Ashok Jhunjhunwala & Roshni Menon, Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI), IIT Madras
1.Introduction:
Urban India has been on move over the last ten years and its growth has accelerated especially over the last five. However, the same can not be said about rural India. Urban Indians are full of confidence, but the rural Indians do not see much of a future for themselves. The only change in lives of many rural people is availability of some television, which in fact has created greater aspiration amongst them. They can now visibly see the difference between the lives in Urban and Rural India and can not understand why they are being left so far behind.
In a democratic set up, where some form of election (central, state or local) takes place almost ever year and half, the feeling of deprivation amongst the rural people plays havoc, especially as rural people are 70% of India.s population. Every politician would be forced to promise more and more to rectify the deprivation and Government policies would be forced to be populists. Yet there are a few constructive programs which can really change the lives in rural India. Governments will be over-turned frequently, as no populist measure would rectify the great divide that is getting accentuated with India.s urban growth. In fact, the policies required to sustain even the urban growth would be under threat and would not be consistently pursued. The only answer is a quick and urgent focus on rural areas towards rural transformation.
Over the last couple of centuries rapid growths in the world has taken place in some parts leaving the others to wait in turn. Fortunately in a functioning democratic set-up, this is not viable. India therefore presents a very interesting situation, where growth has to be simultaneously pursued for all sections of people. Solution to rural stagnation is the key to stability.
2. Rural India today
Rural India consists of 700 million people, living in 638000 villages. The villages are characterized by low incomes. About 85% of the households have an income less than Rs 3000 per month (amounting to Rs 600 per month per person, assuming a family of five). Rural India now has very little industry. Its people are mostly under-employed in agriculture. At the same time, agricultural growth in India has slowed down to 1% over the last decade, falling behind even the population growth.
Fortunately most of rural India has some form of roads today (even though often it is in a very bad state) and at least one bus would ply to a village every day. Railway station is not very far off. Highways connect towns, which are rarely farther than 15 Kms. Also, significant number of villages have electrical grid. However the grid has power only during the period when the demand in urban India is low. During peak-demand period, urban India has the capability of sapping all the power produced and the rural areas is pumped only whatever is left-over. So even when the power flows into the rural grid (0 hour to 18 hours a day, depending on the state), the voltage could be as low as 90V (reflecting higher demand) to 440V (during nights when no one is using power). Decentralized power generation in rural India may be the only answer to this problem in the short run.
Telecom technology has advanced very rapidly. Even though only a small percentage of villages today have reliable telecom connection today, the situation is fast changing. With the rural thrust it is reasonable to believe that most villages in India would have mobile coverage and a broadband Internet connection within the next three to four years. One may even hope to get a 256 kbps reliable Internet connectivity in most villages.
3. ICT can be leveraged
Fortunately the Information and Communication technology (ICT) has the potential of being leveraged for transforming rural areas. If, along with ICT connectivity, a solution to decentralized power generation (or storage during off-peak demand hours) can be found, the basic infrastructure for transformation would exist. It is now time to build experiments and programs which can leverage these technologies, so that the efforts can be scaled as soon as ICT and power are available. The experiments need to be conducted today so that the stage is set up for scaling. But without deriving significant learnings from the experiments, scaling could be disastrous.
There have been a number of companies, which are setting up the base infrastructure in the villages, over the last several years. Internet kiosks, run by a village entrepreneur, is the precursor to set up a full-fledged business center in a village, which could connect urban and rural India. While it could be a trade center taking rural goods to urban markets and vice-versa, the most important outcome could be setting up rural production centers, supplying goods and services not just in nearby urban markets, but all over the world. Lower manpower costs will shift production centers to these areas and create wealth there, thereby enhancing the rural incomes. While these possibilities can indeed attain fruition with the help of Information and Communication technologies, significant amount of experimentation and hard work is required to covert the opportunities into scalable realities.
ICT can and needs to be leveraged to promote the following in the rural areas:
Education and training
Health Servicess
Agriculture
Rural BPOs (IT enabled services from rural India)
IT enabled outsourcing of production work
Agro-industry
Small Industry
Commons: Community oriented efforts such as water-harvesting, local governance
Besides, ICT can and has to be used to enable a host of enabling services including financing rural areas at reasonable interest rates, transport and courier services, buying-selling and trading, decentralized energy generation.
