[India] How COW empowers villagers

["Irfan Khan" <khania2@super.net.pk>]

How COW empowers villagers
TIMES NEWS NETWORK

SEPTEMBER 30, 2002

BANGALORE: Technological interventions for empowering the masses is 
occurring at a brisk pace across India. Acting as a catalyst is a new 
breed of social entrepreneurs who have an altruistic motive.


Digital Partners, a US-based fund which believes in empowering 
villagers and particularly women, is currently evaluating around 125 
ICT (information and communications technologies) project proposals 
in India for funding. According to Satish Jha, director of Digital 
Partners in India, the commitment to technology-enabled rural 
projects is heightened significantly in the country.


Digital Partners supports, mentors and works with organisations and 
individuals developing innovative and sustainable market-based 
solutions that use technology to directly benefit the villagers.


Drishtee, a Digital Partners-funded ICT project, has created over 200 
kiosks in Haryana, Rajasthan, UP and Bihar to offer around 30 
applications to villagers. These kiosks reduce the distances 
travelled by the villagers to less than 5 km from the normal 40 km. 
Based on a robust business-model, Drishtee charges Rs 15-20 to the 
villagers per transaction. Impacting around 30 lakh people, it is 
profitable, generating around Rs 5.6 crore revenues currently.


Drishtee is planning to expand its services to Karnataka to offer its 
slew of innovative citizen-facing applications at an affordable 
price.


Yet another social entrepreneur is Rajeshwari Pingali, the force 
behind COW (computer on wheels) who is implementing a people-centred 
development programme at Ghanpur mandal in Mehboob Nagar district in 
Andhra Pradesh. Designed by Stanford University, COW caters to around 
7,800 people in seven villages giving them crucial information 
pertaining to rainfall, pest management and credit facilities. The 
facilities are delivered through a bike-rider who carries a laptop, 
digital camera and a communication device with Net connection among 
others. ``COW is like the actual cow __ a rural and a sustainable 
animal,'' Pingali said.


However, the most successful of the ICT projects in India has been 
ITC's e-choupal, which delivers real-time information through over 
1,000 kiosks to the farmers to align their output with the market 
demand, thereby improving the farmers' productivity. ``It acts as a 
direct marketing channel with more efficient price discovery and 
lower transaction costs in output marketing,'' says S. Siva Kumar, 
CEO of ITC Agribusiness.


Currently servicing around 6 lakh farmers in 6,000 villages through 
1,000 kiosks, ITC Agribusiness will extend it to over 15 states soon 
covering around 1 lakh villages.


According to Rajeeva Ratna Shah, Union Secretary of communications 
and IT, Media Lab Asia in Mumbai is engaged in bringing out 
innovative solutions to bridge the digital divide. These solutions 
include low cost computing device and voice recognition tools for 
multi-language usage purpose.

source: 
http://infotech.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?artid=23748642