IT - but not for the masses?

Kripa Raman

HOW successful are projects that claim to take information technology to the masses in India? Several government officials in the lower rungs of the ladder of implementing these projects say these programmes are hardly self-sustaining - they last only so long as a very pro-active administrative official at the top holds his position.

Once the officer under whom the programme is mooted moves out, the programmes start to rot, say the officials.

''The maintenance of these computers and kiosks is a very complicated problem in far-flung areas. In addition to this, telephone lines often crash, not to mention electricity supply,'' says a representative from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is visiting 40 odd IT-for-the-masses projects sites in India for a study.

''The showcase project initiated in Madhya Pradesh in the Dhar district worked very well till the person who headed it was moved to another post,'' says the IT-advisor to a public sector unit who is closely involved with e-governance projects. ''The warts have started to show now.''

Dhar is a tribal district in Madhya Pradesh and the project there was to be funded by the panchayats themselves. Revenue officials had even collected a small amount from farmers towards this. But the farmers go to the kiosks to obtain certificates or other details for getting financial credit, and more often than not come away because the communication link is not working or there is no electricity, says the IT-advisor. This is a project which has won several awards.

Dhar is supposed to be one of the better projects in that the funding is partly from the villagers themselves. ''In actuality, the idea itself must come from the local population and not be a foreign implant. It must happen the way STD booths have come up all over the country,'' says a Maharashtra government official.

Officials as well as NGOs are now saying that Maharashtra's Warana ''wired village project'' is not so useful as its investment cost of Rs 2.5 crore suggests it should be. ''Farmers, actually milk sellers, come and find out how much they are owed by cooperatives. More than that nothing very much happens. Rs 2.5 crore is an enormous amount of money for just that. Of course, it could turn out to be very useful in future, but will the system last that long, and what about maintenance?''

The Warana project has been funded with the help of the National Informatics Centre and the Government of Maharashtra; the villages under the project have been linked up using VSATs.

One of the main problems has been the language issue. Meaningfully interactive software is still not available in Indian languages. To people who cannot read or write their own language, coping with English becomes terribly difficult. The other problem pertains to the ruggedness of the terminal or kiosk itself. If farmers must operate the machines themselves, the machines are bound to develop wear and tear problems. How quickly can maintenance and repair happen in remote areas, asks another government official.

One has to distinguish between pure e-governance projects which might be for the internal administrative convenience, says a government official. Many district collectorates might be wired up. This suits the administrative officers. Mass-use projects are a different matter altogether.

One reading of the psychology of technology use is that use by the higher echelons of administration will percolate down eventually. ''But the irony is that even the higher administrative staff is using computers in a very limited way,'' says an administrative officer.

The joke doing the rounds in government circles is that the Central Government had asked every department to set aside a certain budget for spending on IT, with the result that departments ordered computers and never used them, prompting the Union Minister for IT, Pramod Mahajan, to say (reportedly) that government offices were becoming a graveyard of computers.

The Government must take a closer look at mass IT projects. This could be solved if they actually first asked the people what they wanted and then set about designing programmes, say officers and NGOs.

(kripram@thehindu.co.in)