[Telecentres] Re: [bytesforall_readers] 'Internet can transform rural India'

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Friends:

In one of his recent interventions Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala wrote: "The
income generation and setting up of micro-enterprise, agriculture support
and trading, all require a lot of work, specially focused on rural areas. I
think these are the areas where we should concentrate on. My feeling is that
these are not short term work, but require sustained effort."

We at MSSRF have been concentrating on such a holistic approach right from
the beginning of our Information Village Research Project in 1997. As I have
written often, our emphasis is on people, their contexts, their needs (and
wants), and the content (information/ knowledge) that can address those
needs. It is in gathering and delivering the information/ knowledge that we
need to use technologies, and in the past seven or eight years we have tried
a number of them ranging from VHF two-way radio and spread spectrum to
Internet, web conferencing and satellite communication. We also use solar
energy, multimedia communication, community newspaper, public address
system, and so on. Indeed we use both modern and traditional technologies as
dictated by the need. Horses for courses. Also we pay attention to both
content and connectivity. We have close to a hundred databases, some of them
dynamic (meaning, one has to input new information very frequently). The
entire programme is participatory - it is often the village volunteers who
gather and input information. While much of the information needed by the
rural poor is locale specific, we also need some information obtained from
the Internet. For example, the wave height information our staff download
from a US Navy website is rated by the fishermen as the most useful service
provided by our knowledge centres in the coastal villages of Pondicherry.
The information obtained from the Navy web site is transmitted through
notice boards and loud speakers! Recently, we had a tele-consultation when a
heart patient at Thiruvaiyaru and her physician spoke to the head of a major
medical university in Chennai. Our village volunteers test eyes of their
communities and transmit pictures of defective eyes to an ophthalmologist in
a major eye hospital via email.

Once the people have access to information, what next? What do they do with
the information? The next step is to empower them to use the information to
their advantage. That is where skill building, credit, microenterprises,
marketing, etc. come in. We work with many self-help groups, banks and
training institutions. A whole division at MSSRF - the JRD Tata
Ecotechnology Centre - is constantly looking for microenterprises that can
be taken up by the rural poor. For example, this centre has helped rural
communities (barely literate and semilitearte women mostly) in Dindigul
district of Tamil Nadu in southern India to set up small scale production
units for making biopesticides and biofungicides. Another group is producing
paper and board from banana waste.

As Prof. Swaminathan tells often, merely putting up a computer and providing
an Internet connection cannot make a knowledge centre (as we call
'telecentres'). Many other groups who have attempted to set up telecentres
have come to us to know how we manage to handle the 'content' part. These
include people working with MIT Media Lab Asia projects.

MSSRF is certainly not the only organization to pursue such an approach.
TARAHaat, for example, is helping a number of people turn into
enterpreneurs.

Every year about 20 development workers from Asia, Africa and Latin America
visit the project villages of MSSRF for about 7 or 8 days to exchange
knowledge and experience with the rurla communities in Tamil Nadu and
Pondicherry working closely with MSSRF. The reports by the participants
invariably speak highly of the integrated approach to development and the
people focus. These South-South Exchange Travelling Workshops have become
popular and a similar workshop for Africa was held last year in Uganda, when
the MSSRF and Ugandan workshop participants exchanged notes for more than an
hour via a web conference.

We are now working hard towards building such a holistic programme at the
national level. Called the Mission 2007 programme, it aims to make every
village in India a knowledge centre. The idea is to use ICTs intelligently
and innovatively as part of a holistic development strategy that will lead
to both poverty reduction and overall development in rural India.

Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]