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India's Digital Village
sirdude writes "Business Week has a pretty comprehensive story on the impact of projects such as Bhoomi, which are slowly but surely bridging the digital divide in rural India. With entrepreneurial initiatives such as e-choupal, Simputer, and a multitude of other privately-funded projects also beginning to take root, the rural Indian (who comprises about 70% of India's population), is slowly inching his way into the information age. The rest of the third world is watching & waiting, and taking detailed notes :)" And the parts about computerized land records may remind anyone who's read it of Hernando De Soto's The Mystery of Capital .
The Indian Government is sponsoring a couple of projects which aim at improving the agricultural and living conditions of rural India through the use of Information and Communication Technologies(ICTs). I am currently working as a system developer for one such project, Web-based Information Dissemination System. Nice to see govt. of India taking an inititative, finally.
Your experience is a little dated - now you can just log on to a website like http://irctc.co.in/ [irctc] and book tickets. Its couriered to you in a day. I guess the next step is to allow you to print your own tickets but this is extremely handy too.
Watch Out!!
Internet users relative to population:
USA: approx 54%
Australia: approx 50%
India: approx 2%
Source: CIA Factbook
As an Indian-American immigrant I'm both pleased and a bit scared ;) my bros are taking my job -- just joking, but in all honestly, seeing how hard my parents worked as 1st gen immigrants to the US, if the poor people in India all of a sudden learn English (decent - not great i'll admit) and computers, you can watch the salaries of programmers in the US stagnate (due to more outsourcing... it's hard to compete with $1 a day for web design - joke :) don't take yourselves so seriuosly slashdotters - you can always get a job at BlockBuster like me).
on the other hand, it's good that possibly 100-200 million poor poor people (these people maybe have $5 to their name) have a chance to improve their lives - desperate poverty is hard to escape and anything that offers a meager chance of a better life will be studied and digested by them. I hope that they aren't exploited and put into white collar sweat-shops where their job pays them a couple dollars and then most of it goes into "paying" for the computer they are using to do their job (another enless cycle of 'white-collar' poverty) - it's believeable in India because when you have absolutely nothing (not even food) you are willing to do pretty much anything to eat or to have a job. And if you don't like it there are 10-15 people willing to fill your spot. But hopefully by that time, the country's legal system will get a bit better and it can be prevented.
I work for a company in germany which employed 3 people from india with the greencard system 4 years ago. We were 20 germans and 3 indish people. All I can tell you is that we had quite a hard time getting used to them because of their different mentality and their different way to work on projects. It's also hard to tell them something because they feel quite upset quickly or feel like we would be doing this on purpose to nitpick them. We worked with them for nearly half a year until our boss saw that the problems were bigger than he initially thought.
He thought to have hired some perfect geeks with deeper technology skills but he realized that this was wrong. They lack knowledge in nearly every area, they had pretty much communication problems because of bad english, if you told them to comment the code they work on then they exactly did not comment anything, also the produced code was in no way reusable for other projects or structured or far from any logic. Our boss wasted quite some money on them because their demands are quite differently than ours. We here in germany deal with high quality things, project working, and we have quite a high responsibility to our customers who pay us well.
We now hired 2 germans and we can work perfectly with them.
Well the other side of the medal is, that I think that india's IT industry is quite a hype, we have enough and even better skilled people in our own country even if they cost us a bit more but the resulting work is better. We deal with our own people, we keep our own money in our own country, we work with same mentality of people, they know us, we know them.
It's important for every nation to keep their roots of IT industry, the same way silicon valley made it's name years ago as one of the best business for IT stuff, the same way MIT had it's quality name or germany had it's high name, the same way we need to protect those.
India is not the country of geeky IT gurus, it's just a shabby country as every other country we must and we need to stop believing that everything that comes from India is valued as gold. A lot of their stuff is quite uselesss and doesn't fit our standards of quality.
well now, even if some of these projects invite some satire or sarcasm on /. or whether people make foolish observations of "rampant anarchy", etc, the fact remains such projects have been slowly adding up to the nation's wealth, and have been contributing towards improving the quality of life bit by bit:
1. For the uninitiated, India's general elections (which is the world's largest democracy) were carried out using Electronic Voting Machines, and there were no problems relating to counting or whatever. This has previously been covered here
2. India has posted a growth of 10.2% in the last fiscal year, and the new Finance Minister is expected to target even higher growth
3. Projects like Simputer might not attract customers from more developed countries, but then they are targeted and priced for the local masses.
4. eChoupal is an initiative to provide farmers of India all the information, products and services they need to enhance farm productivity, improve farm-gate price realisation and cut transaction costs.
