We invite you to explore and learn what is the most promising, yet challenging, developmental intervention happening in India positioning ICT in human development in this nation of more than one billion citizens. Since its origin in 1998, OneWorld South Asia, along with many of its partners, started using ICT in the works of many development organisations across South Asia. During these years, we have witnessed phenomenal growth in software industry, making giant strides in innovation, business incubation and global leadership in this sector. The rapid growth in ICT sector, however, has not contributed to the development of the larger sector of our nation the poor and marginalised, as it was expected. The developmental
promises of ICT, thus, remained unfulfilled so far.
In an endeavour to tap the potentials of ICT for a holistic development of India, the nation-wide movement called Mission 2007 was launched in 2004. For, ICT has the potentials to energies rural development process by infusing knowledge
connectivity to human agencies while smoothening the nations migration from an agrarian society to a knowledge society, as envisioned in India Vision 2020 that The pace of Indias future progress will depend to a large extent on its ability to make
available the latest and most useful knowledge to vast sections of the population. Experiences of Information Village Research Project (IVRP) which was also initiated in the year of 1998 in Pondicherry led to the launch of Mission 2007 which aims to
forge multistakeholder partnerships for replicating the IVRP model in 600,000 villages by 15th August of 2007, Indias 60th independence day. Experiences with infokiosks at different parts of the world show their effectiveness as knowledge gateways for rural areas. The landmark departure towards the journey of taking ICTs to every Indian village undertaken in Mission 2007 Consultation in July 2004 is thus a necessary step towards creating an Indian knowledge society. The July 2004 National Policy Makers Workshop of Mission 2007 targeted at reaching few milestones:
1. Connecting 25,000 villages as the next step;
2. Identifying, recognising and creating incentives and enabling conditions for RSPs. Software application and user interface development in local languages for local entrepreneurship and fulfilment of objectives;
3. NGOs role in recruiting 1 million village academicians, especially women;
4. Empowering and recognizing local communities as collators of local data and users of spatial data for local planning. Two-way content and services flow bringing content providers to collaborate and ride on the infrastructure;
5. Legitimising the Alliance to take on the mandate of a national level ICT commission;
6. Assessing the needs and perceptions of target groups and beneficiaries. This would be important in humanising the technology a critical sufficiency condition for the success of the knowledge revolution in India;
7. If we agree to go ahead with expanding the usage of ICTs (particularly the infokiosks) in enabling the proposed knowledge revolution in the country, it would be important to address the issue of resources (both manpower and financial) required for supporting the machines;
8. While the creation of new information should be an important component of the knowledge revolution, documenting and archiving existing knowledge and experiments (both successes and failures) should be equally important;
9. Radios, particularly FM radios, have the potential of bringing about a knowledge revolution in the country;
10. Policy recommendations are required in this area to free radio from strict airwave related regulatory issues.
Progress towards achieving the goal has already been started. In May 2005, NASSCOM Foundation and UNDP along with government and NGO partners launched a Knowledge Centre programme in Orissa as the first phase of the coastal knowledge network. The Network will comprise multipurpose resource centres and single window service delivery mechanisms for training and capacity building, knowledge and information systems, linked to life skill education, livelihoods, e-learning, community based disaster preparedness activities targeting women, children and young people for serving a cluster of villages in identified areas. During the financial year 2005-
06, Mission 2007 secured the token financial support in the tune of Rs. 100 crore to be channelised through NABARD for establishing rural ICT self-help groups. In the Budget for 2005-06, the target of connecting the remaining 125,000 villages to the electrical grid and 66,882 villages to telecom network has been set up.
Formulation of a job-led growth strategy has been the mandate of the current UPA government, and the creation of about additional 7 million jobs is in the IT sector by the year 2009 is envisaged. Building basic infrastructure especially in rural areas and urban slums will be supported by the revival of the Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF) through infusing a corpus fund of Rs. 8000 crore for this fiscal year. The Mission 2007 initiative, aiming towards setting up Village Knowledge Centre in every village by Indias 60th independence anniversary, will also be financed by the RIDF. The Bharat Nirman proposal proposes a four-year business plan for building
the infrastructure in rural India in the areas of irrigation, roads, water supply, housing, rural electrification and rural telecom connectivity. In addition, removal of customs duty on specified capital goods as stipulated in the recent Information Technology Agreement (ITA) is major development proposed in this budget. In his budget speech on February 28, 2005, P Chidambaram, the Union Finance Minister of India, said
that, The National Commission on Farmers has recommended the establishment of Village Knowledge Centres (VKCs) all over the country using modern Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Mission 2007 is a national initiative launched by an alliance comprising nearly Processes and appropriation of ICT in human development in rural India organisations including civil society organisations...The Government supports the goal, and I am glad to announce that the government has decided to join the alliance and route its support through the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD). I propose to allow NABARD to provide Rs. 100 crore out
of the Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF).
