution:
Two-way information flows: the administration can update the village and its residents on various government programmes and schemes (this is typically done through the publishing of gazettes), and in turn get regular updates from the village on progress on key parameters reflecting the “health” of the village (this is typically done by sending government officials for periodic visits to the village).
Electronic accounting for the funds which are disseminated by the state/district administration for village activities.
Ability to provide better services to the citizens (e.g. telemedicine).
Provide comparisons across villages on various parameters, to be able to identify success stories and enable their replication across other villages. [In a way, this is akin to how Walmart uses business intelligence from its various stores to identify consumer purchase trends.]

Rural marketing units would like to:

Use a medium by which they can reach out to villagers for their products and services.
Get a distribution point for e-Commerce (delivery could take place through the postal system).
Have a mechanism by which they can collect payments for their offerings.

One can think of the state (or district) as managing an enterprise with multiple branch offices (the villages). To ensure successful and profitable business, there needs to be a right mix of centralisation and decentralisation. This is what the solution will have to offer. This is the first step towards the transformation of the rural economy and its people.

There are three key ideas in using technology to transform Rural India. First, set up a TeleInfoCentre in every village. Next, network these TeleInfoCentres to create a Village InfoGrid to ensure a peer-to-peer communication network between villages. Finally, computerise key government operations in an e-Governance initiative, starting with those that can have the greatest impact for the villagers.

TeleInfoCentre
The TeleInfoCentre makes possible the vision of “a connected computer accessible to every family”.

What makes the TeleInfoCentre unique is its approach to solving the rural computing challenge. It brings together a number of innovations to help create an infrastructure that is both affordable and user-friendly.

The three innovations that it leverages are: server-centric computing to enable the use of low-cost computers as thin clients, Linux and open-source software to bring down the cost of software, and WiFi to solve the connectivity problem. (As we will see shortly, WiFi will currently get used as a LAN solution to extend the reach of the TeleInfoCentre beyond a single room, and later will be used as a wide area network solution to provide a high-bandwidth solution to inter-connect multiple villages.)

The TeleInfoCentre consists of a computer-cum-communications centre. It has 3-5 computers connected together in a LAN, in a single room. The multiple computers ensure that the computers themselves do not become a bottleneck – villagers should be guaranteed to get access to a computer whenever they want it.

Also, by locating them in the village, we ensure that they do not have to walk much to use them – access to computing is not more than a few minutes distance rather than a few kilometres. This will make them think of computing as part of their lives – a utility, available on-demand.

One of the computers in the TeleInfoCentre works as a “thick server”, and does the processing and storage. The others are low-cost, low-configuration “thin clients”. The idea of server-centric computing using thin terminals as desktops is not new. Mainframe computing uses a similar approach.

Even in the Novell era of the late 1980 and early 1990s, PCs would boot off the server. This approach on thin client-thick server computing simplifies the management dramatically – desktop hardware never needs to be upgraded, software and content updation only needs to happen in a single place on the server, and all the thin client desktops can be administered from the server. By using a server-centric computing architecture, it becomes possible to bring down the incremental cost of each new client computer from Rs 25,000 to as little as Rs 5,000 (USD 500-100). The thin client works as a network device. It “lights up” in the presence of a network, just like a cellphone or cable-enabled TV. In this case, the network is the LAN, requiring the presence of a thick server at the other end. Think of the thin clients as Rs 5,000 PCs (USD 100). The question is: how do we get PCs at these price points ?

One approach is to look at (re-)using older computers. Since the thin client requires little more than a 100 Mhz processor and 32MB RAM to provide the performance of a new 2 or 3 Ghz desktop, one can consider recycling Pentium I and II machines from the developed world as thin clients. Countries like USA and Japan are disposing a few years old computers in the millions annually as they upgrade to newer desktops. These trashed systems become e-waste in those countries and create an environmental problem in their disposal. They can now be shipped to countries like India where they get a new life as thin clients. These PCs are available for prices ranging from USD 60-70 (excluding shipping and local duties).

