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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 .
This will work brilliantly until someone decides to outsource it to California...
BHOOMI patents the process of "online updation".
Even most amenities are computerised, the time it takes for something to be done is so slow. take for instance the railway reservation which is computerised in india. still it takes 1-2 hours standing in the queue to get the ticket. i think digitalization is of no use if it is in no way improving your life.
No wonder the USA is outsourcing to India, its just supporting it's native population!
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
In any case, instead of simputer.org, maybe you wanted this instead? It seems simputer.org's tech specs are out of date. I'm drooling over the 4200.
[o]_O
Given the these facts About 70% of the people live in more than 550,000 villages, and the remainder in more than 200 towns and cities.
Source-O-Factoids
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
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.
Don't I seem to recall that in the last election in India, heads rolled because rural residents(who were by far the majority) were pissed off at getting left behind?
This strikes me as a "don't feel guilty about the fact that your Indian employees make 50 times what the rural Indian farmer does" article.
And- furthermore-, rural Indian farmers don't need goddamn "ruggedized" linux-flavored PDAs. Clothe them. Get them running water. Get them something resembling health care. Employ them. Educate them. Roughly in that order. Notice nowhere in there was "give them gameboys so they can check their land ownership status".
Not that we're any better in the US. Teachers may have a PC in every classroom or a shiny lab of computers, but students have to share copies of the book they're reading.
Please help metamoderate.
Also, the bulk of people are against technology and change, as seen in the last elections. They want the old government which promotes anarchy and curruption. So, they will get what they want. Oh come on! every other govt in the world is corrupt. True its a bit worse in India, but what makes you say that people are against technology? rampant anarchy? developments will be quenched pretty soon? pretty harsh there buddy. look at the technology growth in the past 10 years. Telecom, roadways, railways(for crying out loud India has the largest railroad network), computers... this is dispite the so called "anarchy" you mentioned.
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.
This is absolutely not a troll, its a perfectly serious question.
Pre-empting all the knee jerk posters who will claim that rural Indians need food and water first, let me inform you that India already overproduces food; the problem is that the rural folk don't have purchasing power. And the reason they don't is that they don't have tech, and are therefore totally dependent on the urban/industrial sector. So if they are to get food they need more technology, which is what the Indian gov't is trying to do.
Those Telecoms, roadways and railways are there to make it easier to abuse the abundant, expendable labor; not to help that labor. Any improvement to the general populace's standard of living is strictly coincidental. But in defense of you're post, I don't think it's so much that India's gov't is any more corrupt, it's that in a poor nation the negative impact of that corruption is more pronounced. Basically, any human society is going to have a certain amount of it's population living like Kings, with the rest fighting over the scraps. It's just a question of which society has the best scraps.
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Of course, we can always point to the negative and say stuff like "what about:
rooting out corruption?
solving the water scarcity problem?
controlling pollution?"
etc. etc. I am not saying that we should ignore these problems and think the Digital Village is the greatest thing to happen in India. All I am saying is that we should appreciate the efforts and keep on workin to do more good deeds, not belittle the efforts by pointing out existing problems.
After all, quoting the Batman: "There will always be problems, but every problem has a solution."
There have been many articles about India and computers which I had considered to be more of a fad than any real use. However, since I am from Bangalore, Karnataka, I confidently feel that this is one of the best computerization efforts.
Karnataka had a lot (and still continues to have) land disputes, that should never have happened. Many are simple cases of forgery that become complicated by corrupt/incompetent officials, non-transparent machinery. I see computerization as a good tool to increase transparency, thereby reducing corruption. With computerization, it is actually possible to query the database and ensure that one deed does not overlap another deed.
Corruption can never be solved by technology. But, if technology is implemented well, it can empower common people (which, in this case, includes me, since I plan to own land in the near future) to fight back against corruption.
What I am most afraid of, is that power is effectively transferred from corrupt officials to the companies who write/manage the software. So, even if the software companies may be free from corruption, it may not hold good for too long, since "power corrupts". A good criteria would be how transparent is the database.
However, from what I know, this particular project is a very good initiative, and one of the few projects that can be showcased as an example of computerization that can help the rural poor. True, software cannot feed hungry people, but it can empower them to grow the own food.