Some initial experiments are being carried out in several of these areas. However, only a few organizations in the country have taken up this in any comprehensive manner and have tried to build services which can scale and make a difference. Most others have tinkered and have made ICT an end it itself. They have, at best, set up demonstration projects rather than sustainable ones. There has been some reluctance to commercialize and to scale and these projects collapse as soon as the intervening agencies move out. Also, hardly any attempt has been made to examine the scalability of these projects to a larger number of villages.
4. Some interesting initiatives:
Yet some interesting experiments and initiatives exist. The most significant has been on the education front, where several efforts have shown to benefit young children. The most common of these programs have been training rural children to obtain computer skills. n-Logue Communications, Tarahaat, Drishtee have done this in hundreds of villages around the country training large number of children, who use these basic skills to get a job. But the more interesting initiatives have been providing the rural children an Internet based coaching program to help them pass school exams, particularly SSLC exams. The initial results of experiments on this of TeNeT group of IIT Madras have been fascinating. There are other efforts focused on conceptual education. While the content developed has been attractive, there is, as of yet, no business model for these.
In the area of health care, especially with some inexpensive tele-medicine kits, some interesting experiments are being carried out. A company called, Neurosynaptics have developed a remote monitoring of heart beat, remote blood pressure and ECG measurement. Coupled with video-conferencing, remote diagnostics become feasible. However the delivery of medicines, interfacing with existing health care efforts and business model for delivering health care in the villages need to be still worked out. Results need to be watched over the next year or two.
Another significant difference has been in terms of Rural BPO, where the early signs show this to be a difficult but doable task. One could think of ten to twenty people in each village being employed in rural BPO in coming years. One may initially see migration to urban BPO, once a person gains experience and with time reverse migration when the experienced people go back to rural areas to set up the next set of BPO themselves. The efforts of a company called DesiCrew, a company incubated by Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) at IIT Madras, would be interesting to watch.
Some initial work on IT enabled outsourcing of production (contract production work done in rural areas for urban business), does seem promising; but a lot more needs to be done to make this viable and scalable. Migration of people and migration of work has played a great equalizing role in the world over the last 100 years and one could see this happening to rural India once communication and power infrastructure is available. ICT may enrich poverty alleviation programs in a manner, which has not been possible so far, adding a new dimension to all the rural development efforts.
5.Agricultural support is the key
Yet it is in agriculture, where the maximum difference that needs to be made. Use of ICT can get one to approach the problem in a very different way. ITC e-chaupal and EID Parry have used ICT for providing support to farmers and carry out their procurement for several years. n-Logue Communications and e-Sagoo project of IIIT Hyderabad, has used video-conferencing and photographs to provide advisory to farmers. But these efforts have been far from comprehensive.
ICT based Rural Agricultural Support Centers can be set up in each village, which could provide complete agricultural support to each farm in the village. This would start with creating a Farm History record for every plot, including measurement of soil parameters. It would further carry out weather monitoring, provide agricultural knowledge and advisory services, connecting farmers with experts on video conferencing and market information. Linking farmers to commodity exchanges and to finance and insurance companies would be another task. Let us elaborate a possible approach:
a.One of the biggest issue facing agriculture in many parts of the country is the risk associated with agricultural business. Indian newspapers have been reporting every day suicides committed by farmers when they lose everything in agriculture and can not pay their debt. One of the newspapers recently wrote an editorial questioning whether Farming in India is any more a viable venture.
b.One of the ways to look at the risk is to understand the factors which are not in control of the farmers, resulting into an unpredictable and risky situation. These factors are crop-disease, weather (or rainfall) especially in areas dependent on rains for agriculture and the third is the market prices. Disease can wipe out a crop when every thing else has gone well. Lack of rainfall can destroy a farmer, who chooses to invest significantly on inputs in the farm that year. Even when everything has worked well and the crop is plentiful and ready to be harvested, price collapse in the market could destroy the farmer. Most other variables are in significant control of the farmers.
c.It is possible to creatively use ICT to mitigate these three risks to a great extent. Experiments have been conducted in using video-conferencing to connect farmers to agricultural experts. As soon as there is a sign of a disease, a farmer can consult an agricultural expert, show the crop and the leaves and diseased parts on video. In almost 95% of cases, suitable solutions which can be applied locally are suggested. This needs to be systematized and scaled.