Computers and monitors do not go bad in 3-4 years, which is the typical upgrade cycle in the developed world. They can easily be used for many more years, provided the processing and storage can be moved to the server. The thin clients become graphical terminals – or more appropriately, PC Terminals. The second approach to sourcing low-cost computers is to use computers with the VIA chipset and motherboard. VIA is the third company after Intel and AMD which makes x86-compatible CPUs. Their cheaper, lower-speed CPUs bring down the cost of the client, making it possible to get a new computer (excluding monitor) for prices as low as Rs 6,500 (USD 130). An old monitor costs Rs 2,000 (USD 40) while a new one costs double of that. A TV could also be used as a monitor, in case prices have to be brought down further.

The third approach is to use handheld computers, PDAs or cellphones as thin clients. The Simputer project in India has created a Linux PDA which is a full-fledged computer, at prices starting at Rs 10,000 ((USD 200). Perhaps it could be simplified further to work in a LAN environment as a thin client to bring the cost down to an affordable Rs 5,000 (USD 100). Of course, this will mean that the users will get a screen smaller than a 14-inch monitor from a regular desktop computer used as a thin client.

On the software front, the thin clients support all the basic applications that users would need: an email client, a web browser, an Office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation application), instant messaging, printing and the ability to read/write PDF files. There should be support for both English and local languages for each of the applications. The software platform used is Linux, along with various open-source applications. This ensures a lower cost of ownership, along with the freedom to customise applications for the local needs. The various applications on Linux have become more than good enough in the past year, and can provide a desktop almost as good as Microsoft Windows.

For every key Windows application, there is an equivalent Linux application. Evolution from Ximian offers a mail client and personal information manager, creating an alternative for Outlook. Mozilla and derivatives like Phoenix and Galeon are web browsers which rival Internet Explorer. The OpenOffice suite of applications (Write, Calc and Impress) offers much of the functionality found in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). More importantly, it can read and write most MS-Office file formats. In addition, since it uses XML for native file storage, OpenOffice can be extended to build custom applications easily. OpenOffice also has a built-in utility to create PDF files.

GAIM is a unified Instant Messaging application which can connect to the IM platforms of Yahoo, AOL, ICQ and MSN. Adobe Acrobat is available on Linux. Multimedia support is available in the form of mplayer. Gimp is an image-editing software. Java and Flash work on Linux. Open-source databases are also available, in the form of MySQL and PostgreSQL.

The total cost of putting this suite of applications together: zero.

The combination of server-centric computing, low-cost clients and open-source software is the foundation for creating an affordable solution for the computing infrastructure at the TeleInfoCentre.

The User Interface is an area which has tremendous scope of improvement. Today’s interfaces (both Windows and the Linux Desktops of KDE and GNOME) follow similar approaches – using files, directories, menus and icons. Little has changed in the user interface arena over the past decade. For the villagers and especially the younger generation, one could learn from the success of video games and create richer and more interactive interfaces, which are more far intuitive to use for those with very limited exposure to computers.

The clients should also support multimedia with the use of webcams and microphones for recording and playback of audio and video. This is important in the context of the villagers because they may not easily adapt to the largely text-driven world that we exist in today. Using multimedia also gets over the language and usability barriers. It is what Prof. Ramesh Jain terms as “folk computing”.

In addition, over time, the thin clients should be able to accept voice input also – this will entail leveraging innovations in speech recognition. To a small extent, we are already seeing this happening in cellphones in India, with an increasing array of interactive voice services.

As far as possible, the TeleInfoCentre should be able to work in the offline mode – that is, its dependence on Internet connectivity should be minimal. The server should mirror key applications and relevant data, making it possible for the clients to work without the need for an Internet connection. In fact, even the assumption that a TeleInfoCentre may have a few hours of Internet connectivity daily could be far-fetched. This makes the application development challenging, but it becomes an important pre-requisite given the realities of Rural India.

The offline mode entails updating through CD (or an alternate such device – eg. USB Memory Key). A CD will get written daily at the village TeleInfoCentre which has the day’s emails and requests which cannot be served locally. This CD would then be sent by courier or through the postal system to the next level in the hierarchy, which is likely to have better Net connectivity. Similarly, a CD from there would bring updates to the village.