The Hindu culture does include the notorious caste system, but it is not as bad as it is made out to be. For the most part, the caste system is dead in urban areas. It does exist in rural areas, but that is because rural areas have always been a haven for traditional values and culture, in every country.
According to the CIA World Factbook, only a quarter (2002 est.) is below the poverty line, and this is declining rapidly. Israel has 18% below the poverty line, so claims of India's poor social
and economic state are exaggerated.
ALL countries believe their way is the right/best way, be it EU, US, UK, Australia, China, India or even Iraq. It's not nationalist socialist; it's simply patroitism. It's just a different form of the "We're #1" tagline.
Having been to India (rather than just reading about it), I can tell you that Indians are generally respectful of all customs and peoples, as it is a multi-cultural and diverse place. There will obviously be extremists who are narrow-minded, but every country has those.
The "Rush to India" as it were is not about nationalism, or hype. It's about money. India offers similiar services for less.
The last elections were not a mandate against technology and change, but rather a mandate against the insensitive, block-headed policies of the previous government.. a government which couldn't see past its own rhetoric and coined the phrase "India Shining" which was an insult to the vast majority of Indians whose living standards had not improved but instead had worsened.
It is fine and dandy to talk about IT, fancy cars, fancy electronics but when your talk also indicates an attitude of utter disregard for people who were committing suicides due to poverty caused primarily because of governmental negligence, then we have the classic scenario where an old phrase fits - the case of an insult upon injury.
The people of India, for once, decided not to tolerate that.
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/
dude... its YOUR comments that reek of racism! but let me give you the benefit of doubt and just say that you simply got hold of the wrong sources (of the worst kind!) to know about india.
as regards to computerization, it is slowly but surely improving peoples life. yes, you still need to stand in a railway line for half an hour but can you neglect the HUGE population these services cater to?! besides, i can have my rail ticket delivered at home by booking over the internet and paying less than a dollar extra for it. so, no lines for me, ever!
those who talk about "providing bread before pda" - HOW EXACTLY do you provide bread? As "humanitarian" aid that you drop from helicopters after you have finished dropping bombs?!! this technology btw IS helping the farmers grow their own bread more efficiently.
The parent post should be marked flamebait.
New technologies will not suit the currupt and they are the one's who usually have the power to decide what stays and what doesn't.
Although I do agree with the poster's statement, s/he also seems to say that India is at this level. And that's just plain wrong. There lots of parts of India, without access to basic resources, and will continue to be that way for the next 15-20 years if the staus quo prevails. However, that does not prevent the march of technology. As observed in many thrid-world countries, the Mobile Phone base in India is set to overtake Landlines some time this year - why? Because as the parent says, getting landline WAS (and is now only partially) involved dealign with corrupt officials. Whereas getting a mobile phone requires at the most 17 hours of your time in total. Why would these corrupt people want to encourage the use of a technology which has broken their monopoly on communication? Could it be because not all of India is full of these evil corrupt people, and that OVERALL, the Rule of Law is respected in that country, despite the occasional aberrations?Now a person maybe homeless or living in a slum, but the mobile is in the reach of these people. If I could post pictures, I'd prove it to you, but of course somebody would just say that I paid the homeless person to smile into the camera. I've noticed that for some particular reason there is a malicious campaign to discredit India, at every opportunity. Note how most posts about India go:
--Insert positive statement about India here -- followed by "But India is full of poor peeople, and everybody is hungry and starving and won't be able to afford anything anyway"
Finally, only a fool would claim to know what the People's verdict was the last Indian General Election. Even the current ruling political party doesn't claim it has the People's Mandate. the only thing we know for a fact is that BJP lost. But nobody won. And it's no rejection of economic reform, because everybody knows that Congress was the first party to start economic reform. Finally, technological progress in India is never rejected. It is simply rejected in its Western form, then over a large or small time period adapted to Indian standards, culture and society. When satelite Television started of India, it was considered a threat to Indian culture, because all ti showed were American programs, with American newscasters and americans sports. Then within a year or two of its launch, it was showing Indian music on MTV, Cricket on the Sports channels, and purely Indian content on the entertainment channels (alongside the American and British stuff).
Dunno why I bothered to respond to the flamebait, but I did....
