New York Times
May 28, 2000
 

Connecting Rural India to the World

 
By CELIA W. DUGGER


EMBALAM, India -- In this village at the southern tip of India, the century-old temple has two doors.

Through one lies tradition. People from the lowest castes and menstruating women cannot pass its threshold. Inside, the devout perform daily pujas, offering prayers. Through the second door lies the Information Age, and anyone may enter.

In a rare social experiment, the village elders have allowed one side of the temple to house two solar-powered computers that give this poor village a wealth of data, from the price of rice to the day's most auspicious hours.

"If I can get a job through this, I'll be happy," said V. Aruna, 14, who pestered her father, a farmer, until he agreed that she could come here each day to peck at a computer keyboard, where she learned Word and PowerPoint. "I want to work instead of sitting in the house."

At a time of growing unease about the global gap between technology knows and know-nots, India is fast becoming a laboratory for small experiments like the one at the temple that aim to link isolated rural pockets to the borderless world of knowledge. Local governments and nonprofit groups are testing new approaches to provide villages where barely anyone can afford a telephone with computer centers that are accessible to all.

To be sure, these experiments are still small and there are many obstacles. The vast majority of Web sites are in English, a language that more than 95 percent of Indians do not speak. Routine power failures and overloaded telephone lines make connecting to the Internet a frustrating proposition. And there are serious questions about whether countries like India, weighed down by high rates of illiteracy and illness, should spend heavily to provide villages that desperately need schools and health clinics with what most would consider a luxury.

But others say a well-placed computer, like a communal well or an irrigation pump, may become another tool for development.

Information from the computers in this area, where people live in thatched mud huts, has saved the life of a milk cow named Jayalakshmi, prevented the blindness of an old woman named M. Minakshi and routinely warned fishermen of stormy weather that can claim lives.

While Internet cafes have sprung up quickly in even small Indian cities, it is in rural areas, where most people live, that computers must spread if developing nations like India are to close the yawning technology gap with rich countries.

North America, with less than 5 percent of the world's population, has more than half of its Internet users. South Asia -- home to more than a fifth of humanity -- has less than 1 percent, according to the 1999 Human Development Report sponsored by the United Nations Development Program.

But how to make computers available to villagers has led to divergent approaches. Two of the most intriguing efforts are in the former French colony of Pondicherry and in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.

The Pondicherry project was created by the Madras-based M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization that uses science and technology to tackle poverty, with a $120,000 grant from the Canadian government. The foundation provides villages with free technology and information in exchange for the villages' promise to house the computers and staff their operation.

The spread of this approach to more of India's 600,000 villages would ultimately require government money and manpower, with support from nongovernmental organizations and philanthropies.

In contrast, the Madhya Pradesh approach is more entrepreneurial and market-driven. Villages have bought computers with money from their own budgets, then franchised their operation to a local person who charges fees of 10 to 35 cents for government records and other services available at the click of a mouse. The operators, who receive no salary, keep most of the money but give a portion back to the village and state governments.

The story of the cow and the computer is a parable showing that sometimes the simplest information is the most valuable.

Some months back, Subrayan Panjaili, a round-faced woman who cannot read or write, sat in the courtyard of her small home in the village of Kizhur, in Pondicherry, with the family's only milk cow, Jayalakshmi. For five days and nights, the cow moaned while in labor. Something had gone wrong and she was unable to deliver her calf. Mrs. Panjaili grew ever more fearful that the cow would die.

"This is the only good income we have," she said, explaining that the four gallons of milk the cow produced each day paid the bills.

Word of Mrs. Panjaili's woebegone cow soon spread to Govindaswami, a public-spirited farmer who uses one name. The village's computer, obtained through the Swaminathan Foundation, is in the anteroom of his home. The computer is operated full time and for no pay by his 23-year-old, college-educated daughter, Azhalarasi, who used it to call up a list of area veterinarians.

One doctor arrived that night and, by the light of a bare electric bulb, stuck his arm into Jayalakshmi, pulled out the calf's spindly leg and tied a rope to it, then dragged the calf into the world.