Over time, solutions like WiFi will solve the wide area network (WAN) connectivity bottleneck. The advantage of WiFi is that it uses open spectrum – in the 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz bands. The specifications are outlined in the IEEE 802.11 standards, which specify operating speeds of 11-54 Mbps. The computer industry, led by Intel, is rapidly adopting WiFi as a wireless LAN standard, driving down incremental costs to near-zero. Companies like Vivato are also working to extend the range of WiFi beyond a few hundred metres. While WiFi may not be a reality today in India, it is definitely going to be a workable and affordable solution within the next 18-24 months.

In fact, in India, Media Lab Asia has tested WiFi solutions which work over 20-30 kms (line-of-sight, with directional antennae on towers). Another solution which is being tested is DakNet, where a mobile van goes from village to village and offers connectivity while it is there. But these solutions are still in the R&D stage. Today’s reality entails serious consideration of offline usage.

WiFi can play a role today as a Wireless LAN, thus making it possible to locate the thin clients anywhere in the village in a 100-300 metre radius, with the hub (the wireless access point) being at the TeleInfoCentre. Thus, USD 100 (Rs 5,000 personal computers) could be at nearby health centres or the homes of some of the villagers who could afford the solution. They would use the connectivity, computing and storage facilities provided at the TeleInfoCentre.

Besides the computers, the TeleInfo-Centre also has other facilities. It has a printer for printing documents. It has a scanner to ensure that documents could be digitsed and then sent across as email attachments. In a way, this approach could replace fax using a store-and-forward approach, because the phone line may not be present or may not work. In fact, the scanner-printer combo would also work as a photocopying system.

A key issue which needs to be addressed is how the TeleInfoCentre will be powered. Electricity is intermittently available in much of Rural India. Without electricity, the TeleInfoCentre becomes a museum of digital gadgets! There are a few ideas on how we can consider solving the electricity problem.

The first approach could be to look at what the Jhai Foundation has done in Laos to power computers in remote areas. It is using a car battery with “pedal power”, via stationary bicycles imported from India.

One minute of pedaling yields five minutes of power, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

The second approach is to create a 12-volt supply directly, powered by car batteries. Computer power supplies use 230/115 volts because they are meant to plugin directly into the mains. In the case of the TeleInfoCentre, since all the devices are in a single room, one can look at directly using the 12 volt supply from car batteries (as in the first approach) without converting to the mains voltage. This will probably mean a slight redesign for the Rs 5000 (USD 100) PCs, but the benefits would be well worth it.

Rural India – ready for change?
The third approach is to consider the use of solar power. Much of Rural India is blessed with plenty of sunlight round-the-year. Can this be converted into a solution which can generate power cost-effectively ? Talk about Solar Energy has been around for many years, but there have been few solutions which have become commercially available for electricity generation. So, I am not too confident that this will work, but it definitely should be considered.

A big consumer of power in the computer is going to be the monitor. The question is: can this be reduced? One could look at using smaller screens, but they would then take away the full-fledged desktop experience that we are trying to provide.

So, provisioning power for the TeleInfoCentre is a key challenge which needs to be addressed, along with that of connectivity.

TeleInfoCentre applications
The TeleInfoCentre fulfills a multi-centric role: it is a computing and communications centre, has a digital library of documents, complements the teachers for school and adult education, and serves as a small business office for entrepreneurs. Its real value comes, of course, from the applications that it can enable for citizen services and government interactions, making it an e-Governance touch-point for the villagers.

As was discussed in the Village Vision segment, the TeleInfoCentre caters to the needs of four constituencies: the villagers, the village administration, the district and state administrations, and the marketing organisations. The various applications available at the TeleInfoCentre can be categorised as follows:

Information: The TeleInfoCentre enables two-way information flow. Commodity prices, weather information, crop planning, literacy programmes, exam results, health information, school curriculum, government notifications, downloadable forms which could either be printed or filled online, and employment opportunities are all examples of what the TeleInfoCentre can provide. All of this information should be available on the server so the need to connect to the Internet is not there. Updates can be done via CD (or Internet connectivity, if available) every few days. In turn, the villagers and the village administration also provide regular updates on the health of the village and its resources, which is sent to the district administration.
Communications: Email (be it text or audio/video) will be the primary driver. In fact, the ability to communicate with other villages and with government officials is going to be perhaps the “killer app” for the initial use of the TeleInfoCentre. As WiFi becomes a reality, Voice-over-IP (VoIP) will become an important driver.
Community: At present, interactions between village residents are limited to gatherings at the local choupal (meeting place). Distance makes interactions between residents of different villages rare – except for business or matrimony. The TeleInfoCentre can now help build out communities across villages, independent of distance, based on interest areas. Thus, farmers could form an online community, and teachers could do the same. Community weblogs are a good platform to amplify the flow of ideas without the constraints of time and geography. One section could contain classified ads narrowcast to specific audiences.
Transactions: While providing e-Services like land records and birth/marriage/death certificates are important for the village residents, they may require the presence of a real-time Internet connection (unless the service can be formulated as an offline request). Transaction services like bill payments and railway bookings which require queries to centralised database servers can only become possible when connectivity improves.

