Category: Deeshaa (Rural Development)

[via Anish] Excerpts from an interview in OneWorld South Asia (related to the Digital Divide and the role of ICTs):

A major concern is that not every one of us benefits equally from these technologies. The communications revolution has bypassed tens of millions of people, and something needs to be done about it.

We are now reaching the point in our technological evolution when we can and must – commit more time and resources to solving the problems of poverty, deprivation and inequality.

Virtually everything we wish to do in the field of communications is now technologically possible. The only limitations are financial, legal or political. In time, I am sure, most of these will also disappear – leaving us with only limitations imposed by our own morality.

The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information in the sense of raw data is not knowledge; that knowledge is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.

ICTs should be part of a wider solution that needs to be applied with care and caution. Information and communications technologies should be part of the solution, and not the only solution.

There have always been disparities in this world the digital divide is just the latest manifestation. I think we need to take a few steps back from the digital hype and first try to bridge the Analog Divide that has for so long affected the less endowed communities and countries.

A computer in every classroom is a noble goal provided there is a physical classroom in the first place. A multimedia computer with Internet connectivity is of little use in a school with leaking roofs or with no roof at all. The top priorities in such cases are to have the basic infrastructure and adequate teachers.

And we have to be careful that we dont create new problems while solving existing problems. The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs a small army of geeks who have reshaped our world faster than any political leader has ever done. And that was the easy part. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek.

Clarke sees voice recognition as the next big thing:

I see voice recognition as the next major step forward which will also overcome current limitations of literacy and make ICTs truly accessible to millions of people.

Voice recognition systems that are now coming into use enable users to bypass the keyboard and dictate inputs directly. But these systems still have some limitations: while they are very valuable for those working alone, imagine the chaos that a whole officeful of talkers could produce!

Besides, the software has to cope with a huge diversity of accents in which the same language is spoken. I cannot resist quoting from my own first attempts to train one of the best current systems. When I said, Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party, the programme revealed its impressive vocabulary with a startling display of political incorrectness: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of apartheid.

But its only a matter of time before this capability will improve and VR applications will proliferate. Better and more sensitive voice recognition systems will iron out current difficulties and make us less dependent on keyboards.

A comment I had heard recently by a UNICEF expert on BCC said that for countries with limited resources, if there was one thing they should invest in, it would be education, especially that of girls. Two articles in the Economist look at education in South-East Asia and more generally, in the poor countries.

Besides abolishing fees, there are several things that governments can do to get more children into school. In rural areas, families are sometimes reluctant to let their children go to school because they need extra hands to work in the fields or perform household chores. One way round this is to provide free food in schools, as happens in South Africa and India. Pupils become less of a drain on the household budget if they are fed in school, and they can also concentrate better. Ideally, they should also be well fed before they reach school age. Malnourishment stunts brains as well as bodies. If severe in the first few years of life (or in the womb), the effects can be irreversible. By one estimate, better nutrition would raise average IQs in poor countries by 10-15 points.

Globally, girls are more likely than boys to miss school. Poor families often choose to educate their sons first, and it is usually girls who drop out to care for sick parents. Sometimes families are wary of letting their daughters walk long distances to be taught by male strangers. Such fears can be assuaged by opening lots of smaller schoolssometimes only a single classroomcloser to where people live, as Egypt has.

Educating girls is doubly important because it makes them more likely to ensure that their own children are educated. As countries grow richer, girls tend to catch up with boys academically. In parts of western Europe, they have overtaken them. That is still far off in poor countries, but it is never too early to start trying.

