In the early 1990’s the software Guru Ed Yourdon (www.yourdon.com) visited India and wrote an article on his return to USA. Those days India was still struggling to make a name in software business. “India is like a long snake”, he wrote, “while the head is moving into the twenty first century, the tail is still in the sixteenth; and, there are people all over its body”. For me, this was the most comprehensive statement of the information-status of Indian society.

The story is similar in all developing countries, the difference being the length of this snake and the number of people on its head and the tail. Next few years, I kept on thinking: Can we push the people on the tail towards the head?

The need
Like India, all the developing countries are beset with problems of unemployed youth, lack of infrastructure and resources. Some are as follows:

• A large population of trained, educated youth, who need to be deployed/employed but the governments are unable to do so.
• This large pool of youth doesn’t have resources to set up even a tiny enterprise to employ themselves.
• There is a large gap between the lifestyles of rural and urban areas.

There is also an accelerating gap due to limited access to ICTs between various strata of people, the so-called digital ‘have/ have-nots’. This phenomenon is being popularly addressed as ‘Digital Divide’.

An ideal solution to these problems is to develop a self-supporting model that touches lives of people in most spheres of life and apart from causing the improvement in their lifestyles and livelihoods, address the issues of universality of access and creating employment in the society.

The Jagriti model
Jagriti e-Sewa (www.jagriti.com) is a social enterprise that has pioneered the concept of development of ‘Rural Models of IT’. The salient features of Jagriti include:

Low cost IT solutions
The whole project has been developed around Linux, the open source operating system that has gained a lot of ground against proprietary systems such as Windows. This has helped in a saving of about Rs 22,000 per kiosk, being the license fee for proprietary software. The use of Linux has saved about Rs 2 crore on the software license fee only. Linux being less demanding on resources, some outdated and old computers can also be deployed in the project.

Appropriate technology

The technologies as ‘available today’ (e.g. dial-up) are used to render services, rather than the ones, which would have caused waiting or efforts elsewhere. Considering that the American model of e-Commerce (read Credit Card Commerce) wasn’t feasible in rural India for quite some time to come, a hybrid model (physical + electronic) called ‘d-commerce’ (desi-Commerce) was used and it was an alternative model of delivery mechanism.

Diverse services
The lifestyles in rural areas are quite complex. Declining agricultural incomes, migration to cities and the spread of information/ TV has brought about a spurt in demands in the rural areas of modern gadgets like mobile phones that reflect a complex blend of urban and rural. Jagriti recognised this, conducted market studies and included a blend of services that have rural and urban flavours to it.

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