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Joining the Global Village
Sandeep writes "This article tells of an initiative in rural India, to provide internet access for farmers. The initiative is called e-choupal, a name taken from the Hindi name for village square. An incongruous image when you consider they still use bullock carts for carrying the produce..."
But seriously there are great things that small farmers can do with connectivity, it has a great possibility to increase these peoples quality of life.
Fo those who do not wish to deal with the sign-in process...
Here it is:
Indian Soybean Farmers Join the Global Village By AMY WALDMAN
Published: January 1, 2004
TIHI, India -- At least once a day in this village of 2,500 people, Ravi Sham Choudhry turns on the computer in his front room and logs in to the Web site of the Chicago Board of Trade.
He has the dirt of a farmer under his fingernails and pecks slowly at the keys. But he knows what he wants: the prices for soybean commodity futures.
A drop in prices on the Chicago Board, shown in red, could augur a drop in prices here, meaning that he and fellow soybean farmers should sell their crop now. An increase there argues that the farmers should wait for prices to rise.
"If it goes up there, it goes up here," Mr. Choudhry said. The correlation is rough but real. Real, too, is the link between farmers in rural central India and around the globe, thanks to a company's innovation.
The concept is the e-choupal, taken from the Hindi word for village square, or gathering place. The twist is the "e": providing a computer and Internet connections for farmers to gather around. Mr. Choudhry supervises the project for Tihi and several nearby villages.
E-choupal allows the farmers to check both futures prices across the globe and local prices before going to market. It gives them access to local weather conditions, soil-testing techniques and other expert knowledge that will increase their productivity.
Nonprofit organizations have tried similar initiatives but none have achieved anywhere near the scale that e-choupals have. There are now 1,700 in this state, Madhya Pradesh, and 3,000 total in India. They are serving 18,000 villages, reaching up to 1.8 million farmers.
As a result, say those who have studied the concept, the company behind e-choupals, ITC Ltd., has done as much as anyone to bridge India's vast digital divide: most of its one billion people have no access to the technology developed by some of their fellow Indians, whether in Bangalore or Silicon Valley.
E-choupals may offer a model for all developing countries.
"It is a new form of liberation," C. K. Prahalad, who led a case study on e-choupals for the University of Michigan Business School, said of the transparency and access to information they give farmers.
More than two-thirds of India's people still depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. With little chance of the huge manufacturing boom that has employed many rural poor in China, the challenge is to increase farmers' productivity.
Even more tantalizing, ITC now has the means to reach into some of India's 600,000 villages, where 72 percent of the people live and where the greatest potential markets lie. Most businesses never venture to an area with fewer than 5,000 people, said ITC's chairman, Y. C. Deveshwar.
Eventually the company expects to sell everything from microcredit to tractors via e-choupals -- and hopes to use them to become the Wal-Mart of India, Mr. Deveshwar told shareholders this year.
"We are laying infrastructure in a sense," Mr. Deveshwar said. Sixty companies have already taken part in a pilot project to sell services and goods, from insurance to seeds to motorbikes to biscuits, through ITC.
By overcoming the infrastructure problems that have hampered progress in India's villages in the past -- ITC decided to use satellites and solar panels, for instance, to sidestep the state's shaky power supply and lack of phone lines -- and by offering full Internet service on the computers, the company has instantly broadened villagers' horizons.
"We never dreamed of this, that our vi
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Well, it seems that Indian powers that be have focused on making India a tech savvy country, providing programming education to her inhabitants... that's a good thing... the problem is that when you deal in selling cheap sooner or later some other will sell even cheaper.
What will happen to all these people when some African, East Asian, or emerging former Soviet republic offer the same services with the same quality at a lower cost.
ON the other hand, India should definitely do something to feed most of her population, tear down the caste system (yeah, India may be the most populous democracy in the world, but a very unjust, quite corrupt one), and stop spending so much money on the more than morally unsound purpose of eventually blowing Pakistan to pieces and try to challenge China as the local superpower. This could also be applied to Pakistan and other countries in the area.
Many will call me a troll, but the truth is that is sad to see such a wonderful people suffer so much under the hands of such corrupt, incompetent leadership.
