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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..."
we americans should not allow this to happen.. we could lose our trade advantage
Don't want it to happen? Then do something about it. Fix up your own house instead of deciding to tear down the Joneses 'cause they're committing the crime of hubris by catching up.
Enough people here take the free market as a religion, the sole and primary characteristic of anything good, that I'd expect people to keep that in mind. They usually do in the business world. But ohhhh no, as soon as foreign countries - especially those "subhuman" ones lumped under the title of "Third World," as though Nicaragua, Brazil, Afghanistan and India all belong to a single, undifferentiated bloc of squalor - then they must be foulest evil fit only to be destroyed if they approach our sacrosanct grandeur.
So what the hell is it with that? Is America's hegemony so shaky that you can't stand the thought of another major country getting its technology base built up without wetting yourselves in abject terror?
You don't like it? Then go improve your own country, culture, and economy. Then, maybe you'll have something worth boasting about should you stay on top because of it. Another country pulling ahead worries me a lot less than one country deciding to keep the rest of the world down to protect their precious egos.
If you can't hold an advantage on the world stage by continuing to produce better technology, by managing a better economy, et cedera, then you bloody well don't deserve to.
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
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
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.
Will you for a moment think of "internet access" as something other than Spam, pr0n and /. ?
/.; oh well)
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(of course, this is
The aim is not to provide "internet access". The aim is to provide farmers with live prices, so that they can sell accordingly. A similar project is on at IIT Kanpur (Digital Mandi -- see http://www.iitk.ac.in/MLAsia/digimandi.htm)
The rationale is that, because (a) farmers (i.e. producers) are not aware of what the current market price is, and (b) $BROKER is going to try to maximize profit by any means, the farmers usually end up selling there wares for waaaaaaaay less than the current market price. The diff is such that market price is anywhere between 2 to 5 times the price the farmers get.
Considering how many farmers have very little cash to spend (even by Indian standards), every extra buck per kilo they make is A Good Thing (tm)
[[ Yes, I am an Indian, living here for *quite* some time, and am aware of these problems despite reading
US is now divided as the "Red" and "blue" states. Red States = communist countries. Coincidence? I think not