This week, the results of the four state elections in the Hindi heartland (MP, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh and Delhi) were out. The Congress was the incumbent in all four states. It lost three of them to the BJP, managing to only retain Delhi. Shekhar Gupta of the Indian Express captures the mood prevailing in the Indian voters and the sad state of the Congress:

[Sonia Gandhi’s] generals are not willing to match their skills with the BJPs, her colonels are not willing to leave the comfort of their homes and business to join battle, and the troops are in disarray. Amazing, how a party that brought in the computers into elections (1984), then Sam Pitroda with his promise of high-tech revolution and Rajiv Gandhi with his promise of 21st century India, now speaks a language frozen in the seventies. Its thinking on economics has regressed, it sees privatisation as the loot of public wealth, banking reform an insult to the memory of the senior Mrs G, clings to the least creative of its old guard (one of them told me the other day the way for the Congress to revive itself was to re-establish contact with the generation of freedom fighters!), is afraid of throwing a Manmohan Singh even into the Delhi campaign, and refuses to create a new B-team. It fails to project its chief ministers as stars. Why was S.M. Krishna not paraded in Jaipur and Bhopal? I will do for tourism in Rajasthan what my colleague did for IT in Bangalore. That is one line we never heard from a Gehlot.

It instinctively denies the arrival of a new India, awash with a feel-good mood not seen since Rajivs first year in power, and powered by a new voter who asks real questions on his quality of life, rather than succumb to old slogans, mantras and the pull of any dynasty. You send tacky, free school-bags to children who have seen better bags on their TV screens. You insult them. What this voter is telling you is, dont throw me a freebie. Promise me a much better tomorrow its my right. The party fails to understand that the Gandhi-Nehru nostalgia may not have ended but is waning, that nearly five crore (50 million) voters in the 2004 elections would have actually been born after Indira Gandhis assassination and that they will vote on a promise of a better future than on the prejudices or loyalties of the past. How come the same voter that throws you in the gutter in three states, votes you back so thumpingly in the fourth? A party that does not ask itself these questions and wrestles with their answers lives in the past and the only message it gives its constituency is that it cannot guarantee a future. And if there is one thing the New Indian Voter is not ready to compromise with, it is the future. Irrespective of what your ancestors did for his in the past.

I am so glad that, finally, at least in some Indian states, we are moving away from caste- and religion-based politics. The focus is on development – social and infrastructure. People want to talk about the future, not gloat over the past that was promised and never delivered. Once the paper’s aspirations start rising, we will also see a new, younger and more dynamic generation of people enter Indian politics.

The past few years have seen an amazing rise in self-confidence and self-belief in urban and semi-urban India. I hope that the winners in the elections can deliver on the expectations and promises. India has an opportunity that cannot now be squandered. For two generations, the politicians have overpromised and underdelivered. Hopefully, this time around the message from the electorate is very clear.

As part of an article on extending the Internet via the road, The Economist writes on an innovative idea to take the Internet to the masses in India:

At The Future in Review, a wide-ranging technology conference held in San Diego earlier this year, Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think-tank, outlined a cunning scheme to provide e-mail access in rural India using buses. Each bus would be equipped with an e-mail server and a high-power Wi-Fi base-station, with a range of a mile or so. This communicates with nearby computers in homes, schools, offices or post offices, delivering and collecting e-mail wirelessly as the bus drives past, so that there are a handful of deliveries and collections each day. The buses connect to the internet when they reach the depot at the end of the line. Given the reach of the bus network, it is estimated that this approach could provide national e-mail coverage for a paltry $15m. E-mail by buswhy not?

From what I can understand, this is a project which began as part of Media Lab Asia, and is called DakNet. Here is more from an article recently in the Financial Express:

According to First Mile Solutions founder Amir Alexander Hasson, who helped initiate the two DakNet Wi-Fi pilot projects in Tikawali, a village near Faridabad, Haryana, and Dodabalapur district in Karnataka, We are using IEEE 802.11b equipment at 2.4 GHz. We dont use base stations, but rather our custom DakNet Mobile Access Point (MAP) that is mounted on and powered by a vehicle.

Giving the project details, Mr Hasson said, Essentially, a van roam roams around the Dodabalapur district in Karnataka, stopping at different villages long enough for the local computer to connect to it wirelessly and transfer the data stored in it. From the van to the central database is also a Wi-Fi hop, thus resulting in a wireless end-to-end transfer of information – which is what Wi-Fi is all about. The project involves creating an online database of land records.

