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 .

Comments

also the government

[KrisCowboy]

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.

Re:is it improving peoples lives?

[saurabhchandra]

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.

When they say...

[acceber]

When they say the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer...it's never more evident here. These initiatives are a great source of hope for developing countries.

Internet users relative to population:
USA: approx 54%
Australia: approx 50%
India: approx 2%

Source: CIA Factbook

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: India's digital village

[manavendra]

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

Re:Cynicism

[civad]

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.

Re:Oh Please! The land where police protect crimin

[s.fontinalis]

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.

Re:Oh Please! The land where police protect crimin

[The Cydonian]

Okay, so I'm a closet Rail geek, but technically, Ind Rail is the world's largest rail network under a single management. This is quite different from being the "world's largest (country-wide) rail network", which still is, as a matter of fact, Russia's. Incidentally, IR is also the world's largest employer (has some 2 million or so employees, many of them college teachers, doctors and so on), as also moves the largest number of people per day anywhere in the world, so yup, we're talking of a really massive enterprise here.

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.

Re:Standard responses

[general_re]

India overtakes US in milk production to become largest producer of milk in the world ~= 90 million metric tonnes.

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.

Re:Cynicism

[scrytch]

> As an Indian, I find the level of cynicism in comments in any article related to India quite surprising

Misplaced aggression I guess. Fact is, India's cheap. Pay an Indian a princely wage, with a safe workplace and full benefits ... 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.

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 ... though maybe my profession is.