Last month, I was working on the Project Closure report of the CCDN (Community-based Content Delivery Network) project funded by Development Gateway Foundation, and by Govt of India. The main outcome of the project is a Web-based system called ECKO, in which I played the role of a project leader, (2005-2007), promoted from the role of a team member, that I played, for the project that started in the late 2003. I had learnt many valuable lessons during the course of the project. The objective for which the project was funded, was to develop an ICT-based solution that can help the digitally impoverished communities, and empower them. In short, the stated ultimate goal was to alleviate poverty through a Software Solution!!!.
As this was a huge challenge, and ridiculous, it might sound, we believed that communication is the basis for addressing the challenge, and information adding value to the communication would empower people. Due to poor infrastructure facilities, people in rural regions were spending more for communication, (whether to communicate with their near and dear ones in the neighboring villages, or with government officials, or with doctors or with other professional experts; - at that time, mobile penetration was very low and costly) and our idea was to facilitate a system that could help them to communicate and gather useful information that would saves them their costs in many ways. Ofcourse, this requires setting up of a network infrastructure. At this time, we found that, there were many reputed NGO's operating in various rural regions with one or more computer systems and with some minimal network. We initially chose NGO's such as Dhan Foundation, MSSRF, who had superior network infrastructure among others and deployed our solution ECKO - Empowering Communities Through Knowledge.
Our first version of ECKO, developed as a web-based system, using open source tools, in 2003 , was closer to a content management system, that facilitated people to share and know about the local news and events, happening within and around their community, with facilitates for one to one communication, through messaging (similar to orkut's scrapbook), and had a content upload feature that allowed to upload any kind of content, for use by others (might sound similar to youtube!). We deliberately did not want to incorporate crawlers, to crawl and present global information, as we wanted the system to be focused and meant only for a particular local community and to have content contributed only by them. We wanted the people themselves to speak for themselves, and hence we did not hire the services of paid professionals such as local Journalists, content-creators etc... to present the view of the people!. So, as it can be seen, our intention was not to develop a software product, but to deliver a solution that would reach those digitally impoverished people, in some way satisfying some of their needs!.
As, it turned out, the model was not successful. We had tried to circumvent many problems, such as using the infrastructure of NGO's to deploy our system, and training few members of those NGO's to use the system, and used their social contacts with the local people to generate awareness about the system, and also helped the digitally-impoverished people to use the system through trained kiosk operators (who were employed by the NGO's). We also solved the issues of language, by incorporating a local language framework within the system. It should also be mentioned that we faced problems that were unique to these kind of environments: such as the crashing of the hard-disk/system, due to electrical power-supply constraints and unavailability of UPS. This is where we learnt the importance of robustness, reliability and the need for packaging of our software, in such a way that it is easy to install and run it.
As configuring and running a web system with completely open source tools, is not a child's play (even today!), we packaged it in such a way that the kiosk operators can easily install it, and also facilitated mechanisms for database backup and restoration, through the web-based front-end GUI; Despite all these challenges, and measures, we found that the interests of the people could not be sustained, though there were youngsters and students using the facilities of chat and content upload heavily. We then incoproated services, such as daily market-prices, daily weather-information, job information and even matrimonials, but unfortunately that did not catch the fancy of those rural people, atleast in those days. And, moreover we aimed to provide a meaningful usage of our system, and did not want ECKO to be another entertainment service!.
As we started looking in deeper, through our painstaking and laborious surveys and interviews, we discovered that to attract meaningful and fruitful usage, the system should facilitate features that ease their main livelihood-activities, (say in case of agriculture - facilitating a means to buy the seeds, fertilizers, etc..., to marketing the produces, seeking guidance from experts, learning new techniques in farming etc... ) and that was not such an easy-task, as our scope was limited, and such steps required support from many other agencies. Ultimately, we wanted a system that could be termed as a Social Information System, with the ability to cater to any given community, but at the same-time, address the user-specific requirements of a member and ECKO was close to that. These realizations dawned, while we were close to the final phase of the project, though our system is being used in few places across India, supported by NGO's that are active in those regions of deployment.
The lessons, I learnt from this socio-technical (ICT) project were many:
(From Technical point)
(From Technical point)
- Provide simple systems (that serves one purpose, though it can facilitate integration with any system), in a simpler way
- Provide a reliable and robust system!;
- Ensure that the systems ease the load of the people!;
- Ensure, that using the system should not be anything more than a child's play!.
- A lot more things needs to be done, especially for digitally-impoverished communities, in rural locations, and that requires huge efforts, backed by the governments
- Establishment of 1 lakh kiosks throughout the country would only be a small step, towards empowering communities (though I am afraid, that it is too late and too small step, and will have only a shorter-life time!)
- In my guess the true spirits of E-governance will take atleast another 10-15 years, for realization in India!, and that will and should drastically change the way - people do their livelihood activities; businesses are conducted; and the ways of governance.
In writing such a long essay, about an 'Himalayan' effort, I will be sinned, if I don't mention the people, who were motivating, guiding, and participating along with me in this effort. First, N. Subramanian, who not only believed me and gave the responsibility, but also motivated, encouraged, and guided me, during the project. V Neelanarayanan, a former-colleague, and friend, who participated in this effort, had a lot of knowledge about the rural environments and tried his best, for a reasonable amount of time. R Sreekumar, the former project leader, had a lot of innovative ideas, and tried a few of them. K S Selvakumar, a project leader for another similar project, called Vyapar, funded by the same agency reflected a lot of wise thoughts, guidance and appreciation, during the project. Rajiv Ranjan, Ponraj M, Kailash Tandel, B Ravikumar, Dnyanesh Pawar, & Ravikumar Poddar were the members, who participated in this effort, and without their cooperation, and support, the project would not have progressed beyond a few minds!. Also, I am thankful to the people in those NGO's who sincerely helped and supported us in our efforts, despite their other commitments. Last, but not the least, I am extremely thankful to our administrative staff members (especially Sh. Krishna Kumar and Sh. George Arakal), promotional group members, and all our seniors of the centre, at that time, (especially Sh. Ganga Prasad, Sh. Ramakrishnan) without whose support, it would not have been possible to put even the first steps forward.
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