Hello! Who’s there? Excuse me... Hellooooooooo?
Can’t help it, you see. You can’t reach everybody all the time. Errr, you can’t even reach most people most of the time in the great outback of India. No sms, no e-mail, no chatroom gupshup! Forget e-commerce. Forget e-governance. India remains a huge crater of information black hole.
True, you may have been Bangalored by now. Maybe, even Gurgaoned! 24x7 connectivity. Call centre jobs for the asking. But you only find that in islands of excellence.
Take this for a starter. That ubiquitous bell box you call a telephone. There are just about 3,560 telephones for every 100,000 people. Worse, the number of PCs adds up to barely 13,486,000. Which is to say there are only 11 PCs for every 1,000 people. Now consider the number of PCs that are wired, and you have 2,947,000 people, in all, with access to the world wide web. On the last count, India’s population was, oops! 1,094,130,000. And growing.
“Connectivity really makes an impact when a critical mass is reached. Should you ask me if we have reached that mass, my answer is, no, not yet,” says Mahesh Uppal director at telecom and rural connectivity consultancy Telecommunications & Computer Information Systems (T&CIS). Uppal points to the less than 2% teledensity in rural India. A third of India’s villages either have no telephone or have telephones that do not work.
Which is why non-resident Indians still use telegraphic money orders, mail transfers and even coded messages to remit money back home to folks in Madhapar in Gujarat’s rural Kutch region. Electronic cash transfers are not possible. This is when almost 65% of Madhapar’s population works abroad. Sure, the village hosts 10 nationalised and private banks, each with its own ATM. Between them, Madhapar’s 15,000 residents boast deposits worth Rs 1,800 crore. But half that amount is parked at the local post office.
Still, Madhapar residents may be lucky. Because others are not. For some 7.1 million people in the three most backward districts of Jharkhand, the All India Radio is their only link with the outside world. There are no roads, no piped water, no electricity connection, and no hospital.
Why just Jharkhand? There are 700 million Indians living in 600,000 villages across rural India. And millions more in small towns and urban sprawls. Do they have a choice? Forget telephone and broadband, for most, middle India is one large area of darkness. Towns and cities across Rajasthan, UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa go without power for 8 to 10 hours at a stretch. Piped water delivery to urban homes is severely stretched all over the country. Some 62,000 habitations across India go without any source of water and 3.78 lakh habitations have only partial access to water.
Subroto Bagchi, COO at IT major MindTree, says he’s seen folks in Bangalore’s surrounding villages smoke mice out of holes and roast them for food. “That day, I realised that 50 km from Bangalore, the word ‘mouse’ attains a different meaning.”
Small wonder, India ranks low in the world human development index, sandwiched between Namibia and Botswana with a life expectancy index of 0.64, education index of 0.59 and a GDP index of 0.55, a third of its adult population illiterate.
Things could change. Because Bagchi believes that India is one place, like no other on earth, where the truth reveals itself in contradictions.
For one, there’s this huge Rs 1,200 crore government plan to set up internet kiosks in 100,000 villages across the country in the next two years to ease governance and commerce. Already, there are examples of such initiatives working. Digitalised land records are now available in pockets of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. ITC’s e-chaupal has freed some Madhya Pradesh farmers from the clutches of extortionist middlemen and helped them sell their produce at a better price. Others such as n-Logue’s have helped with education and health. Apollo Hospitals is delivering telemedicine in interior Andhra. The results are modest but promising.
“Livelihood generation is just starting,” says Ashok Jhunjhunwala, professor at IIT Chennai and pioneer of low-cost wireless telephone technology. Jhunjhunwala is optimistic that rural connectivity will eventually happen, though the present looks dark. There’s always the rainbow.
Recently, MindTree polled 170 of its fresh software engineers. None of them were big city folks; their grandparents were peasants, teachers, petty shop owners and nondescript service holders; their parents earned barely Rs 20,000 a month on average. Bagchi says these techies didn’t get their jobs because ‘who they knew’, but because of ‘what they knew’.
“It’s interesting how the digital divide is not an impregnable line of control. Its porosity is fascinating. The Grameen Bank experience (in Bangladesh) tells us that porosity has a unique character. Once people escape through it, they do not slip back into the past.”
For rural connectivity to work, Jhujhunwala feels the government should move out and let entrepreneurs take over. He’s possibly basing his argument on the way private mobile service operators revolutionised telephone access in the country after 50 years of government control. The same argument should hold true for rural internet kiosks. “For rural connectivity to work, the kiosks should be entrepreneur driven. Remember these kiosks will only be a means — an infrastructure — not an end. The rural work of bringing education, health and creating micro-enterprises will then just start,” he says.
T&CIS’ Uppal agrees. “ITC’s e-chaupal succeeded because someone was putting his own money, making more money out of that, and putting it back to expanding the business. e-chaupal is very much a part of ITC’s business. There is a product or value they are driving through it.” Yet, ITC’s efforts are on the fringes. Nobody has penetrated the interiors where middlemen still rule.
Critics believe that the 100,000 state-sponsored rural kiosks may also end up on the periphery of urban centres that are already connected with broadband and telephone lines. Such an endeavour would defeat the purpose.
Uppal believes that technology, in theory, is extraordinary. But technology minus empowerment adds up to zero. “At one level, the democratic process has very limited meaning in the rural context. There are issues of bijli, paani, hospitals...” There is no single tool that can deliver people from poverty.
So, the solution will have to come with content. Till then, middle India will remain an empty void. Get hooked!