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What a load of crap. Who is going to build those railways and roads? Who is going travel by them? Apparently slave labour, judging by your post. Person A is living in a village, which has no roads connecting it to a big city, or a railway line. If person A gets struck by a debilitating disease, how is s/he going to get access to supplies, food, healthcare? By magic? Oh sorry, this all to exploit labour. This parent post should be marked flamebait too.
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Also, the bulk of people are against technology and change, as seen in the last elections. They want the old government which promotes anarchy and curruption. So, they will get what they want
/, etc. NOT a anarchy?
Yeah, right. The bulk of people wanted better livelihood and wages. Technology was just the next logical step. The previous govt. ignored the first two needs and focused on the third instead.
Tell me, is the present US Govt. curroption-free? If so, why the issue about the nexus between conglomerates and the administration? How are the efforts to suppress information / profile people
Yes, people will get what they want. So be happy and get drunk.
I'm an American, and I know quite a few Indians, and they tell me that government in India is very corrupt. They have even shown me articles from online editions of Indian newspapers lamenting the situation. It seems to me that government corruption in India is a very real problem, and until the people there are able to do something about it, it will hamper India's efforts to truly modernize their entire society. Note that I have never been to India, so I don't know any of this first hand. However, as I mentioned, my Indian friends volunteer this information to me. So I suspect that the problem is a bit more serious than you seem to be suggesting.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
I started to spent some time reading about the Indish culture and econmoy, and figured out that they have a casts system there and that 2/3 of their people are suffering and starving and live in the poorest possible conditions while some of them are quite rich. They also have a strange sense of politics and a strange view of themselves being the only right humans on this globe (we could say national sozialism mentality) e.g. their religion is the best religion, their culture is the pure culture, their knowledge is the right knowledge, their busines is the best busines and so on. It's quite ignorant and disrespectful if it comes to other people, other mentality, respecting other humans on this globe - and yet the IT industry stuffs money up their butt.
It's quite possible that the information you've gathered from your cursory readings has helped you obtain a thorough understanding of Indian culture. As an Indian though, my viewpoint is very different.
The caste system that you addressed no longer exists. It is dead. I am not saying that its effects are no longer present in Indian society, but the caste system is *considered* to be a relic of the past.
I have no idea where the notion of Indians thinking they're "the only right humans on this globe" has come from. When you say we think our religion is the best religion, which one do you refer to: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity, etc? When you say we think our culture is the best culture, which one do you refer to? I believe India recognizes 18 languages, and seeing as how a unique language is often indicative of a unique culture, it would suffice to say that India is very diverse culturally. When you say we think our knowledge is the right knowledge, which one do you refer to? I have cousins majoring in medicine, english, economics, etc.
What I'm trying to say is that India is very diverse culturally and academically. Just because we mostly have the same skin color, it doesn't mean that we're all the same. With so much diversity it is impossible for any group to think that they are the "best."
I was based near Dusseldorf for a 3 month internship in a univ research group back in 2000. The green card program had just started then. At that time, I was interviewed by a college newspaper, and I was astonished at find that the paper had twisted the facts and said that "the first green card aspirants have arrived at...". I was a college junior at that time who had absolutely no ambitions for a green card. Things like these and some others (like being called a brownie at the supermarket) created a bad taste in the mouth but I _do not_ blindly brand the Germans as racist xenophobes. I do hope that you get a chance to change your perception. Btw, my _entire_ code was accepted in an industrial strength compiler, so that is a testament to the programming abilities you were referring to.
Other than that, the bottomline is that its the patriot in you who is speaking out, who is wary of the total Indian stranger. I understand that and do hope that you do not let your judgement be misguided by that.