As many Non-gov agencies will tell you in order to help someone you have to feed him and provide him with clothing and shelter first. Then you can start thinking about an education.
... y Dios vio que Linux era bueno... Genesis 99.666
A friend of mine went to several Indian villages to do a documentary and tells me that there are many projects initiated by the government to bring modern ideas and methods to villages that have functioned, more or less, the same way for hundreds of years.
These projects are bringing new ideas and ways of thinking to the villagers (like gender equality), but at the same rate, many of the young people of the village are being encouraged more and more to leave the country and find their fortune in the city.
Now will this internet-access for all encourage young people to stay in the country, doing all of their work and research online; or, will this extra exposure encourage more to leave? I'd be interested to hear others' views on this.
Mod this one -- better formatting
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I don't get it. Why is it whenever countries like India start coming up some people in west like you get scared?
I think whenever people talk about fall of western civilization they make two serious assumptions which are wrong--
a)West has always been rich and powerful. FALSE
Figures for 1750
share of world manufacturing output China(32%)+ Old India(24%) ==56%
share of Asia == 80%
share of west = 18%
share in word population
west = 20%
asia = 60%
So, Asia outmanufactured west even propotional to it's population, and, this was true for pretty much all of the known history. Asia being even wealthier as you go back in time. Why do you think columbus wanted to discover india? for its famed money and riches. Ofcourse he ended up discovering America, and called the natives Indians which frankly causes so much confusion.
After 1750, bristish de-industrialized India,and it stagnated(for e.g. never in the recorded history were there any famines in India before 1800s. They cut off thubs of all the textile weavers becaus ethey couldn't compete-- simple solution no thumb no production etc. etc.), and China's wealth fell after 1800s.
Read this book:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.
and this article for the numbers
http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/jun/08ra
b) Rise of India+China means fall of west FALSE.
This is not a zero sum game. With world trade both west and asia will end up getting richer.
Is it really a good idea to disrupt these peoples' traditional way of life, so that they can download pornography? That's what'll happen, make no mistake. The do-gooders implementing this change don't care a whit for the traditional way of life, and in fact want to destroy it altogether because it doesn't fit into their "modern standards". The children will see a larger world outside their village, and quite naturally won't want to live in a mud hut when they can see everyone else in the world is living in skyscrapers.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
(I was putting together a submission for Slashdot, but never got around to it, and now I can't find my notes. Argh!)
Some might think that tossing the Internet (5 whole laptops!) would be a violation of some sort of nanny Prime Directive and bad for them.
Sadly, they're already in a bad way with the common problems of marginalized indigenous cultures shoved off their land: alcohol, suicide, solvent abuse, etc. I doubt five computers and Internet could make things any worse!
And lose them too, fsck, fsck! *sigh* I had some good points and links. I'll go complete my morning coffevolution and if I find them, I'll submit it.One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Now will this internet-access for all encourage young people to stay in the country, doing all of their work and research online; or, will this extra exposure encourage more to leave? I'd be interested to hear others' views on this.
At some level, this type of information access may accelerate the flight of the young from rural areas. Increasing the productivity of Indian farmers means the India needs fewer farmers. This has good and bad effects.
On the one hand, increasing the profitability and productivity of Indian farmers will mean more food, cheaper food, and better standards of living for many of people in both rural and urban areas. India will change in the same way that the U.S and other "developed" countries have changed -- shifting from 90% rural to 90% urban.
On the other hand, more productive farmers means less farm employment. This leads to the question of jobs for former farmers. If India cannot create jobs for former farmers, these people will have a much lower quality of living.
The potential for telecommuting is very interesting, but does require certain economic prerequisites. Telecommuting requires every worker to have their own internet terminal and full-time access. This depends on the cost structure of rural internet workers vs. urban non-internet workers. If the labor cost of rural workers plus the cost of internet access is less than the labor cost of urban workers plus the cost of urban real estate and non-internet business processes, then telecommuting will occur. As the price of internet access drops and the wages of urban Indians rises, some types of white-collar employment will shift back to rural areas.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.