At a seminar on ‘Bridging the Digital Divide: Towards Developing CSR Strategy and Business Model, organised by the Indian Ministry of Communications and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), many companies shared their plans to sell their products in Indian villages using information technology. The seminar was on how to use ICTs for achieving socio-economic development in the fields of education, health and poverty reduction. Minister for rural development Raghuvansh Prasad Singh said that poverty and unemployment, which still remain big challenges for India, can be tackled head on using information technology. He urged the corporates to empower the rural Indians by building their capacity to live and work.
Shashank Ojha of the e-Government Practice, World Bank, said many rural services will be delivered either free of cost or at subsidised rates. He added that the World Bank is looking at private-public partnerships and expects development organisations to implement services in rural areas.
Ojha recounted the challenges that corporates will have to face in rural India. He said: “The IT industry will encounter problems relating to language as India has numerous languages and this will pose a big opportunity. Also, we need standardisation because in state after state, governments are reinventing the wheel. This is leading to enormous waste in cost, effort and money.”
CII representative S Sen said the organisation plans to use ICTs in some of the poorest districts and have started work in Rajasthan. He said: “We have chosen districts where even water is a problem. The CII is working through its members who have identified sustainable models of development.”
The chief of rural market development, Bharati Cellular Ltd - a mobile telephony provider -, Navaid Khan said that there is a wide gap in rural and urban tele-density, wherein rural areas have less than two per cent tele-density. Khan said: “There still are about 65,000 villages in India which do not have a single phone though there has been excellent growth in the number of people having phones – both mobile and landlines.”
He added that phones have a big role to play in rural development as well as in improving the productivity of people. Khan quoted a study by Waverman, Meschi and Fuss which says that in a typical developing country, an increase of ten mobiles per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points. “The village phone ladies make an average of $71 per month in Bangladesh where the average monthly income is about $25 thanks to the Grameen Village Phone initiative in which women operate 1,00,000 village phones,” elaborated Khan.
Consumer products manufacturer HLL also is a making an ambitious foray in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh through iShakti. Rohit Hari Rajan of HLL said that the company has created nearly 14,000 entrepreneurs in rural areas in 12 states and also have trained women in marketing their products.
Rajan said: “In the iShakti venture, we have created a website which works offline and in which users login, register themselves and get the desired information. The iShakti website has been able to attract 30 users every day in each village and health and agriculture are the most popular areas of content.”
The seminar also witnessed a debate on the Karnataka government’s immensely-successful e-project – Bhoomi Project. The project has been successful because it had no competition as it is the sole provider of land record services. Also, a farmer has to come back to Bhoomi every year because it is only through Bhoomi documents that he can avail of the loans.
An official of the Karnataka government said that the project is now stagnating as it has failed up link up to banks and other government departments. He pointed out that if government services do not improve in other areas, this will soon affect the e-initiatives of the government.
Ojha said the World Bank is in talks with the Karnataka government to scale up the Bhoomi Project and also to bring about some changes and improvements. He said: “We are very keen that e-governance initiatives reach the Panchayati Raj institutions, but here a lot of capacity will have to be built. Though under the e-governance project of the Indian government there is a component for training rural people in the use of ICTs.”
Autor: Rahul Kumar
Quelle: OneWorld South Asia, 15.04.2005
