No one could afford to fall sick in Kathirimalai until last year. The mountain-top village deep inside the Chennampatti forest reserve in Erode district has no roads, electricity is a rare sight, and donkeys are still the chief means of transport. Treatment at the healthcare centre nearly 40 km away was simply a luxury. Things changed nine months ago when District Collector H Krishnanunni and his team thought of a plan. The district administration launched Punnagai (Tamil for smile), an ambitious plan that sought to use high-speed, 5GHz WiFi internet to link Kathirimalai with the outside world. With a doctor just a click away on the computer screen at the local school, where the facility has been set up, now it’s all smiles for Kathimaralai and its 156 residents. “There is a conversation (with doctors), and based on the symptoms we narrate, they recommend medicines, which are made available by the local officers or we get them when we go to the town,” said one resident, Chinnagiriyan. “A doctor’s touch may be the only thing missing,” he laughs. Krishnanunni said the WiFi project is an example of “how the world changes when the internet is made accessible to a village detached from civilisation”. The District Collector is among the 19 winners of The Indian Express Excellence in Governance Awards for 2020 and 2021. The biennial awards celebrate the finest work done by District Magistrates, women and men considered the foot-soldiers of governance as they script change that touches the lives of countless people across the country. The first obstacle in launching the telemedicine project was building a communication network in an area that had no phones or roads. That’s when Krishnanunni and team jumped on the idea of WiFi. Soon, a team from the Centre for Social Computing (C4S) reached Kathirimalai and began installing a tower, and the required hardware, with help from the District Rural Development Agency (DRDA) along with NABARD. The technical assistance for the internet came from Anthiyur town, the nearest metropolitan roughly 40 km from the forest. “The facility is accessed by the end-user with only one click… It allows people to connect with the doctors or mentors on the screen,” said Roshy K Falgunan of C4S, who played a key role in setting up the 100 Mbps, long-distance wireless facility. The efforts are bearing fruit. Falgunan said the doctor-patient telemedicine experiment also helped the authorities trace those who needed urgent medical attention. For instance, she said, the administration is already at work after a recent study found “20% of the population” suffered from malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies. But it’s not only healthcare though that has improved after the internet project was launched. According to Roja, a village assistant officer, around 434 students from Kathirimalai and nearby villages have also been using the WiFi facility, resulting in “better reading and writing abilities”. “If the students’ reading and writing abilities were below 20 last year, they are now above 60,” she said. With the ‘Kathirimalai healthcare project’ a success, the Erode district administration is expanding the project to similar remote areas in the Western Ghats region. Although some are cautious about the project’s sustainability, most people in the village said they find hope in Krishnanunni’s “special interest” in the WiFi project, and his frequent inspections to the slopes of Kathirimalai.
