The Hindu : An `i-community' in the making

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 10, 2002

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An `i-community' in the making

By Anand Parthasarathy

Kuppam (Andhra Pradesh) Oct. 9. Six months after the Andhra Pradesh Government and the U.S.-based Information Technology company, Hewlett Packard, launched an innovative partnership to create the world's first `i-community' here, Kuppam, seems poised to become India's most e-nabled rural reach.

Even as the State Government is working to provide broadband connectivity of one megabits per second in each of the five mandals that make up the Kuppam constituency, browser-based Web services to access government benefits, agricultural information, educational resources and healthcare records, are being test-run. With assistance from a global community leadership training voluntary agency, World Corps, and the Chief Minister's schemes for unemployed youth, a new breed of Kuppam's young entrepreneurs has come forward to set up a chain of Community Information Centres (CICs) — local Cyber dhabas — which also serve as copier shops, telephone booths and dissemination points, for a variety of government welfare schemes.

This correspondent, who visited the `intelligent community' in the making, as part of a media group yesterday, saw tangible signs that the Andhra government's thrust to harness IT as a socio-economic driver, was bearing visible fruit. Auxiliary medical personnel like mid- wives, who make door-to-door calls to the 64,000 houses in the five villages that make up this southern mandal in Chittoor district, routinely enter the data collected on births, deaths, immunisations done, family planning measures adopted etc in a personal computer at the nearest Primary Health Centre (PHC). As the second phase of the AP-HP effort takes off this week — to last one year in a total experiment planned for three years — they will soon be provided, hand-held computing devices where they can directly log their entries in the field and dump them into a base computer at the end of a field trip.

Even in the hitherto most "backward" of the five villages — Gudipally — where literacy is currently around 24 per cent, a single-PC CIC has sprung up — though the three young men who jointly run it, supplement the income from browsers and emailers, by selling stationery and fancy goods. "We get farmers coming in to ascertain the vegetable wholesale prices in Chittoor and Bangalore, by STD calls'', explains S Subramoni, who shared a Rs. 3 lakh bank loan with two friends to set-up the cyber dhaba, "But many locals come here to email their relatives and our youth surf the job employment sites''. A women's self-help group in the same village collects one rupee every day from every housewife and use the corpus to obtain a larger loan from the bank. This is disbursed as micro-credit: Rs. 100 — Rs. 500, after adding a small service charge. There are rarely any defaulters.

World Corps coordinator, Deepa Pravin, explained that the agency provides rigorous training in responsible entrepreneurship to local applicants and assists them in identifying socially relevant local business opportunities. Anand Tawker, Director of HP's India i-community project and convener of the joint committee that steers the AP-HP initiative, explained that the major objectives of the Kuppam experiment were planned for completion in the coming 24 months, and that a few large private sector Indian companies were likely to be associated in achieving some of the goals. HP would provide technology inputs like voice activated systems for interactive local services and solar-backed photography and printing services as a self employment package. It had taken the help of Indian software agencies to realise Telegu language interfaces and create literacy testing systems. Only 90 minutes away by train from Bangalore, Kuppam has the potential of becoming a major vegetable and fruit supplier — if its reach to the urban centre could be e-nabled, the project workers felt.

The Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, who is the legislative representative from Kuppam, has promised his 275,000-strong electorate that his target is to make the constituency 100 percent literate within the project period.

The U.S. printer giant hopes to replicate the first-of-its-kind Kuppam experiment in China as part of its announced "e-inclusion" initiative to deploy part of its global work force in bridging the developing world's digital divide. However, its role in the Kuppam project has been low key, if sustained. None of the villagers to whom this correspondent spoke, recognized the letters "HP" or associated the mostly Indian task force with the American company.

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