REUTERS[ THURSDAY, JUNE 16, 2005 02:16:18 PM]
SAN FRANCISCO: A consortium of high-tech firms, banks and government officials are gearing up to create rural business centers across Karnataka, backers said they will announce on Thursday. Officials of Wyse Technology of San Jose, California said their company is teaming up with Comat Technologies Ltd., a Bangalore computer consultancy that is helping digitize Indian land records as part of a government rural development push. But while the plan is to erect computer kiosks in 5,000 rural villages around Karnataka, the focus of the project is not to deliver technology itself - but the education, banking, healthcare and legal services that villagers crave. "We are not just trying to throw technology at the problem," Wyse CEO and president John Kish said. "Western technology companies have been parachuting computer kiosks into India for years," Kish said. "But no one has put in place the business services villagers need." The consortium - which includes the International Finance Corp., an arm of the World Bank, ICICI, India's second-largest bank, and D. Manjunath, Karnataka state's education minister - will detail plans to attack the digital divide that separates India's rural poor from increasingly high-tech city dwellers. The plan is to install 6 to 10 maintenance-free networked terminals in each village to act as outposts of e-government - providing education and healthcare information along with access to local land records. ICICI Bank will offer farm loans and crop insurance to documented landowners. The project fuses the latest ideas about microfinance and Internet technology to bring rural India into the economic mainstream, said Antoinette Schoar, an associate professor of entrepreneurial finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. Schoar is acting as an advisor to Comat and ICICI. The involvement of ICICI is vital to breaking up usurious local money lending practices, where farmers can be charged interest rates of 4 percent a month for loans on fertilizer or seed, Schoar said from her office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Once you have access to your (land record) documents to prove property ownership, it becomes easier to take out a loan," she said of the consortium's rural development plan. BLUEPRINT TO SOLVE 'DIGITAL DIVIDE?' Supporters of the project say they hope the Karnataka pilot will become a blueprint for setting up similar rural business centers in each village kiosk. Comat is working to digitize rural land records in stats across India. India has an estimated 147,000 rural villages. "We see this as the 'rural services' blueprint for populations in developing nations everywhere," Kish said. The consortium is one of several Indian projects seeking to tackle the intractable issues underlying the world's "digital divide" between information "haves" and "have-nots." Last month, India's Encore Software, the company previously behind the $200 handheld "Simputer," said it planned to start selling a $230 Linux-software based "mobile desktop." Digital Partners and ITC Ltd. have similar low-cost projects. Wyse has more than one third of the world market for so-called thin-client computer terminals. Each device has no moving parts. The plan is for each machine to carry roughly 256 megabytes of flash memory, enough to run a royalty-free software system such as Linux or Wyse's in-house software. The cost of each Wyse terminal will be $250, Kish said. A pilot project will focus on setting up kiosks in 6 villages. By August, Karnataka state officials are expected to unveil plans to expand the kiosk project to create as many as 6,000-7,000 rural business centers, according to Ali Fenn, Wyse's vice president of business development. In Karnataka alone, 30,000-50,000 Wyse terminals are expected to be put to work in the project. To put that number in context, Wyse expects to sell some 1 million terminals worldwide this year, on top of the 15 million the Silicon Valley-based company has sold over two decades of operations.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1143767,curpg-1.cms