These are just an example of the country-wide measures being adopted as the country is slowly geared towards economic well-being
http://efil.blogspot.com/
I agree. This is a reply to my post about e-voting in India:
Re: India (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 30, @01:51PM (#9021344) Yes, you're a troll. Your stupid country which doesn't even have running water in many places DEFINITELY didn't get electronic voting right (or at all), so shut the fuck up.
I have stopped posting on this site (almost) because I see nothing but a bunch of ignorant, arrogant zealots on this site who are biased against ANYTHING that is non-North America/Europe. ---> I am in the US, btw.
Nobody claimed that computer is the end all solution. But the grandparent said that illiterate people can't handle computers, and I'm simply saying that's not true. We'd like to believe our job requires a bachelor's degree minimum, but there are people who can pick up computers without that, and social experiments, conducted within India itself have shown that kids, whether they can read or not, tend to pick up computers very easily.
My Favourite Meme
Whoa there, have you ever seen the Simputer website? Here's a summary:- except for cute Indic marketing, there's in fact zero value that an Amida adds over, say, a Dell Axim, EVEN in terms of pricing.
I can probably see why you want to "defend" India against trolls (personally, growing immune to the crap these days), but let's use the *right* weapons here shall we? :-)
More than mere navel gazing.
It's safe to say that with rare exceptions (Japan, theOldEU) the world's rail networks are in horrendous shape. "Rail Network" is a gross overstatement here in the States.
Btw, you really don't want to write off IR that easily. They are doing some cool stuff out there; an IR subsidiary has, for instance, developed a fascinating new mass transit solution for India's crowded urban landscapes. They also have a fairly active mailing list, and often respond to polite queries.
More than mere navel gazing.
I have given up reading cooments in articles about India. When it is not an Indian zealot saying how great India is for all the things they are doing or are going to do, it is the guy who bashes India for some particular reason. Slashdot should slow down with these articles until the freaks cool down....
From Bhoomi FAQ
Who has designed the Bhoomi software?
The Bhoomi software has been fully designed in house by National Informatics Centre (NIC), Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India.
NIC is doing really good work on behalf of Govt. of India.
They are planning to develop (or help to develop) web sites with useful information for every district in India (Total no. districts = 601, Districts with websites = 399)
I think some kind of XML site feed exposing district related data (e.g : no. schools, hospitals) will help decision makers to understand patterns and take quick actions and plan better.
One would hope so. That statistic is much less impressive if you calculate per-capita production. The US produced about 77 million metric tons of milk in 2003, or about 262 kg per person per year - for US readers, that's about 67 gallons per person per year, at 3.9 kg per gallon. Taking your number at face value, India produced 90 million metric tons of milk, or about 84 kg per person per year - about 21 gallons per person per year.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
> As an Indian, I find the level of cynicism in comments in any article related to India quite surprising
... and it's still cheap. People lose their jobs here to that, and it creates resentment. It's all fairly understandable that people are going to vent their spleen.
... though maybe my profession is.
Misplaced aggression I guess. Fact is, India's cheap. Pay an Indian a princely wage, with a safe workplace and full benefits
My own source of cynicism, which I'll be arrogant enough to say is not quite as misplaced, is that the savings companies incur will be pocketed by the executives. That's all. Five thousand jobs here and there so the CEO can get a few million in bonuses and sink it all into their mansion or buy some politicians. I have very little faith that the dividends of outsourcing will be recapitalized, but will merely serve to concentrate wealth into an self-perpetuating aristocracy. I just don't see any net benefits on average aside from the fact that people can get even cheaper goods from Wal-mart who will proceed to drive wages ever downward so that people will need to shop there to afford anything.
I say all this as a die-hard capitalist, because these disparities are ultimately bad for capitalism. I don't think we're all screwed as a result
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I regret that my submission on Bhoomi was rejected in mid 2003. interested /. readers should go to the Bhoomi homepage and read about the project. It is truly fascinating and gigantic in scale.
http://www.revdept-01.kar.nic.in/
Techies should make note of the enormous change management, infrastructure and end user adoption issues that are highlighted (dont get turned off by NT, SQL and VB which is what has been used here)
SOME PROBLEMS FACED
1 Data entry agencies were not aware of land records Computerisation data entry screens. It was not one to one data entry process. The data entry involved data transformation which many a times was not done on paper by Village Accountants thus increasing our dependence on data entry operators to use their own knowledge for data entry process. Data entry agency representatives were therefore trained in Bangalore by the Bhoomi team. The meaning of different fields in land records document and their implications was explained to them.
In all divisional and district level workshops also, these agencies were called so that they could interact with Bhoomi team and have independent knowledge of data inputting.
2 Data entry agencies did not have sufficient infrastructure with them. They had old computers, most of the time, 80486 based machines which could either not run Windows or if it could, its processing speed was very slow. They did not have enough printers and UPS either.