Essentially, the DakNet-enabled vehicle drives past a kiosk where it picks up and drops off land record queries and responses. Each day, this is synchronised with a central database. Data is transported through the access point, which automatically and wirelessly collects and delivers data from each kiosk on the network. The transfer of data can take place up to a radius of 1.25 km around the kiosk.

ITC is one of the most active companies in rural India. They have set up over 2,500 e-choupals in the villages and expect income from e-choupals to be more than their tobacco business by 2010. “In the next 5-7 years, ITC will have 20,000 choupals. Since each choupal covers around five villages, the company will have access to 100,000 villages. Each choupal currently serves 500-600 farmers.” To complete the picture, India has about 600,000 villages with about 700 million people in all. “[ITC chairman Yogi] Deveshwar explained that the revenue estimated from choupals in the coming years was not unfounded, given the importance of the rural economy. He said at present the propensity to spend was low among villagers because surplus income was low. However, the choupal network would boost farmers’ income and increase their propensity to spend, he said, adding that this would have a multiplier effect on the economy.”

The e-choupals are spokes, and where there are spokes, there is a need for a hub. The Economic Times writes about their plan to set up rural malls:

ITC is setting up 45 shopping malls in the countryside, each the size of Delhi s Khan Market, to retail everything from John Players clothes and ICICI life insurance to Eicher motorbikes. The first five malls, costing more than Rs 20 crore, will be ready for shoppers in 16 weeks.

What ITC gets in return is a dedicated customer base, savings through procurement of cheaper farm produce, and a cut ranging from 3%-40% of sales value from the brands which use its shelf space. The focus at present is Madhya Pradesh, where ITC has already managed to set up an exhaustive network of e-chaupals for procurement of soyabeans and sale of agri-inputs.

Built on 5 acres, each mall would cost ITC anything between Rs 3-5 cr [USD 650K – 1.1 million], depending on the price of real estate. To put that area in perspective, most malls in the large metros are built on just 2-3 acres of land. Each mall will be a self-contained unit, with facilities for storage of goods, warehousing of agricultural produce procured by ITC, shelf display, and parking. Each store will be manned by at least five full-time ITC sales staff, and the number could go up in busy seasons of the year.

This interests us is the context of our RISC ideas. We are working to set up a pilot by mid-2004. RISC’s goals are broader: “Fundamentally, the specific market failure that RISC addresses is that of coordination failure. RISC is designed to coordinate the activities of a host of entitiescommercial, governmental, NGOs. It synchronizes investment decisions so as to reduce risk. It essentially acts as a catalyst that starts off a virtuous cycle of introducing efficient modern technology to improve productivity that increases incomes and thus the ability of users to pay for the services, and so on. It creates a mechanism that reduces transaction costs and therefore improves the functions of markets.”

Continue reading ITC’s Rural Hubs and Spokes

Atany Dey explains why India should develop a comparative advantage in solar technology:

The case for India to invest in R&D for solar technology is so plain that I find it incredible that everyone and his brother is not shouting about it. Consider the following facts. First, India is conventional fuel poor. We do not have oil and have to import a good portion of our current needs. We cannot afford to rely on the whims of foreign oil producers. There is one 800-lb gorilla in the oil market and it has cornered significant sources of the global oil market. So for strategic reasons, India must reduce its dependence on foreign oil to meet its energy needs.

Second, rich nations have the resources to pay (one way or another) for the oil they consume, India cannot. For instance, the US pays for oil by directly paying the producers and indirectly by maintaining a huge military and using force strategically.

India is blessed (?) with a lot of solar energy delivered free. The sun shines too hard most of the time and very few people are making hay.

Finally, any desired technology can be developed if you throw sufficient money at it. That is a basic fact of the modern world. Everything that is theoretically possible can be developed given sufficiet commitment in terms of time, effort and resources.

