eGovernment for Development

Success/Failure Case Study No.1

Village Information Kiosks for the Warana Cooperatives in India

Case Study Authors

Simone Cecchini (scecchini@hotmail.com) and Monica Raina (monica@cclan.iimahd.ernet.in)

Application

A combination of MIS (management information system), and delivery of services to citizens, via the Internet.

Village kiosks have a PC with a printer and most are connected to the Central Administrative Building (CAB) via wireless telephony. Some of them, though, save information on floppy disks and bring the disks to the CAB as they cannot afford the telephone bills. Kiosks also have email and Internet access, although connections are often very slow or unreliable. Some kiosks have bought an Internet connection from the local ISP (Internet Service Provider).

Application Description

The 54 functioning village information kiosks are facilitating the Warana Group of Cooperatives (WGC) in the sugar cane production process at three stages:

• First stage: With the yearly registration for plantation, when supervisors from WGC record mutations (changes to land property).
• Second stage: With the issuance of harvesting permits.
• Third stage: With payment information.

WGC pays farmers for their crops in four installments, which are credited directly to their bank accounts. The cooperative publishes payment dates in the local newspaper. On these designated dates, the farmers visit the kiosks to obtain the payment slips and know the updated status of their accounts with the bank or CAB. In addition, farmers can purchase fertilizer at depots located next to the kiosks, in cash or on credit. If they buy using credit, they get a receipt for their purchase at the kiosk. Money spent on transport of the crop to the sugar factory and the harvesters' bill is also entered in the system.

Application Purpose

The stated goal of the Warana "Wired Village" project is not only to increase the efficiency and productivity of the sugar cane cooperative, but also to provide a wide range of information and services to 70 villages around Warana. The project aims at giving villagers access to information, in local language, about crops and agricultural market prices, employment schemes from the government of Maharashtra, and educational opportunities.

Stakeholders

The main stakeholders affected by this application are farmers and the WGC. Warana is a well-developed rural area located 30 kilometers northwest of the city of Kolhapur, in one of the richest states of India, Maharashtra. The main economic activity there is sugar cane growing and processing. About 50,000 farmers live in 100 villages spread in the 25,000 sq. kilometer area covered by the cooperative. The WGC is formed by 25 cooperative societies with a total turnover of US$130 million.

Impact: Costs and Benefits

The project has increased the efficiency of the sugar cane growing and harvesting process, both in terms of time saved by the farmers on administrative transactions as well as in terms of monetary gains. Before computerization, it used to take two or three days (many times, even one week) for farmers to know their income and expenditure account with CAB. Now, all it takes is a visit to the village kiosk. And as a result of computerization, fertilizer stock inventories are better managed, which is said to have brought savings of about US$750,000 to the cooperative. The estimated cost of the project is US$600,000.

Evaluation: Failure or Success?

This is a partial success. Depending on the size of the village served by a kiosk, between 30 and 100 farmers visit the kiosks daily. However, some of the project's features have not been implemented yet: these include distance learning at IT centers, the digitization of land records, and the connection of all of the cooperative's "business centers." Information on sugar cane growing and agricultural prices lies unutilized and has not been updated since 1998.

Enablers/Critical Success Factors

1. Strong human development . Relatively high levels of human development in that region - the sugar cane belt of Maharashtra is one of the most prosperous regions in the country.
2. Good infrastructure . For instance, there are no power failures in the area.
3. Local organizational capacity . For example, the strength of the local cooperative movement and champions of this movement.

Constraints/Challenges

1. Top-down initiation . This was a somewhat top-down initiative, initiated by the Prime Minister's Office Information Technology Task Force.
2. Overambitious goals . Some of the goals set were too broad and high, e.g. "bring the world's knowledge at the doorstep of villagers through the Internet".
3. Lack of participation . Lack of local staff participation in the software development and implementation process, which was done by a central nodal agency in Delhi, the capital of India.

Recommendations

1. Assess the information needs of the community, promoting local ownership and participation . While conceptualizing e-government initiatives, which use ICT for development, the information needs of a community should be thoroughly assessed using rapid, participatory rural appraisals and other survey instruments which have been used for several years to ensure community ownership of development programs.
   Development practitioners and software developers may plan to utilize a wide range of resources and develop applications that are of potential use to a community. However, what matters most is the information or application that has a direct impact on the livelihood of the people. If applications have the potential to raise the income levels of the community, they can become "killer" applications. The critical mass, needed to ensure the success of the project, gets built up.
   In the case of the Warana "Wired Village" project, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) developed user-friendly software, using regional language (Marathi, the native language of Maharashtra) front-end interfaces. The process of software development and content creation precluded participation of the local staff from CAB, the intended users of the software. This partly explains why much of the information, including that on sugar cane growing and agricultural prices, lies unutilized and has not been updated since 1998.
   It is advisable that e-government initiatives follow an incremental approach, by which both content that responds to the most pressing information needs of the community and software that is appropriate for the local conditions are developed by the nodal agency in collaboration with local staff. In this case, WGC would have probably derived greater benefits through regular updates of prices and making effective use of the information initially provided by NIC. Local ownership and participation, in sum, ensure continuity, while a top-down approach will most probably lead to a waste of resources in the initial period of the project, without ensuring its future sustainability.
2. Attend to women's and poor people's ICT access . In Warana, women generally visit information kiosks to obtain sugar factory services; but where the Internet is available, it is only men who are using it. Without finding means to get women involved in e-government projects, and in particular to ensure that women are trained to become information kiosks operators, they may be further marginalized.
   Similar considerations apply to access to e-government by poor people. In Warana, the information kiosks are mostly accessed by members of the cooperative; farmers who own their land. The poorest, landless laborers and tribal groups, currently do not have a reason to visit the information kiosks, because they do not need the services connected with sugar cane growing and harvesting. However, information on government schemes offering employment, or on educational opportunities for children, would be of great importance to the poorest. Once such kind of information is made available, efforts (like public awareness campaigns, radio spots - as even the poorest turn to the radio for entertainment in India, street plays, etc.) should thus be made to improve access by the poorest to the kiosks.
3. Empower grassroots operators: the local champions of ICTs . Finding motivated and skilled grassroots intermediaries is a necessary condition for any project to succeed in bringing e-government to rural communities. These grassroots operators can become champions for ICT in their villages, easing access to information for farmers, providing training to children, and creating new economic opportunities through software development and other activities like desktop publishing, data entry jobs, providing email facilities to the local community, etc.
   In the case of Warana, operators at the information kiosks generally come from the grassroots, and have a great faith in the potential of ICT to improve the standard of living of their community, especially of the rural youth. Most operators have the capability of teaching computer skills and software to children and youth, and would be willing to provide training, if given the necessary incentives. Furthermore, some of the operators have good programming skills; in the village of Tope, for instance, an operator has developed database software to manage the local store's orders and purchases. Some of these young operators have had job experiences in the city and decided to return to Warana due to the strong attachment to their community.

Further Information

http://www.mah.nic.in/warana/

Case Details

Author Data Sources/Role : Interviews, Observation and Documents; No Direct Role
Outcome : Partial Success/Partial Failure. Reform : eServices (improving public services).
Sector : Economic Services (Agriculture); Social Services (Community Development).
Region : South Asia. Start Date : 1998. Submission Date : July 2002