A basket of applications should be made available to the villagers for a flat price –Rs 20 (USD 0.40) per family per month, as we discussed earlier. The question is: what will make each family pay a monthly subscription fee of Rs 20? My view on this is that they will pay if it can:

Offer hopes of additional income (growth in livelihood)
Remove pain from their lives (government interactions)
Improve their skillsets (learn to do things better, retraining)
Make them more productive (agriculture, crafts)
Offer their children a brighter future (education, jobs)
Provide them a voice to and response from government within a specified time period

Once the TeleInfoCentres are rolled out and their use begins, local content developers and software companies will realise that there is an excellent platform for offering value-added services – much like what we are seeing with the SMS services on cellphones today. These service providers should be able to distribute their applications and content to the TeleInfo-Centres easily. Getting new services is critical for building an ecosystem around the TeleInfoCentre foundation.

TeleInfoCentre Economics

How much does it cost to setup a single TeleInfoCentre ? Assuming 3 computers to begin with (2 thin clients and a server, which can also be used as a client), the costs are as follows:

Thick Server: Rs 30,000 (USD 600; any standard desktop can work as a server; also has a CD-writer to write CDs for offline data distribution)
2 Thin Clients: Rs 20,000 (USD 400; over time, we will get to Rs 5,000/PC, USD 100; price point)
Software: Rs 7,500 (USD 150)
LAN Networking, Modem, Telephone Line (if available): Rs 12,500 (USD 250)
Scanner, Printer, Webcam, Speakers: Rs 10,000 (USD 200)
Power Supply: Rs 10,000
This brings the total set-up costs to Rs 90,000 (USD 1,800).
Monthly Operating Costs are as follows:
Operator Salary: Rs 2,500 (USD 500)
Connectivity: Rs 1,000 (USD 20)
Consumables (Paper, CDs): Rs 500 (USD 10)
Maintenance: Rs 500

This totals Rs 4,500 (USD 90) per month. Assuming the set-up costs can be amortised over three years (through a bank loan or some other form of financing), the monthly cost on account of the upfront investment comes to Rs 3,000 (USD 600). Add to this the Rs 4,500 monthly operating costs and we get a figure of Rs 7,500 per month as what is needed for break-even.

The assumption made here is that space costs are zero – that is, the space is provided by the entrepreneur or the village at no charge for the TeleInfoCentre.

The question is: how does the TeleInfoCentre generate a minimum monthly revenue of Rs 7,500 ?

As we had discussed earlier, if the TeleInfoCentre supports a village of 250 families (1,000 people) and each family pays Rs 20 per month as a subscription fee for a basket of services, then this generates a monthly income of Rs 5,000. The deficit is still Rs 2,500 – how does this get covered ?

There are multiple ways by which the TeleInfoCentre can generate additional revenue:

It can take up data entry jobs or other such work to better leverage the computers that it has.
The state / district can pay for some of the services that it uses. For example, on account of the TeleInfoCentres, the information collection and dissemination costs can be reduced. Part of those savings could be channelised through to the TeleInfoCentre.
Some funds could be allocated from the village for the operation of the TeleInfoCentre, since the village administration will also be a significant user and beneficiary.
Additional services can be offered for the villagers beyond the base set, which can result in more revenue.
Ads can be shown on the screens to create a revenue stream from companies interested in reaching the rural markets.

In addition, the loan payback period could be extended from three years to four years, resulting in bringing the break-even figure down to under Rs 7,000. Also, if older PCs can be re-used or duties on new computers can be reduced, that would lower the start-up costs by Rs 10,000 or more.

