'Magic box' a lifeline to India's poor farmers

["Irfan Khan" <KhanIA@super.net.pk>]

Wednesday, May 24, 2000 

'Magic box' a lifeline to India's poor farmers  


<picture> Cyber aid: tribal men gather outside a 'house of information'. 
The Internet is being in rural India used to educate and narrow the gap 
between rich and poor. Picture by Lynsey Addario MARION LLOYD  


For hundreds of years, farmers in India's central tribal belt were locked 
in a battle against three seemingly invincible foes - drought, poverty and 
corrupt middlemen. Now, thanks to a new computer system, they are on their 
way to bypassing the third evil and are better equipped to combat the other 
two.  

Earlier this year the government of central Madhya Pradesh state launched 
an experimental computer network in the remote farming district. The 
intranet system gives villagers access to everything from copies of land 
titles - a must for securing yearly bank loans - to rural water supply 
schemes. No bribes, no queues, just 10 rupees (about HK$1.70).  

"It's a wonderful thing," said Kaluram Verma, a farmer from nearby Nawasa 
village. He was clutching a computerised blueprint of his farm that will 
allow him to secure a loan for a well on his parched land.  

The pilot project covers 600 villages in Dhar district, one of dozens of 
dirt-poor tribal areas in Madhya Pradesh. It is part of a push by the 
state's reformist chief minister, Digvijay Singh, to find low-cost ways of 
overcoming the state's lack of infrastructure and improving conditions in 
rural areas.  

The project has been so successful that the Federal Government announced 
last month that it was considering expanding it nationwide. The goal is to 
ensure that the information technology revolution 
sweeping urban India also reaps benefits for the rural masses, who 
still comprise 70 per cent of the country's one billion people.  

The potential of the system is apparent in Dhar. Previously, farmers 
in Bagdi were hostage to an infamously corrupt system inspired by a 
government bureaucrat first employed during the British era. Chosen 
for his surveying skills than his scruples, he would often charge as 
much as 4,000 rupees - at least two month's earnings for farmers - 
for a copy of a land record. He could also revoke land ownership with 
the flick of his pen, say farmers.  

"It's been that way for hundreds of years, but everyone was too 
afraid to complain" for fear that they would lose their land, says 
Verma, who owns a two-hectare farm 12 kilometres outside Bagdi. This 
town, where bottled water is an unheard of luxury and the roads are 
passable only by jeep or ox carts, is home to one of 21 intranet 
centres that service the surrounding areas.  

The system is linked to a parent monitor at the district 
headquarters, allowing villagers to appeal to the local government 
quickly and cheaply. The Bagdi centre has forwarded dozens of 
complaints about broken hand pumps and absentee teachers, and 
requests for medical advice to urban hospitals. Most get replies 
within a week.  

"When you think about it, it's damn cheap," says Suresh Verma, a 
grain merchant who uses the system to check produce rates at markets 
across India. He says it would cost him 100 rupees per call to survey 
the market centres. The same service costs five rupees on the 
intranet, which he and other villagers refer to as "the magic box". 
His enthusiasm was ironic, considering the system has reduced 
farmers' reliance on traders, who would quote them rates far below 
market prices and then pocket the difference. But Verma says he can 
still turn a large profit by being more discriminating in which 
markets he chooses to take his goods.  

The financial benefits can be enormous. Last month, farmers who could 
afford it chose to truck their crops 650km to Bombay to take 
advantage of 40 per cent higher prices for garlic and wheat, the 
staple crops of the area. Others have the option to wait to take 
their produce to the local markets when prices are highest.  

It's the kind of project United States President Bill Clinton had in 
mind during his March visit to India when he urged the Government to 
make sure its booming information technology industry benefited 
India's impoverished masses, not just the Western-educated elite. 
"Millions of Indians are connected to the Internet, but millions more 
are not yet connected to fresh water," he told a group of 1,200 
Indian entrepreneurs in the southern city of Bangalore, home to one 
of the country's largest information technology centres.  

He was on a week-long tour of the Indian subcontinent, aimed largely 
at boosting ties between Indian software engineers and US-based IT 
companies, which are critically short of manpower. India has the 
largest untapped supply of programmers. Its domestic software 
industry is also thriving, and is expected to grow from US$6 billion 
(about HK$47 billion) a year to US$40 billion in the next eight 
years.  

But Mr Clinton also sounded a note of caution, lest India's IT boom 
further widens the gap between the haves and have-nots. He pointed 
out that while India supplies 35 per cent of the world's software 
engineers, it also accounts for 25 per cent of the world's poor. "Our 
challenge," he said, "is to turn the newest discoveries into the best 
weapons humanity has ever had to fight poverty."  

Chief Minister Singh, the man behind the intranet system in Madhya 
Pradesh, agrees. "Information technology should be for the people. It 
shouldn't be confined to the upper echelons of society." He has given 
reform-minded bureaucrats a free hand in trying out innovative 
projects in rural areas, such as training villagers to take charge of 
water distribution and encouraging women to stand for local 
elections.  

"It might seem like a small step," Amit Aggarwal, the local bureaucrat 
spearheading the Internet project, said of the computer system. "But from 
here, there is no turning back."  

Marion Lloyd (marionlloyd@usa.net) is the Post's correspondent in New 
Delhi.    


[South China Morning Post]  

http://www.scmp.com/News/Comment/Article/FullText_asp_ArticleID-
20000524052040288.asp