d.If one examines the rainfall pattern in any area in the last eighty years, it is found that rain fails badly typically once in eight years. In other years, either the farmer gets very good outputs or at least enough to take care of the costs of the inputs. This is an ideal case for insurance, rainfall insurance. The inputs for the agriculture could be covered by the insurance at a small premium. The problem is that rainfall patterns vary quite a bit from one village to another. To accurately determine the rainfall in a village, it is possible to put an electronic rain-gauge in the village connected to some data storage system on Internet. Internet can also be used to manage this insurance. Department of Science and Technology (GoI) has initiated a project to install such low cost weather monitoring stations in 100 villages.
e.The third problem is associated with market-price risk. Fortunately, commodity exchanges now exist in India, where crops can be sold months in advance using FUTURES and even OPTIONS to sell certain amount of crop can be taken at a price known in advance. In other words, it is possible to peg the price of the crop at the time of sowing itself. Coupled with rainfall insurance, it can eliminate all production risks as long as disease can be handled as discussed above. The key is to make this available to a small farmer. ICT can play a great role in enabling this.
Risks aside, steps need to be taken to increase the crop-output which has leveled off over the last decade in India. Yet the productivity is very low as compared to that of most other countries. One of the reasons is that very little is being done to understand the specific conditions of the farm and apply appropriate inputs thereby. One hardly takes into account the soil-conditions and moisture content of a specific farm, figure out what was grown in the last season and how much was the output. Here a Farm Historian System could leverage ICT to provide a micro-level history of individual plots. Input parameters would include rainfall recorded, water irrigated, fertilizer applied, soil test results etc. This then could provide a personalized advisory to help the farmer (esp. marginal farmers) to manage their crop better. The idea is to know the history of the farm so as to decide the kind of crop to be grown and amounts of inputs to be put.
Yet another intervention required is in terms of water harvesting for the village as well as nearby village cluster. Once again, a computer could be used to create topographical maps of the village. If the ground water information can also be added, it would help in planning the micro-irrigation works in the village so that most rains can be captured for the benefit of the villagers.
Agro-industry and small rural industries can also leverage ICT to trade better as well as for knowledge and training. Rural Supply chains are needed to transport goods from a village and financial services need to be developed so that finance is available in rural areas at 10 to 12% interest rates (instead of 24 to 30% interest rates at which most micro-finance companies provide loans). Several interesting experiments are being done in this direction. Both State Bank of India as well as ICICI bank are experimenting with the use of the Internet kiosks as a banking outlet in the villages.
One can go on and on. The key is to build some great pilots quickly where ICT is pre-integrated in rural development work. One must see clear benefit in two to three years. Rural India will not wait longer to scale. India can not afford to let rural India languish.
6. Conclusion
Before we conclude, let us take up an important aspect about building ICT based services for the benefit of Rural India. Services are key to make a significant difference to lives in rural India through the Internet. But this is also one of the misconstrued areas of this endeavor. Many have understood providing services to rural areas to be equivalent to web-development or some software development. Software development is at most a tool and not a service, and constitutes a small part of the effort to build services. Any service must have as its end result, the intention to impact the lives of people in rural India.
Let us elaborate this with an example. A tool or web-development, which allows the farmers to ask questions to some agricultural experts and get an answer, is not by itself a service which would help agriculture. The service would require identifying the right experts and getting them to participate in the process and provide answers that would make a material difference in a timely manner. Also, there is an assumption that such a service is required by the farmers on a continuous basis for which they are willing to pay sufficiently to cover the cost of running an Internet kiosk, connectivity, cost to experts and cost of infrastructure required at the expert.s end. Without this framework, where the complete money flow including the logistics is worked out, it is not a scalable service
To Conclude, IT and Communications have lifted India out of the gloom in last 15 years. It has not just created wealth for the country, but far more importantly, it has created confidence in the country. Youngsters in India no longer consider themselves to be inferior to any one else in the world. Urban middle class youngsters no longer believe that one has to be born rich to be highly successful in the country and thus entrepreneurship is thriving. India is on the move. But this would be incomplete, unless this confidence permeates to rural areas. ICT can help in this, but it would require a lot of effort. One must never forget that ICT is at best a tool. We need to use it to make a difference.