India needs solar power. It has a very large market for cheap solar power. India should invest in developing solar power. If India invests say $10 billion, the return on investment would be mumble billion $. First, India would save on energy imports. Then India would develop comparative advantage (and perhaps competitive advantage) in the field. Thus India would be able to sell that technology to other countries. There is a first mover advantage in being the leader in this field. Fortunately, the US and other developing countries are not taking the development of alternative energy sources very seriously. So the field is not crowded and India has a tremendous advantage.

My policy recommendation is simple. Set up a national goal to make India the Solar Power SuperPower (SPSP) in the next 10 years. (Pres Kalam, are you there?) To achieve that goal, spend Rs 500 billion (approximately $11 billion) to get an R&D started at space travel speed using the best brains that exist anywhere in the world. Hire the best scientists and pay them so much that they would not consider working on anything else. Create programs in all the Indian research institutes and reward people with sacks of gold or whatever floats their boats to get them to devote all their talents to that one aim of making solar energy technology in India so good that we don’t have to import a single drop of oil and can tell our Arab friends to take a hike. Indeed, once the demand for oil falls, they would have to take a hike because they would not be able to afford cars.

Atanu Dey writes why the fundamental focus for achieving the UN’s Millenium Development Goals should be on rural poverty:

Poverty is manifested as an interrelated set of problems such as hunger, disease, child mortality, gender bias, and environmental degradation. All of the factors that the MDG seeks to address are causally related.

For instance, hunger is a consequence of poverty because even when the food supply is adequate, the poor suffer from hunger and malnutrition. Hunger and malnutrition is in part responsible for low productivity and low incomes. Low or even negative savings coupled with credit constraints do not allow investment in education. Lack of education leads to poor understanding of hygeine and health care, high birth rate and child mortality, and poor maternal health. Eliminating poverty therefore is a necessary condition for the eradication of the whole set of inter-related effects.

Poverty is the most common characteristic that defines the populations of developing countries. It can be broadly classified as income poverty and non-income poverty. Non-income poverty in terms of education, health-care, access to markets, etc., directly produce the income poverty that traps the average citizen of developing countries.

Thus, income poverty and non-income poverty are closely related. The problem appears almost intractable because the two kinds of poverty are mutually reinforcing. Any solution that does not address both kinds of poverty is unlikely to be successful in poverty alleviation. The question of how to raise huge populations out of this poverty trap is a formidable challenge that governments, multilateral organizations and policy makers face.

Another way of classifying poverty is to distinguish between urban and rural poverty. Urban poverty, to a certain degree, is the result of rural poverty. Often, lacking economic opportunities, rural populations are forced to migrate to urban areas. An excess rural migrant population which cannot be gainfully employed in the urban areas leads to urbanpoverty. Therefore, alleviating rural poverty is a precondition to solving a large part of the urban poverty.

On a related note, I was reading Tracy Kidder’s account of Dr Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti – “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” Farmer makes a similar point in the context of healthcare – one cannot only treat the diseases amongst poor people and not worry about what causes them.

[via Abhijit Gore] McKinsey Quarterly had an article in 2001 on India which still makes interesting reading. The basic premise: “In a decade, the country could more than double its gross domestic product per capitabut only if its government and people act quickly and decisively.” To double GDP in a decade, India needs a growth rate of just over 7% per annum. We finally seem to be getting there. But we should be able to do a lot better. The article had a 13-point prescription for India:

1. Completely eliminate the reservation of products for small-scale industry; start with 68 sectors accounting for 80 percent of output of reserved sectors

2. Equalize sales taxes and excise duties for all categories of players in each sector and strengthen enforcement

3. Establish an effective regulatory framework and strong regulatory bodies

4. Remove all licensing and quasi-licensing restrictions that limit the number of players in affected industries

5. Reduce import duties on all goods to the levels of Southeast Asian countries (10 percent) over five years

6. Remove the ban on foreign direct investment in the retail sector and allow unrestricted foreign direct investment in all sectors

7. Resolve unclear real-estate titles by setting up fast-track courts to settle disputes, computerizing land records, freeing all property from constraints on sale, and removing limits on property ownership

8. Raise property taxes and user charges for municipal services and cut stamp duties (tax on property transactions) to promote the development of residential and commercial land and to increase the land markets liquidity