The monthly gap can thus be narrowed and even eliminated. Over time, as the villagers realise the benefits of the TeleInfoCentre, usage will increase. Also, as content developers and software companies realise the potential of the audience being created, additional revenue-generating services will get created. The aim should be to get the per capita income of the villagers to increase, since that will mean that they would be willing to spend some more money at the TeleInfoCentre.

The TeleInfoCentre should be the responsibility of a local entrepreneur. There should be no government subsidies in their set-up or operation. The role of the government should be that of an enabler, not a funder.

TeleInfoCentre as a business
The Entrepreneur is the key in proliferating TeleInfoCentres. What an entrepreneur does is bring in the right zest and drive to keep up service levels and innovations. If we look at India and see the two grassroots technology revolutions in telecom and cable over the past two decades, they were both entrepreneur-driven.

In the 1980s, Sam Pitroda’s dream of making telephony accessible to the masses was realised by tens of thousands of individuals and small businesses who set up a PCO (public call office). India may have only 40-odd million phone lines for a population of 1 billion, but the nearly 1 million PCOs that dot the landscape across the country have given telecom access to almost everyone across the country.

In the 1990s, another revolution at the grassroots brought cable television into millions of homes across the country. With satellite dishes to catch the signals from the air and wires strung from building to building, the cable entrepreneurs revolutionized television entertainment and gave birth to India’s TV software industry and the dozens of television channels.

So, who will be the TeleInfoCentre Entrepreneur ? Where will he raise the initial capital from? Where will he locate the centre? How will he make it grow ?

The TeleInfoCentre Entrepreneur must be from the village. What is most important is that the Entrepreneur have an open mind because for the immediate future, he is the one who is opening up the village to the outside world. In Madhya Pradesh, for example, each village has a Prerak or “Info Leader”, who has played a lead role in increasing literacy by educating the villagers. Such a person could be a good candidate for becoming the Entrepreneur.

The initial capital of about Rs 90,000 for setting up the TeleInfoCentre will have to come from various institutions: local banks, microcredit institutions, panchayats or NGOs. This money is not a donation – it is a loan to be repaid in a period of 3-4 years. As far as possible, the state government or the district administration should not be involved in the business of financing the TeleInfoCentre.

The TeleInfoCentre should be located in a neutral zone, given the realities of India’s caste system that is still in (illegal) existence in some form in many villages. A school is an ideal location because it is already seen as a bastion of knowledge. One of the classrooms could be converted into a TeleInfoCentre. For the time that the school is in session, it becomes a computer education centre for the students. Before and after school hours, it offers services to the village residents. For any business, growth is essential. The Entrepreneur must see potential in the business – that each successive month will be better than the previous one. For this, it is important to keep layering additional services at the TeleInfoCentre. This is going to be driven both by the Entrepreneur’s own marketing skills and the nature of requirements that the villagers have.

TeleInfoCentre differentiators
What makes us think that TeleInfoCentres can work as a model to transform Rural India, where previous initiatives have met with only limited success? The TeleInfoCentre aggregates a number of innovative ideas and is different from previous approaches:

