Saturday 22 September 2012


While working and study of various e-governance projects especially in rural area I realize that technology is set to talk off and ICT will become the part of life, but is, rural India is ready to give warm reception to it, No! The stage is yet to be set in terms of Digital Divide, Infrastructure acceptability awareness; there is low literacy rate-IT awareness still to come.

On other hand when ever we talk about VKC/Tel center ICT Kiosk in e-governance forum, workshops  it Stop's at last mile connectivity content linkage, electricity, process engineering and many such issues. I strongly believe that technology will take its own time to get set by the time let us set the STAGE with preparatory school at base line.

With our experience, instead of waiting for all such issues we should adopt B-T approach. We can prepare the society for ICT usage by automating the activities of gram Panchayat through gram Panchayat automation s/w (stand alone) by the time connectivity and other issues from top takes the shape, these automated Gram Panchayat can be used as a knowledge base and slowly switching to on line content as and when ready. This will immediately demonstrate the power of ICT to rural community, once a Gram Panchayat stand alone is able to use computer for their own operation with deep penetration and more users, they can easily be hooked to online solutions which is bound to come by the time.

NICT has successfully worked out various multi-location target oriented wide spread ICT projects with similar road blocks like establishing 700 computer labs in 8 districts of Rajasthan we have done it by building the capacity of local entrepreneur.

Similarly in case of Gyandoot 250 Kiosk has setup by multi level entrepreneurship model. What we suggest is from every state district collector should forward names of atleast 5-10 villages where a computer and software for automation of cooperative bank/gram Panchayat is installed which will help in building the capacity and local environment at base line and later on it can be hook with a knowledge highway as when the connectivity reaches by the time the knowledge content can be provided thru district coordinator in the form of CD's. This will immediately create a network of rural ICT worker at village level who will be one of the entrepreneurs from village itself.  

By this we can start with 1-2 thousand villages all over India in first phase and in every 3 months we can add the same number to get the target Mission 2007. This can also contribute to the Missions of 1 lack Kiosk program of DOIT. The model is full proof and tested practically only the resource implementation planning is required to be done.