TECHNOLOGY-INDIA: Internet Links Rural Communities to Markets

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Lalitha Sridhar

CHENNAI, India, Aug 29 2003 (IPS) - Farmers in the Dindigul area of India’s southern Tamil Nadu state need no convincing when it comes to the value of maintaining a website to get the best possible prices for the their produce.

"We farmers daily enter the prices of vegetables in our market daily into our website www.oddanchatramarket.com and the result is that last year last year, we earned 140,000 dollars by exporting drumsticks to Kuwait alone,” said H Bagadoor, a farmer who has become a key figure in this information technology project.

Dindigul suffers from perennial water shortages. Until the arrival of the Internet a couple of years ago, it was a place where the price of tomatoes would swing from less a fraction of a cent per kilogramme on one day and all the way up to a dollar the next.

Convinced that the future of farming is linked to information technology (IT), Bagadoor has taken time off from farming to be a fellow at the Virtual Academy for Food Security and Rural Prosperity (VARP). It was inaugurated on Aug. 23 by no less than the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Inducting the first fellows of the academy, among them Bagadoor, Wickremesinghe said he saw benefits from VARP for people in his own country, which is separated from Tamil Nadu by the narrow Palk Straits. ”I have only two words to describe VARP – innovative and exciting."

VARP is a pioneering initiative launched by the Chennai-based research institution M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), with support from the Tata business house and a consortium of research and government bodies.

Its aim is to bridge the growing divide between ‘scientific know-how’ and ‘field level do-how’. It aspires to do more than mere transfer of information through an Internet kiosk, but also help communities manage information and knowledge.

VARP plans to use information and communication technology, including the Internet, cable television, community and ham radio and community newspapers, to ”bring knowledge to every home and hut, in every village, in every state all over India, to meet the food, water and livelihood needs of rural families."

Wickremesinghe said, "Sustainable agriculture has to replace subsistence agriculture. Why do we have ministers in charge of industry, commerce, and development but not for the rural economy? VARP will provide value addition to those who toil on the land."

VARP is to concentrate on climate management and the five foundations of sustainable development identified at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002 – water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity. The linkages envisaged are ‘Lab-to-lab, Lab-to-land, Land-to-lab and Land-to-land’.

Said Dr M S Swaminathan, founder of MSSRF and an agricultural scientist named by the ‘Time’ magazine as one of the 20 most influential Asians of the 20th century: "The younger generation is losing interest in farming. Unless we can add value to the labour of our rural poor, they will not be able to better their lot. Agriculture has to become knowledge-intensive rather than chemical-intensive."

Added S Senthilkumaran, associate director of the informatics division, MSSRF: "Unlike conventional universities, VARP is demand driven, user-friendly and locally relevant. Content receives as much attention as connectivity. At least one man and one woman in each village will be trained as climate managers. ”

Already, a flagship Information Village Research Project of MSSRF operates 12 knowledge centres in 12 villages in the Union Territory of Pondicherry, based on a hub-and-spokes model. Fifty thousand people use the services, 30 percent of them having an average monthly family income of less than 25 dollars.

Beneficiaries include landless labourers, women, ‘Dalits’ or low-caste Hindus and the illiterate. Information and community technology-based programmes to market rural produce in the Dindigul and Ramanathapuram districts are also a part of the Virtual Academy.

The academy found that even women educated up to the third grade were able to operate HTML coding and editing in the Tamil language. In fact, many discovered new markets by going to the computer centre and entering data every night.

M Ananthakrishnan, dean of the Madras Institute of the Development Studies, said, "The Virtual Academy recognises community workers who have worked hard at rural sustenance. They may not have a string of academic achievements to their credit but they have an extraordinary degree of emotional commitment to rural prosperity.”

”This is a very unique, distinct model. Nothing like this exists in any part of the world,” he added.

Said B Kasturi, a 36-year-old homemaker from Pondicherry: ”We did a survey on eye health in our area. One hundred people had eyesight restored because of collaboration, over the computer, with an eye hospital.”

The knowledge centre also helps dispel superstitions. ”Women are better informed about health matters – formerly, in our village, women were blamed for infertility,” Kasturi recalled.

”Now, eight of us work in two shifts, after attending to our household and work duties, to keep updated. Other than health matters, we find out about climate information, exam results, about business ideas, how to make pickles,” she added.

Vivek Harinarain, secretary for information technology of the Tamil Nadu state government, was cautious and said the initiative raised many questions.

"What is the guarantee that we provide on information? If a particular farming community takes a certain course of action on the basis of certain information provided on the VARP and if it doesn’t really work out, do we just throw up our hands and say that we are only facilitators?”

But 37-year-old K David, a physically challenged entrepreneur-activist from Ramanathapuram district in the southernmost end of the state and a VARP fellow, said: ”In the beginning people didn’t know what the word ‘computer’ meant . Now we are able to find markets for our shell crafts because of connectivity."

For David and others on the impoverished coast overlooking Sri Lanka, that is progress enough – for now.