Chennai villages ride the IT wave

Sixty-year old Palaniammal, a resident of Melur, a village 600 kilometres from Chennai, seems like the most unlikely candidate to be endorsing the benefits of information technology.

Barely literate, she has hardly stepped out of her village in her lifetime and is alien to the concept of IT as it can get. Yet Palaniammal has become an example of how information technology can help lives in rural India.

Palaniammal suffered from a problem in her eyes, which could not be cured by the local doctor. Though unable to muster the trip to the town hospital, Palaniammal, however, made it to a Web kiosk down the road in her village. There, pictures of her eyes were clicked with a Webcam and mailed to the reputed Aravind eye hospital in Chennai.

Subsequent to a video-conferencing between the patient in Melur and the doctor in Chennai, and with the help of supporting photographs, the ailment was diagnosed and treatment prescribed.

Since then more than 1000 patients in small villages across Chennai have been diagnosed and treated using Web kiosks.

Bringing the information technology and its benefits to rural India is one of the biggest challenges for advocates of wider usage of IT in India. About 70 crore (700 million) people live in India's villages and they have at times no access to education or telephones.

But one group, led by Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor at the department of electrical engineering in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, is showing how it can be done.

When he is not teaching IIT students, Jhunjhunwala is busy with the Telecommunications and Computer Networks group (TeNeT) at IIT Madras.

This group has incubated ten companies till date, which together at times work on developing solutions that can help rural India.

n-logue Communications is the star in the stable.

Incorporated by the TeNET group, n-Logue focuses on providing and operating telecom and Internet services only in small towns and rural areas of India. To prevent dilution of focus, its charter bars it from carrying out operations in urban areas. n-Logue believes that there is a large rural market in India for such services, and that it must be tapped differently from that in urban areas.

"There is a need to overcome the technology barrier and build a sustainable business model. For that you need an organisation that thinks and acts rural, as opposed to being an organisation with an urban mindset," says Professor Jhunjhunwala.

In urban India, public telephone booths introduced in 1987 helped offer telephone access to many. Today there are over 950,000 PCOs (public call offices) spread across the country and they generated 25 per cent of the total telecom income last year.

n-logue hopes to create a similar revolution in rural India with its Web kiosks. And its business model is remarkably simple.

For Rs 50,000, a kiosk can be set up in any village that will have a PC, telephone, Internet, Webcam, printer and a power back up. "Most of the time we see that people put Rs 10,000-15,000 of their own and take the rest as loans from banks," says Professor Jhunjhunwala.

To earn profits, every kiosk owner needs to make just Rs 3500 per month or about Rs 3.50 per person a month in a village of 1000 people. Earning that kind of money is not very difficult.

For around Rs 50 a month, kiosk owners found children and adults joining to learn typing on the computer since they didn't have access to a typewriter otherwise. The Webcam was also being used to click photographs that could be printed and used in a number of forms that needed to be filled.

The 'Vet on the Net' is another popular application where diseases to livestock like goats or chicken are treated via video conferencing. To save a trip to the nearest town to visit the vet, villagers were ready to pay for the service.

The other popular service was of course Videomail.

"We found that villagers were willing to pay Rs 10 for a one minute clip of their loved ones who are in the city," Jhunjhunwala says.

Even email in its most basic form has helped achieve a few significant victories for the rural populace.

Jhunjhunwala cites a case where an email was sent to a number of government officials including the chief minister about a possible breakout of the small pox epidemic in a certain area.

Though the email was ignored by many, it finally did reach the right official and prompt administrative action to prevent the epidemic was taken.

"In Attapatti village, Veermani, a man with disabilities was unjustly dismissed from his job. He wrote an email to many government officials, one of whom finally took note and he was reinstated," Jhunjhunwala points out.

But many of the applications haven't been easy to find. For instance, popular video conferencing software is expensive and thus not economically viable to deploy it in villages.

Which is why the team at TeNeT wrote its own videoconferencing software called 'iSee.' The low cost multi party videoconferencing software was specifically developed to meet rural needs.

It enables users to do real time sessions yet the entire application is less than 0.5 MB in size and takes just about two minutes to download and install. It also works reliably on low bandwidth networks such as 12kbps lines.

Similarly, other companies are coming out with innovative solutions to kick start the project.

To help deploy the Internet, Banyan Networks, another start-up from the TeNeT stable built an ISP in a box solution, while Nilgiri Networks did a low cost billing solution.

To operate the kiosks, young women or men of the village who are educated only till high school but can communicate well with the local population are chosen and trained by n-logue.

Today, BSNL provides fibre connectivity up to most talukas (county headquarters). From there technologies like that developed by Midas, a company best known for its CorDECT WLL (Wireless in Local Loop) solution, can help cover 85 per cent of the villages from the talukas. CorDECT is an advanced wireless access system that helps bring connectivity to rural areas at one third the cost it would take otherwise.

A few other non-IIT incubated companies too have been working to bring innovative cost effective solutions.

Chennai Kavigal is one of them. It has developed the Office package in Indian languages of Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada.

The package offers a word processor, a spreadsheet, email software -- all in Indian languages yet compatible with Microsoft Office.

The package from CK, as the company likes to be called, costs just about Rs 2000.

It offers spell check in the Indian language, transliteration and also lets the user work in two or more languages simultaneously.

Another project by n-logue in the pipeline is a low cost rural ATM. Typically, a single ATM can cost up to Rs 800,000. But a prototype has been developed by TeNeT along with n-logue for just Rs 30,000.

n-logue is planning to partner with ICICI to deploy these ATMs near its Web Kiosks.

Today, over 19 districts in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat already have these Web kiosks.

Jhunjhunwala says that by September 2004, 10,000 Web kiosks will be there in over 78 districts throughout the country.

By 2005, if all goes well, the figure will multiply to 100,000 kiosks.

The net effect will be that it will also help double the per capita rural GDP, says Jhunjhunwala.

The rural GDP of India is currently Rs 700,000 crores (Rs 7,000 billion) for a population of 70 crores (700 million). Or a GDP of Rs 10,000 per year per person.

"By bringing Internet and computing to the villages, we can double this figure," says Jhunjunwala confidently.

His dreams seem to strike a chord. At the end of his session in Bangalore IT.COM 2003, where he made a presentation on bringing the Internet to rural India, Jhunjhunwala was mobbed by delegates who wanted to see if they could be a part of his ventures in some way.