It gives me great pleasure to participate in the inauguration of the Second Convention of the National Alliance and the First Convocation of the Jamshedji Tata National Virtual Academy for Rural Prosperity.  I am especially honoured to be with Hon’ble President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on this occasion.  His deep and abiding commitment to improve the quality of rural life through the use of technology is well known and we look forward to your advice and guidance, Sir, in this important initiative.

On the occasion of the First Convocation of the Jamshedji Tata National Virtual Academy for Rural Prosperity, let us also remember with gratitude a great visionary, Thiru. Jamshedji Tata.  I am quite sure that this Academy would live up to his high ideals.

Dr. M.S. Swaminathan and his Foundation have been playing a pioneering role in setting up of Village Knowledge Centres. I am sure that under his leadership, this National Alliance would make an important contribution to reduce the Digital Divide and bring prosperity to our villages.

India has made considerable progress in the ICT sector, particularly in the software and telecommunications sectors and, now increasingly, in hardware design, Research and Development.  We are also trying hard to make similar headway in the hardware-manufacturing sector.

All of us are aware that the benefits of any innovation or revolution in technology or process usually do not reach the poor in any country, more so in developing nations. This must change and the revolution in Information and Communications technologies (ICT) has the potential to help us break out of this unfortunate cycle.

It is now the time that we use Indian IT and Software skills to improve the social and economic conditions of our rural population. Technology should be harnessed to change the face of rural India by providing urban amenities to the under privileged living in the rural areas. The emerging technology tools and benefits of the knowledge economy can actually help transform the dream, we have for rural India, into reality.

I believe that ICT can be used very effectively in the areas of high developmental priority such as education, agriculture, health and so on. Even in entertainment, where TV and cable penetration are already at impressive levels, new vistas are opening up. We are already seeing examples of the use of ICT in rural India like the e-Choupal project of ITC, various distance learning programmes and ICT enabled education, imaginative IT literacy programmes like Akshaya in Kerala and a host of projects like e-seva in Andhra Pradesh, which deliver an entire range of Government services to the public at large. Today, these are impressive, though somewhat limited, in terms of both the number of centres and range of services. Even e-Choupal, which is the most widespread, has only about 5,000 centres in the country.

In the education sector, primary and secondary education, adult literacy and vocational education are the need of the hour. With the use of ICT tools, such as the Internet, e-classrooms, video-conferencing, audio / video relays, multi media enabled interactive material, television, community radio, etc.,  ICT would make education accessible and more affordable and enrich it in terms of quality and reach it to larger numbers.

Increasing the efficiency of the market would bring positive benefits to the income of farmers.  Since the rural Indian economy is largely agriculture based, this would have positive impact on our society.  The information that may be of use to the farmers are - price of seeds, fertilizers and produce, appropriate use of pesticides for specific pests, fertilizer use and application, weather information, etc. The emphasis should be on the management of the information generated, and reaching it to the masses with a view to empower them.

The way to reach the rural hinterland is by using ICT through Village Knowledge Centres, which provide the village community access to various services like:- 

·       Education: IT courses, distance learning courses, vocational training, life skills, etc.

·       Information related to agriculture, Government schemes, laws, rights and benefits, weather, market prices, disaster preparedness, etc.

·       Communication facilities such as text and voice mail, fax, telephone, voice and video chat, courier services, etc.

·       Domain expert support in medicine, agriculture, law, etc. through periodic meetings and / or email correspondence

·       Miscellaneous: photocopy, photo studio (digital camera / web camera), lamination, desktop publishing (DTP) etc.,

·       Payment of Utilities

·       Registration of births and deaths

·       Reservation of bus and train tickets

·       Assistance in identifying and tracking resources that a village has and in planning and monitoring projects

·       Updation of communities on various Government programmes and schemes by local Government.

·       Electronic accounting for the funds which are disseminated by the State / District administration for village activities.

·       To be a collection and distribution point for farm and other agricultural products.

          The challenge then becomes not just to provide information, but also to provide meaningful information in a form that can be accessed by the rural poor. The term access here has two contexts – physical access and cognitive access. Therefore, information has to be

·       in context (of communities and individuals) which would mean – in a form and language that would appeal to non traditional readers

·       easy to navigate

·       useful, concise and to the point for members of a village community

·       actionable or be able to influence action, i.e. information that provides or helps provide solutions

           Government has clearly recognized the potential of the ICT and has decided in principle to promote the establishment of a large number of such ICT-based community service centres. We have almost finalized the modalities of the programme. Some of the strategies around which the approach will be centred are:

o      Entrepreneurship based – model to encourage innovation, localization and customization as well as to adapt quickly to rapidly changing technology environment

o      Leveraging SWAN (State Wide Area Network) infrastructure to provide reliable, broadband connectivity to remote, village-level Common Service Centres (CSCs). We are thinking of 1,00,000 centres by 2007.  This will be a major initiative of the Government of India to partner with the State Governments, the private sector and the NGOs to take development into the heart of India using the power of ICTs. The CSCs will serve as the primary outlet for provision of a wide array of e-Government services in an integrated manner at the village level. Promotion of e-governance on a massive scale is one of the key promises made in the National Common Minimum Programme of our Government.

o      Three-tier implementation structure including a Service Centre Agency at intermediate level and Village level entrepreneur at the ground or field level. A single Service Centre Agency would be responsible for several CSCs in a given geographical area.

o      Mix of grant and loan support from Government.  Finance Minister has already announced loan support through NABARD to the tune of Rs. 100 crore in the budget.

o      We have taken a number of steps to promote adoption of local language computing in the country, such as free distribution of software tools and applications.  Recently, a whole set of such tools and applications for Tamil and Hindi were released in Chennai and Delhi respectively. Similar launches are planned for other Indian languages. These efforts would go a long way to take the benefits of IT to the masses.

           Mission 2007 – “Every Village a Knowledge Centre” is an initiative to connect every village in India by the 60th anniversary of our independence by creating a network of knowledge centres across the country. Each of these centres would become a centre for knowledge-based livelihoods and income-generation opportunity for the less privileged sections of our society.

    I compliment Mission 2007 team for bringing together a wide array of partners from NGOs, the private sector and
the Government, which is absolutely critical for achieving the goal of harnessing ICT for accelerating India’s development and hopefully, serving as an example for other developing and even developed countries around the world

     I thank the President for his constant encouragement and support and for providing an inspiring vision for the country’s development using the power of modern technology.

     Finally, I would like to extend my personal appreciation to Prof. Swaminathan, the team of NASSCOM foundation and organizers for inviting me to the 2nd Convention of the National Alliance. We look forward to work closely with your team in several of our initiatives.

           Thank you.