Information technology has definitely simplified life for both the Rural and Urban Indian. Bhoomi is one of many projects that dot the landscape: The e-seva kendras in Hyderabad (electronic service centers where the power, water, telephone and other bills could be paid at one place), the spot billing of power consumption using hand held computers/palm tops, Simplified registration of sale of properties, registration of birth and death etc are some other noteworthy projects. Has the corruption reduced? Definitely, yes! Once the Government's system of maintenance of records is de-mystified and simplified, the avenues for corruption reduce. More importantly, the users can now invest the time and energy, which they were earlier investing on payment of bills etc, more productively. These initiatives may not be enough to make administration totally citizen-friendly but they are a good beginning. Though hardly 2% of Indians have Internet connections, a large percentage access cyber cafés. The cyber revolution is like the STD/ISD booths of yesterday. Fifteen years back, it was difficult to communicate on telephone from one mofussil town in India to the other but today, even the most interior villages have STD/ISD booths. Development is not restricted to only Information technology but also in other fields like Education, Health, Housing and Infrastructure. As India is vast, the extent of development is not the same everywhere. Parts of North India are at least five-six years behind the South and the West. But, considering that India got its independence (From 200 years of British rule) only in 1947, the advances that the Country made are praiseworthy and significant. No room for cynicism, here. The best is yet to be!
Those prior posters who are complaining about India's lack of political and economic transparency (as well as the same problem in many other poor countries) should read De Soto's book.
De Soto's goal is to help the poor - and the countries they reside in (including India) unlock dormant intellectual and financial capital.
Like it or not, India is growing up in ways that will make its poor more enabled - and able to leave poverty behind. Some of this will result in domestic displacement here. That's capitalism, especially when its operating in a way that lets people really *own* something of capital worth, and *leverage* that worth for further wealth.
Right now, India is learning to leverage intellectual capital, and making flegling attempts to improve the property system - there's no stopping this trend.
De Soto should win a Nobel prize for his work. His findings are astounding, and so compelling that every page seems a new insight into wire-ranging economic solutions that lie just under the surface.
What he describes in places like India is an arcane and complex system of underground economies that exist because there is no political/economic structure to permit ownership and transfer of capital. This is a seminal insight.
In fact, De Soto (who has done his research, exhaustively) shows that America went through the travails of a very non-transparent system of property ownership, and found its way out of it.
Bottom line: it's the ability of a culture to create transparent infrastructure that enables the ownership and transfer of capital that leads to development, and freedom ("freedom is participation in power" - Cicero (the Roman sage and philosopher).
Frankly, De Soto's book is one of the most enlightening things I've read on development, ever. It will help the reader understand what prerequisites are necessary to defeat poverty, and enable the poor.
As I write this, many governments worldwide have brought in De Soto (he's Peruvian) and his teams to help figure out new ways to structure capital ownership and capital transfer (leveraging).
This will all take time, and will make a huge difference to everyone - inlcuding Americans (in fact, De Soto presents the American experience as a template for how to begin approaching this problem in other places).
Read the book, and be enlightened.
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.
There are two companies that are working on it. I visited one of these guys a year ago and saw the product. It was cool but wasn't available out in the market. Finally, about 6 months ago, they were out with thier offering. It's priced at about INR 10K or USD 220
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.
There is nothing civilized about your argument, as much as you would like to pretend. You make this lovely broad sweeping statement:
Here's what we found: Indians are very boastful of their capabilities and are very eager to prove themselves, but they don't know squat. They have a particular arrogance about them that is not only annoying, but completely unprofessional - even going so far as to telling us we're doing our jobs wrong, but then failing miserably when they try to do things their own way.
So basically you decided to categorise a nation 1 billion people as being idiots. That pretty much ends any civilized conversation there and then. You see 50-100 Indians and think they represent 1 billion people. How friggin' stupid.
Then in your reply to my reply you state:
The differences are culturally based and more global in scope than you are realizing
So which is it - do Indians not know squat or are there just a few cultural issues to be sorted out?
Finally, you mention that these people went thru your company's selection process. I don't know what more needs to be said there. You picked these people, and now you have a problem with them. Further, you are still mistaken about your joint venture with Tata, clearly. Tata is a brand name, and they have many subsidiary companies. One of them happens to be TCS - Tata Consultancy Services. This company deals in software, and only software, and has no link to manufacturing. If your company is involved in manufacturing, and the people you called in are from the manufacturing arm of Tata (These are firms like TISCO and TELCO), I don't know who the bigger moron is.... Clearly you yourself don't seem to know anything about the joint venture you are working for. And if people higher up in your company don't either, then I am not surprised that the whole project is a fiasco. Which brings me back to my original point. You take some dumb anecdote, and use it to try and discredit a whole country, based on mistakes that your company itself made.
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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.
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.