The Swaminathan Foundation has sought to give the four villages in its network other practical, highly local information, which is distributed through the village computer network in the local language, Tamil. Generally, that kind of information is not on the World Wide Web.

They distribute the dates that roving medical camps will be set up in various villages. M. Minakshi, 70, who said she felt as if a sari had been draped over her right eye, went to one and discovered that she needed cataract surgery.

Each day, the project's staff also download a map from a United States Navy Web site that shows the wave heights and wind directions in the Bay of Bengal.

On a recent afternoon in the fishing village of Veerampattinam, loudspeakers fixed to tall poles along the broad beach blared out that daily weather report. Bare-chested fishermen in loincloths who were mending nets, repairing homemade wooden boats or just snoozing in the sultry heat perked up to listen.

The four villages taking part in the project are linked to the foundation's hub through an ingenious wireless system. It was dreamed up by V. Balaji, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, who oversees the project for the foundation.

While the foundation's model is relatively costly and may prove difficult to replicate on a large scale, the government of Pondicherry nonetheless plans to expand the project to 50 more villages.

One immediate obstacle, as Mr. Balaji notes, is that local bureaucrats have often been reluctant to give up their monopoly on information, which can be a source of power used to extract bribes.

"We're hoping the bureaucrats will become public servants," said M. S. Swaminathan, the internationally known geneticist who leads the foundation.

One such public-minded civil servant is Amit Agarwal, the creator of the model computer project in the state of Madhya Pradesh. It is Mr. Agarwal who has taken power out of the hands of bureaucrats and given it to village entrepreneurs.

Mr. Agarwal, 29, the chief executive of the Dhar district council, said he believed that while low-level bureaucrats might be tempted to demand bribes, an entrepreneur being paid to provide the records retrieved on a computer would be more inclined to work hard.

He has set up a model project in his district, one of India's poorest, where young men have a franchise from the state to distribute daily crop prices and commonly needed state records for a small fee.

Mr. Agarwal predicts that revenue-generating computer projects like his will spread more quickly than those that depend on scarce state funds. "This is the paternalistic welfare model that the country has been slowly discarding over the past decade as not having worked," Mr. Agarwal said.

Since the project was set up in January, 22 villages have each bought a computer, a modem, a printer and a battery for $1,500 with their own money and agreed to provide a small booth to house the setup.

In each case, the state then picked a young person from the village with at least a 10th-grade education to operate the computer and gave him a franchise to sell information from the state's computer network.

For 25 to 35 cents, villagers buy printouts of documents that they might have spent days trying to get from local bureaucrats: land records, caste certificates and proof of income, among others.

For another 25 cents, any citizen can send a complaint to the state by e-mail -- my pension didn't arrive, my child's teacher didn't show up, my village hand pump doesn't work -- and the state guarantees a reply within a week.

And for 10 cents, a farmer can get a printout listing the prices of any agricultural commodity sold at surrounding markets.

At Bagdi village, wizened, sun-beaten farmers filed in to collect the day's price lists for wheat, garlic and whatever other crops they had to sell. They all said their knowledge of the rates improved their negotiating leverage with middlemen.

"If the price he offers suits me, I'll sell it to him," said Satya Narayan Khati, who grows wheat on his three acres. "Otherwise, I'll take it to market myself."

In Bagdi, the computer booth is operated by Deepak Patel, 20, a gaunt, lanky son of a farmer. Mr. Patel still helps milk the cows and bring in the harvest, but he prefers his computers. After just a few months, he is already making a good living from the long hours he spends selling printouts.

When people come in to e-mail a complaint to the state, Mr. Patel writes out their grievances for them, since most residents of the district are illiterate.

In his booth, as in every computer center visited in Madhya Pradesh and Pondicherry, children crowd in, clamoring for a chance to play on this machine that their elders call a magic box.

"It's better than farming," Mr. Patel said. "Through this you feel connected to the rest of the world."