Presence in each village vs Sharing across villages: To succeed, access to the centres (or kiosks) must be such that villagers do not have to travel significant distances at all. They should be able to use it multiple times a day, and on demand. This means the centres have to be present in each village.
Multi-functional vs Uni-functional: Most current approaches tend to work in silos, thus necessitating duplication of expensive infrastructure. As envisioned here, the TeleInfoCentre becomes a platform for various services which are applications on top of the basic “computing grid”.
Offline vs Internet-centric: The TeleInfoCentre can begin operations simply with periodic CD-based updates, and without the need for a telephone line or Internet connection.
Information-centric vs Transaction-centric: The initial focus is on information, communications and community services which do not require real-time Internet connectivity, rather than transaction oriented services which do.
User-generated content vs Top-down broadcast: The TeleInfoCentre encourages users to generate their content and share it across vertical communities of interest and practice, to complement the information that is sent from the state and district headquarters.
Rs 5,000 computers vs Rs 50,000 computers: Most existing approaches tend to use new desktops with MS-Windows and MS-Office software resulting in a per PC cost of Rs 50,000 or more. (The government and its agencies have to buy legal software!) The TeleInfoCentre approach uses thin clients for a fraction of the cost.
Multiple Computers vs Single Computer: The TeleInfoCentre has at least 3 computers available for use at any time, thus diminishing dramatically the chances that a villager will come in and not find a computer to use.
Linux/Open-source vs Proprietary software: The use of open-source software eliminates licence fees, while at the same time maintaining compatibility with file formats for document exchange with the external world.
Wireless vs Wired connectivity: The use of WiFi in the months to come can dramatically cut connectivity costs, and at the same time eliminate dependency on unreliable, wired telephone lines. (Cellular phones are still far away from making their presence felt in Indian villages, especially those away from urban and semi-urban areas.)
English and Local language support vs English only: Support for at least one local language is important. People need to be able to interact with others in the language they feel most comfortable in.
Subscription model vs Pay-per-service: The TeleInfoCentre approach calls for each family to make a fixed monthly payment for a basic set of services, encouraging increased usage. The alternate pay-per-service model actually inhibits usage. That may be right when computing is a scarce resource but with cheap and multiple computers available at the TeleInfoCentre, one needs to take a user-friendly approach. Taking all these factors into consideration, the TeleInfoCentre is a more practical approach given the realities and constraints of Rural India.

Rural tech innovations
The TechInfoCentre can be created using today’s technologies. However, a few innovations can be very helpful as we look at a large-scale roll-out, especially in some of the more infrastructurally-poorer parts of India.

Power: There is a need to use “pedal power” or solar energy or other alternate energy sources to power the computers and other devices at the TeleInfoCentre.
Connectivity: WiFi is the future. The question is: how can WiFi be made to work as a wide area network? Using directional antennae (or even perhaps Pringles cans as has been tried out in some cases) can increase the distance for line-of-sight communi-cations.
Thinner Clients: The aim is to make the thin clients as thin and as cheap as possible. Ideas from embedded computing can be applied here.
TV as Monitor: The monitor cost (Rs 2-4,000) is a significant component of the thin client cost. Can this cost be reduced? Cheap TVs are available in plenty. The question is: how can TVs be made into higher resolution (800 x 600 pixels or more) displays?
Server Redundancy: The thick server is the most critical component in the TeleInfoCentre value chain. If it fails, then the entire centre is unusable. How can we introduce redundancy in the servers, yet keep costs low? Dual CPUs, two hard disks with data mirroring, two motherboards, and blade servers are some ideas which need to be explored.
Client-Server Connectivity: At present, the assumption is that there is a LAN (10-100 Mbps) between the thin clients and the thick server. If the clients can be made to work on lower speeds, then it may become possible to use a thick server across multiple villages connected through WiFi, thus, further simplifying management and reducing set-up costs of the TeleInfoCentres.
Desktop Interface: Video Games offer a natural inspiration for rethinking the desktop. How can desktops be made richer, more interactive, more 3D-like such that language and learning does not become a barrier to usage?
Multimedia: There is a need to go beyond just text for communications and interactions. With falling costs of peripherals like digital cameras and webcams, plentiful storage and broadband connections, multimedia is going to be an important driver in applications.
Visual Biz-ic: This is a term I have coined to denote a Visual Basic-like development environment for applications involving business processes and workflows. How can ideas from web services be used to create reusable libraries of governance processes which, with only little modifications, can then be leveraged across TeleInfoCentres for use in different states and countries?

Thus, there is still plenty to do to bring forth the next generation of TeleInfoCentres, which will set new benchmarks in affordability, connectivity and usability.

Village InfoGrid
TeleInfoCentres in every village are the starting point. These centres are not critically dependent on connectivity. As the options for connectivity grow, networking them together into a grid – call it the Village InfoGrid – is the next step. What the Village InfoGrid does is create a peer-to-peer network of the TeleInfoCentres, allowing for near real-time communications between them opening up a range of activities and applications that have previously not been there.

ICTs: sharing knowledge
The TeleInfoCentre enables communi-cations between the village and the district (and beyond). The Village InfoGrid becomes the platform for inter-village communications. This is interesting because so far in India, there has not been much interaction between villages because of the limited options involved. Typically, villagers have interacted with either only nearby villages or with the district, which is one-level up the hierarchy. The network connecting up the TeleInfoCentres now makes each village a peer, and equidistant in the electronic world. Geography is no longer a barrier for interaction.

