The Vidya Bharati Institute of Information Technology in association with Digital Partners of Seattle, (USA), arranged a two-day conference in Baramati, a Taluka Town in the Pune district of Maharashtra on the 1st and 2nd of June, 2001. A number of developers of applications useful to organizations working in rural areas among the poor, artisans, farmers, women, for small-scale industry and literacy and education, participated in this conference. One special feature was the interest shown by the World Bank the IFC, PLANET and other financing organizations. The conference focused on how information technology is to be used for human and economic development in Rural and Remote Areas (RRAs). This would require appliances as well as micro-finance. Two women belonging to SEWA from Gujarat described (in Gujarati and Hindi), how certain packages developed for them for their operations among rural women’s groups, are helping them to manage micro-finance and the health of the small enterprises they are running.

Could the poor people and their families constitute a market that even multi-nationals are interested in serving? How do we take the benefits of IT, especially the Internet, to RRA in a language that people understand and speak? And could the devices be operable by the hardly literate but intelligent folk in rural areas? If multimedia Internet-connecting PCs are going to cost Rs 50,000 and upwards, they would not be affordable to many small enterprises. If an appliance cost less than Rs 15,000 like a TV set, it would go into tens of millions of homes. The working of a device being developed under the direction of Dr Bhatkar (formerly of CDAC), was demonstrated. This would cost about Rs 12,000 and would require the use of a TV set for display. It has got a touch pad so that messages written in any language could be transmitted as electronic mail.

Apart from the affordability of the IT device, what would the cost of usage be? If access over telephone is going to cost 21 units (Rs 25 per hour), it would not be affordable. The Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) is giving a 25 percent rebate for dial-up access charges in rural areas, but this is not sufficient to enthuse rural users to use the Internet. Another issue is the speed and reliability of access. The copper conductors in twisted pairs that the BSNL uses are of an awfully low speed. The wireless corDECT, access system developed by a group of academicians in the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, appears to be the most appropriate and economical system, especially because it is indigenously made. Over sixty villages in the Kuppam constituency in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, have been using corDECT, wireless access which is giving 70 Kbps speed in contrast to 9.6 Kbps available on the CDMA Wireless in the Local Loop of the fixed service providers. Unlike dial-up access, which requires Rs 25 per hour, the corDECT wireless access has no such charging at all. Also, it is far more reliable than copper cable connectivity.

Pramod Mahajan, minister for IT, government of India, in a scintillating speech, observed that in many of the villages the poor can be heard saying, "We have lived without water for ages but we can now no more live without a TV set, a telephone and even an Internet connection". The minister added that if one could make the PC and content on Internet as useful as TV and as easily operable, surely even the poor would like to get on to the network." It may take us long to give physical connectivity by way of roads to all our villages but we can connect all the villages electronically; that is, by wireless and optical fibers within five years. The latter is far cheaper than road connectivity.

Also, in the next fifteen years, more than 400 million people will be released from the rural areas from the agricultural sector. They will have to be made literate and imparted employable skills. Accommodating them in urban areas is going to be a huge problem. We must use IT to provide employment. IT-enabled services have great promise, provided our people are sufficiently educated and become computer-literate.

Access to the Internet for the masses must be provided quickly to take on the benefits of information technology. A broadband, high-speed optical fiber transmission system must be rolled-out to connect all cities, towns and villages. Besides the government-owned BSNL, which has nearly 3,00,000 rkm of optical fiber cables, a number of private companies holding ISP licenses and government utilities like the Railways, Power Grid Corporation, Gas Authority of India and the State Electricity Boards, are also laying fiber optic cables to provide bandwidth. Competition among these entities will bring down prices to international levels, which are about 1/5th of what they were under monopoly conditions in India.

Private companies are also executing projects to lay under-sea cables to connect Mumbai, Cochin, Chennai and Visakhapatnam to the international system of multiple submarine cables, girdling the globe, and providing almost infinite bandwidth at falling prices and increasing reliability. The government’s policy of enabling all the nearly one million public telephones (STs and ISTs) in our cities and villages to be upgraded into Public Tele Information Centers, with a multimedia PC connecting to the Internet, will provide universal access to the Internet. It is not a telephone in every home that we have to aim at, but access to a telephone in every village and at every 500 meters in urban areas. Just as universal access to the telephone system has been accomplished by private initiative and public policy acting together, universal access to the Internet would also be accomplished in the same manner. In the way of tens of thousands of individual entrepreneurs who have established cable TV networks in India without any assistance or hindrance from the government, individual entrepreneurs could be facilitated to open Internet cafes. Micro-finance should be made available to them in order to speed up this project of universal access to the Internet. A number of private companies (Satyam for eg,) are themselves planning to bring into being thousands of franchisees to offer Internet services through public kiosks. The private companies may first, confine themselves to the lucrative urban areas. The government, in order to bridge the ‘Digital Divide’, will have to step in to promote Internet cafes in every village. The government should abolish the entry fee and revenue share which are going into the budgetary resources of the union government and instead, have only one universal access contribution of say, 10 percent of the revenue of every telecom and information service provider.

Baramati and the Vidya Pratishthan are a testimony to what could be done in a rural area by people with vision. In a 20-acre campus, there is a built-up area of 88,000 sq. ft with several institutes and hostels. The campus can rival any university in the US. It is transforming the rural area.

Whatever Sharad Pawar may or may not be achieving in politics, it is his vision and leadership that have established this Vidya Pratishthan with its international world-class telecommunications links and educational institutions. These are the ones that demolish the digital divide and narrow the gap between the poor and rich, and between rural and urban areas."

Dr. TH Chowdary is IT advisor to Govt. of Andhra Pradesh and director, Center for Telecom Management & Studies.