IT must bloom in the fields

Up to this point, the karkhana8217;s forays into education and health were for the welfare of the members. For the good co-op, the karkhana took care of its members from birth to death. The cooperators liked me. Vasant Dada Patil lectured me on agriculture, but was happy I served milk with sugar at meetings discussing agricultural prices in Delhi. I bugged a young PM on his first visit to Washington to get approval from him of a cane price, announcing it on his behalf at a dinner near Kopergaon, where thousands had come on their tractors. They were happy that they mattered.

By the late eighties, it was clear that knowledge was important for making money in the next phase. Around thirty of us sat down for days at Loni and worked out a Rural Education Policy. Knowledge, we said, was to be the source of growth. Biotechnology would raise crop income, but also dairying, which by then was already a quarter of family earnings, since prophylactics, fodder and more productive breeds, would all matter. Information was needed to find solutions at the farmers8217; doorstep to technology problems. Information on the markets would be on tap, the farmer would decide the crops he would grow and the weather would be known. All in Marathi. He said we would borrow and then build up our own knowledge. If you were a social type, you could come as a friend of the coop and the farmer. If not, we would pay. We wanted a Rural Education Council and a rural university in each agro-climatic region to break the stranglehold of Macaulay. We lobbied in Delhi and got the council, but it was a pale shadow of our dreams and became another tomb of ideas in Delhi. The rural universities were not to come. We keep on lobbying. This year when my coop gave its pre-budget presentation to a VVIP, he orally whiplashed me for 8220;this not being the time to discuss rural universities8221;. I retired hurt to my lair, licking my wounds and biding my time to rise again. Three years ag,o when Maurizio Bussollo and David O8217;Connor reviewed literature on technology and poverty removal for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and Asian Development Bank, they found instances of biotech, both for crops and animal farms, but no functioning models of IT in the rural Third World.

We have examples. The commercial ones are interesting. They are for crops, for technology and markets. At Loni, we had experimented with a less ambitious model. The hardware was provided by the coop. The local KVK configured the technology links, weather, markets at home and abroad and the rural health university the telemedicine, the occupational health and the links with the hospital. Software models are a plenty. But a village desktop will work only if the community owns it.

It costs around Rs 2,000 a month, including a part time trained operator. There are ten villages with RF connectivity. I went to the one at Dadh and found it was making around Rs 1,500 a month from charges collected. There are others: Rahata, Rajouri, Kolhar and of course Shirdi and Loni. Seven more villages run on the dial up mode, including Chandrapur, Teesgaon, Ashwi and Gogalgaon not googlegaon!. The costs can be brought down. Jhunjhunwala at IIT, Madras, it is said, has a cheaper system. My guess is that apart from the desktop, the current costs will need a subsidy, perhaps of around a third.

Our software achievements are truly remarkable. Eighteen of the top 25 global companies, growth through the cycle and the sector now leading GDP growth and giving the nation financial security. But still, rural India is unconnected. The 8220;field8221; is all yours, Sam.