Prior to email, we had hundreds of years experience with personal media — the telegraph, the telephone. But outside the Internet, we had almost nothing that supported conversation among many people at once. Conference calling was the best it got — cumbersome, expensive and useless for large groups. The social tools of the Internet have a fluidity and ease of use that the conference call never attained: compare the effortlessness of CC-ing friends to decide on a movie, versus trying to set up a conference call between them. The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time. To get a conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing those restrictions, the Interent has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog.

The thing that makes social software behave differently from other communications tools, is that groups are entities in their own right. A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation, peculiarly social effects like flaming and trolling or concerns about trust and reputation.

Consider the possible impact of interconnecting the villages into an InfoGrid: villagers can share best practices with others, they can benchmark themselves on a wide range of metrics and discuss ways by which they can improve. They can find out opportunities elsewhere, they can create vertical “communities of practice” to share knowledge and innovations, and they can voice their opinions via community weblogs. This is just the starting. As villagers start using the network, they will come up on their own with the ideas on how to make it more effective and useful.

One set of institutions which needs to be part of the Village InfoGrid are engineering colleges, which can play an important role in both developing software applications relevant for the rural segment, as well as providing technical support. By stimulating the creativity of the young human mind, we can create a win-win situation for students looking for interesting and practical projects to do in their final year of college, and the needs of the villages looking for technology talent to create content and software for the TeleInfoCentres and the InfoGrid.

An interesting idea to make villages attractive by clustering them together is outlined by India’s President APJ Kalam. called PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas), and aims to “to make rural areas as attractive to investors as cities are. Then, rural areas too will generate urban-style employment to halt (if not reverse) rural-urban migration”. The scheme envisages:

Linking villages by a ring road with frequent bus services. That will integrate them into one market. Then, those villages become a virtual city with a potential to expand and accommodate 3-5 lakhs population.
Compensating farmers for the land acquired from them NOT by a lump sum but by an annual fee equal to twice the price of the produce they grow. That gives farmers inflation protection.
Sub-leasing land to employers both for business and for employee residences within walking distance of each other, eliminating commuting to work.

The President wrote recently in India Today on PURA: “The model envisages a habitat designed to improve the quality of life in rural places and makes special suggestions to improve urban congestion too. As against a conventional city, say rectangular in shape and measuring approximately 10 km by 6 km, this model considers a ring-shaped town integrating a minimum of 8 to 10 villages in the same area. This model provides easy access to villages, saves transportation time, cuts costs substantially and is more convenient for the general people. Such a model of establishing a circular connectivity model of rural village complexes will accelerate rural development process by empowerment.”

On this idea, overlay technology with TeleInfoCentres connected as part of the Village InfoGrid, and we have an architecture that now fully integrates the village into the networked world, both physically and virtually.

By building a technology centre in the villages and connecting these together, we are leapfrogging a whole set of people from an era where they could interact with only a handful of people to one where they can peer with many more like them irrespective of distance. It is much like how the Internet connected diverse and isolated networks in its early days. The Village InfoGrid is the first step towards making the global village a reality.

Intelligent, real-time governance
A Government is very much like a large, multi-locational Enterprise. If we think of intelligent, real-time enterprises, we can also apply the same ideas to enable intelligent, real-time governance.

A real-time enterprise, as Ray Lane says, is “a company that uses Internet technology to drive out manual business processes, to eliminate guesswork, and to reduce costs. The key feature of a real-time enterprise is spontaneous transaction flow.” In other words, think of a real-time enterprise as having the following characteristics:

Computing and communications available to every employee
Superior information availability across the value chain
Streamlined business processes using the Internet
Low inventory through improved analytics
Data entered only once
Single interface to all applications

This is exactly how governments need to think of themselves. It is about creating ‘a corporate atmosphere with a social bias.’

The villages are part of the real-time governance supply-chain. A supply chain is only as good as its weakest link. Today, isolated villages are equivalent to unconnected small and medium enterprises in supply chains.