9. Reform tenancy laws to allow rents to move to market levels

10. Privatize the electricity sector and all companies owned by the central and state governments; in the electricity sector, start by privatizing distribution; in all other sectors, first privatize the largest companies

11. Reform labor laws by repealing section 5-B of the Industrial Disputes Act, by introducing standard retrenchment-compensation norms and by allowing full flexibility in the use of contract labor

12. Transfer the management of the existing transport infrastructure to the private sector; contract out the construction and management of new infrastructure to it

13. Strengthen extension services to help farmers improve their yields

Atanu has written three posts as part of a series [1 2 3]. Key points:

What exactly is the role of ICT in any economy? The answer can be succinctly stated as: It reduces transaction costs.

What, you may ask, is transaction costs? The answer is this: pretty much everything is transaction costs, with a little bit of physical stuff thrown in.

Transaction costs are ubiquitous. Consider what happens in any organization, say a car manufacturing firm. Cars are produced by people using machines to transform steel and other stuff. If you add up the costs — labor, material, and machines — the car would not cost all that much. But when you add the fact that there are other people employed by the car firm who have nothing to do with the manufacturing of cars, you realize that they represent transaction costs. For instance, you have managers, and accountants, and secretaries, and human resources divisions, … the list goes on. They all represent transaction costs. And the greater the transaction costs, the higher the cost of production. Why do firms exist? Because they reduce transaction costs.

Ultimately, one can explain pretty much all organizations as an attempt to systematically reduce transaction costs. Economies of scale, scope, and agglomeration themselves arise from the reduction of transaction costs.

Turning to the issue of developing countries and the use of ICT, the matter central to our discussion. Developing countries are resource constrained and therefore reducing transaction costs is a great way to stretch resources.

A high-quality always-on widely available affordable communications network is an absolutely essential part of the infrastructure for any economy, especially a developing one. Since this requires significant fixed costs and since there are immense positive externalities (network and consumption externalities), the market will underprovide communications networks. Therefore, the provision of a communications network should be subsidized for achieving the socially optimal solution. Conversely, taxing the provision of a communicatins network would have negative consequences. And that is what short-sighted money-grubbing developing country policy makers do: they tax the sector instead of subsidizing it.

[via Vivek Padmanabhan] NYTimes has an article entitled “India’s Poor Bet Precious Sums on Private Schools.”

In this democracy of more than one billion people, an educational revolution is under way, its telltale signs the small children everywhere in uniforms and ties. From slums to villages, the march to private education, once reserved for the elite, is on.

The schools, founded by former teachers, landowners, entrepreneurs and others, and often of uneven quality, have capitalized on parental dismay over the even poorer quality of government schools. Parents say private education, particularly when English is the language of instruction, is their children’s only hope for upward mobility.

Such hopes reflect a larger social change in India: a new certainty among many poor parents that if they provide the right education, neither caste nor class will be a barrier to their children’s rise.

Even those with little cash to spare seek out these schools. Ram Babu Rai, who farms less than an acre and earns about 1,000 rupees a month ($22), working part time, sends one of his three sons to a private school here. Just sending one boy is a struggle, costing him 2,200 rupees a year ($49), including the 10-year-old’s orange and navy blue uniform.

“With my little means, I have to manage my family,” Mr. Rai said. “But still, I thought to spare some extra money for the boy, so he will do well in life.” A member of the cowherders’ caste, Mr. Rai dreams that his son will become a “big officer.”

India’s government has long devoted more attention and proportionally more resources to higher education, which has helped it soar in so-called knowledge industries.

But it has neglected elementary education. India spends only about 1.7 percent of gross domestic product on primary education, and 3.4 percent for education overall (compared with about 5 percent for Brazil). Up to 40 million children are out of school, something the government hopes will be remedied by a law passed in 2002 that made free and compulsory education a fundamental right for children up to 14.

But the law did not address the quality of government schools, and that, parents say, is the problem.

Continue reading Education and India’s Poor