While Mission 2007 has succeeded in securing multi-stakeholder support the progression towards establishing infokiosks in 600,000 plus Indian villages largely is yet to commence. To be able to ignite the rural development process with knowledge
revolution, infokiosks need to be equipped with not only robust and reliable connectivity and electrification, but also with killer content and applications, efficient human resources and creative management to be able to attract dynamic community
participation. Both data and voice connectivity in conjunction with the power supply system constitute the basic infrastructure in the infokiosks and analyses will show that such functionalities remain the key barriers in successful operation for majority of pilot infokiosk interventions. Development practitioners have underlined the need to develop appropriate content and applications that will energise the rural development process and transform the lives of millions of rural inhabitants. Unlike provisioning telecom and internet connectivity in rural areas, content and applications development appropriate to rural population clusters that belong to diverse socio-economic milieu, speak in at least 18 major languages and 844 dialects, inherit diverse religious and
ethnic beliefs and customs is a major challenge. It is imperative that the infrastructure building, content development and community-centric management of infokiosks exercises being undertaken in millions of Indian villages envisaged as part of the Mission 2007 initiative shall encompass locale-specific services delivery so that socioeconomic development takes place in those villages.
Mission 2007 as a nation-wide movement envisages placing ICT for rural development and then, helping the ruralcitizens themselves to attain gram swaraj or village sustainabity to attain the developmental targets. At a conceptual level, IVRP
serves as a role model before the Mission 2007 stakeholders for providing shared access to ICTs to the countrys thousands of villages. At the same time, OneWorld South Asia which has been a key project partner both for IVRP and later on the Mission 2007, was interested to investigate the social, political, economic and technological contexts in which thousands of such village knowledge centres could be created. After Mission 2007 movement was created, Indian Government launched several large scale initiatives like the Common Services Centres (CSC) initiatives or the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP). We recognise the inherent commonalities in the motivations
of these initiatives in harnessing the potentials of ICTs in human development and also the need for working towards achieving the goals in tandem.
The four papers symbiotically brought out as part of the rural connectivity research project conducted from August 2004 to March 2006, review four key distinct aspects of these initiatives. The notions of putting ICT in the context of human empowerment remains a complex issue and most often ignored or underestimated by the government and mainstream funding agencies. We have attempted at delineating the areas of
interventions. In so doing, we have reviewed the institutional framework wherein such interventions would function and operate. A wide range of field-based projects those are
operational in various parts of rural India have, then, been reviewed to develop a better understanding of current pitfalls and possible solutions in projects roll out process. Finally, the last paper reviews the technological situations and assesses alternative solutions that would help all in decision making on technology management. Throughout the research project, we have been extremely benefitted by the inputs given by our esteemed colleagues and partners. In particular, we are grateful to all those who provided us with the much needed information on field projects reviewed in the papers. It is difficult to name all individuals and organisations here however, we are especially thankful to organisations like Development Alternatives, Drishtee Foundation, Indian Institute of Technology - Kanpur, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, n-Logue, University of California Berkley, among others. We acknowledge valued contributions made by Dr. A. Chatterjee Mr. Mohan K. Mishra and project workers in Digital Ganaetic Plain; Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Mr. Senthil Kumaran and volunteers in M S Swaminathan Research Foundation; and many others.
We also acknowledge continued support and encouragement we have received from all our esteemed colleagues towards the completion of this project. We are particularly thankful to Mr. Nikhil Raj, Mr. Naimur Rahman, Mr. Manish Kumar and Ms. Geeta Sharma for their reviews and comments. This collection could not be brought out without the excellent editorial and administrative support from Ms. Mamata Pradhan, Mr. Mukesh Garain and Mr. Ajay Kumar.
We expect to continue bringing out research publications on the issues explored here and critical comments from the readers are welcome.
March 2006 A. Garai and B. Shadrach
New Delhi
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