The TeleInfoCentre and Village InfoGrid bring the villages into the governance network, enabling a two-way near real-time flow of information. They form the endpoints, the spokes, the front-office if you will. They need to be complemented with the automation of the back-office – the heart of the government which lies in the state capitals and district headquarters. What governments need is a four-step action plan to move towards the vision of architecting an intelligent, real-time information flow architecture:

Messaging and Internet Access for all employees: Every government employee should have an email ID and access to Instant Messaging. Each of the government locations should be networked. There should be integration of the messaging infrastructure with cellphones to enable delivery of real-time alerts.
Computing for all: Every government employee needs a computer. The ideas that are applicable for a TeleInfoCentre (low-cost computers, server-centric computing, open-source software, and support for English and local languages) can be used to build out the computing infrastructure. Computer training and usage must be made mandatory for salary raises and promotions. The monthly cost to make computing available to every employee will be less than Rs 500-700. If employees and government processes can be made just 5% more productive, the investment will pay back immediately.
Collaboration and Knowledge Mana-gement: Once the computing and messaging infrastructure is in place, the next step is to make people individually more productive and make teams work together more efficiently. This can be done via the use of workflow software and tools to aid decision-making. Every employee’s computer desktop should have a Digital Dashboard – a single screen of information which shows the key indicators and events that need attention. Tacit knowledge within government employees should be harnessed through the use of enterprise weblogs.
Business Process Automation: The essence of governance is about managing money (accounting) and interacting with citizens and businesses (customer relationship management). The focus needs to be on the core business processes, creating an event-driven architecture with the focus being not on routine information management but on handling exceptions. The OHIO (only handle information once) principle should ensure an integrated backend database. One of the first places that governments can begin using Internet and Web ideas is in e-Procurement.

The result of building out the government as an e-Business will be to enable the creation of an Emergent Democracy.

Emergent democracy
If India is to realise the vision of becoming a developed nation by 2020, the need is for a bottom-up revolution, which does not stop at India’s villages, but starts there.

The need is to consider people not as our biggest problem, but our greatest strength. What has been missing so far has been a framework in which the mix of villages, people and technology can be magically combined to build a New India – an India which is transformed from a democracy into an Emergent Democracy.

An Emergent Democracy is one in which people across the chain, from the villages to the cities, are empowered and have a say in governance – not just through their vote, but by active participation in discussion and execution. It is a nation which truly makes governance of the people, by the people and for the people.

The ideas that we have discussed here – a network of TeleInfoCentres in every village connected together into a Village InfoGrid, and complemented by Intelligent, Real-Time Governance – will lead to reduced information asymmetry between administration and the citizens. It will provide for real-time feedback on schemes and problems, with solutions also being provided by people themselves.

It will increase efficiency, transparency and accountability and reduce corruption. Additionally, it creates a local technology ecosystem that is beneficial as India seeks to deepen and widen its technology base and build a knowledge-driven society, and also self-sustaining, replicable and viable.

Last word
Writing in his book The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change, Gurcharan Das has a section on “The Ambiguous Village”. He writes:

Mahatma Gandhi was a man of the city but he had the most romantic view of the countryside. He dreamt of building a modern India around self-governing village republics: ‘My idea of village swaraj is that is a complete republic independent of its neighbours for its own vital wants and yet inter-dependent for many others.’

Jawaharlal Nehru disagreed with Gandhi, saying that ‘a village, normally speaking, is backward intellectually and culturally and no progress can be made from a backward environment.’

Urban India wants this century to belong to India. No nation can progress leaving behind more than two-thirds of its populace. The tools of technology in the form of TeleInfoCentres, the Village InfoGrid and Intelligent, Real-Time e-Governance are at hand. The choice of transforming – or ignoring Rural India is in our hands.

Acknowledgements
The initial impetus came from reading CK Prahalad’s Bottom of the Pyramid ideas, and his belief that India has to grow at 10% per annum. The discussions with R Gopalakrishnan (Secretary to the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, and who set me on the course by inviting me to make a presentation in MP), Rakesh Shrivastava (of MAPIT) and Anita Sharma (of MP’sHeadstart programme) have helped refine many of the ideas. My exchanges and brain-storming sessions with Prof. Ramesh Jain (Georgia Tech University, Atlanta), have been invigorating, especially his views on “folk computing”.