There have been a number of efforts in order to promote IT amongst the masses and lot more on their way. The government spends millions in trying to promote various activities that promote ICT
to common man of India. Research institutes like IBM Research Labs, Media Labs Asia, NCST, C-DAC,
institutes like the IITs, IIMs among others, have taken up dozens of challenging projects to try filling the
gap of ‘Digital Divide’. The private sector is not behind, with companies like NIIT, HCL, Infosys, Wipro
and TCS having demonstrated cases for taking computers to the common man.
As an example, rural kiosks is one of the ways in which many organizations are trying to apply
information and communication technology for socio-economic development. A number of kiosk based
projects have been implemented by n-Logue, Drishtee, ITC e-Choupal, Media Lab Asia and other such
initiatives.
Through the e-Choupal initiative, ITC aims to confer the power of expert knowledge on even
the smallest individual farmer. E-Choupal services have now reached 31,000 villages through 5200 kiosks.
Through village internet kiosks, information about weather, market prices for crops, farm practices etc.
will be disseminated. This information is made available in local languages to help adoption. The farmers
will benefit through enhanced farm productivity and higher prices. The Drishtee kiosks are focused on
providing e-government solutions to rural villages. They have computerized a number of government
services like birth certificate application etc. nLogue kiosks are more focused towards varying services.
The kiosk owner acts like a local service provider for that area and pays for the network usage. The kiosk
owner earns by charging for the services that he provides. The above listed ones are a few of the efforts
that give an idea of the varying approaches taken by different groups in India. This List goes on and on.
While trying to bring technology to the masses, majority of the efforts seem to be facing the
following problems:
Accessibility
Awareness
Experience
Illiteracy
Economical solution
…
It is observed that majority of these efforts end up in providing solutions to the above problems rather
than bringing the real benefits of technology to the masses.
For a while, let us assume that some form of computing is available & all the above problems are
solved. Even in such a scenario, what is the compelling reason for a common man in India to use it? Will
it be a better alternative to spend those pennies to have a monthly agriculture visit in the village or to
have a shared tractor, or to renovate village school building? What we mean is computing is not the
solution to the problems. Even putting computer in each village is not going to solve the problems either.
Not technology, but technology in a meaningful manner will make the real difference.
Ongoing efforts in India have been trying to get computing to the villages. Even doing that,
scaling to the level of Indian villages will take a lot of time. ITC currently targets to get e-Choupal
installed in 6 villages per day. Even if these installations were to go throughout the year, setting up these
e-Choupals in all the 600,000 villages in India will take more than 200 years.
The other observation was that most of the people visiting the n-Logue kiosks were there for
entertainment. Kiosk customers tend to be young people primarily students. People visiting the Drishtee
kiosk were there only for government document related problems, though it can do lot more than that.
What we want to emphasize here is, though these solutions have been able to get computing to
the masses, they were not able to bring meaningful technology to the masses. The core underlying
problems of awareness of the benefits of technology and a good experience that the common man gains
out of using it are still not addressed fully by any of these efforts. What is required is to help understand
the real needs/problems and to solve them by any mean. Computerization is not the only solution.
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