<TITLE: Global Challenges of eDevelopment Conference 1
ACADEMIC DOMAIN: technology
DISCIPLINE: information sciences
EVENT TYPE: conference presentation
FILE ID: CPRE08D
NOTES: continuation of CDIS08A, continued in CPRE08E and CDIS08A, session also includes presentations CPRE08A-C/F/H (CDIS08B and CPRE08I/L/P are part of the same conference)

RECORDING DURATION: 13 min 43 sec

RECORDING DATE: 14.3.2005

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: circa 40

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 1

S10: NATIVE-SPEAKER STATUS: Bengali, Hindi; ACADEMIC ROLE: research student; GENDER: male; AGE: 24-30

SS: several simultaneous speakers>


<S10> <COUGH> er so this is a paper based on the project that er that we've done for the university of california at berkeley er four of us were on this project and this was in the southern indian state of kerala i don't know how many of you know this state i my voice sounds very funny but er this is my first gift from finland actually <SS> @@ </SS> er so this this is a project in the southern state of kerala er in the er green district you see er fourth from the top called malappuram and this project was er before that let me tell you a little bit about the state the weather is very similar to what it is here <SS> [@@] </SS> [this is what your average day looks like er most of the state] is er back waters er which is erm very important to the local economy which i'll get to later and er it's a lot to do with the paddy paddy fields er the place that we were working at was er this was this was specifically the bridge that we had to get to get to where we were working and er it's a primarily rural er district in er kerala er and this is an example of the e-centre that i'm gonna talk about er if you see the blue sign to the right-hand side that's that's an e-centre an e-centre is basically a a village (xx) cafe erm <COUGH> this what you see is actually a more is an urban district so this is a more more urban district inside kerala okay so er er wh- what the project is so basically this is er started up as an e-literacy project so the er village councils of this state voted er one of the dis- districts in the village councils voted to get the entire district trained in computer the way they would do this was that they would get each household send at least one person to get some kind of a computer training and that this would be done by the village councils would pay for this so when they went to the state with this proposal the state basically said that we'll give you this training in addition to which we'll set up a permanent a a permanent network of telecentres where you can er it's like kiosks where you can go and come and go and use er basic computing facilities in the future once the e-literacy is done so er the interesting thing about this is that unlike most of these er initiatives that you'll see which are either university-initiated or maybe even government-initiated this one came up straight from the village councils where there was a demand that we want to get this e-literacy training also interesting is that this specific district where this ha- has taken place is the most backward district of that state <COUGH> now er er a little side note is that this this this this scripture that you got by you there is be computer literate be perfect it sort of underlines the how people er started imagining computer training er other than (south) er anyways the other important thing is that er one of the project coordinators said about er now so when you think about e-literacy we're talking about a lot of people who have very basic literacy skills li- literacy skills so what is computer literacy to them well the basic idea behind this was that if you give people some kind of idea of how to use the computers they stop getting afraid of computers and therefore either they can learn how they can use those in the future or the next generation their children are more likely to use computers er <COUGH> so the the district where this was that where this was done was this place called malappuram and er er in all this was three 630 telecentres (make it) the telecentres were planned in such a way that there is no point in that district which is more than three kilometres walking distance away from one of these telecentres so basically the first stage anyb- everybody sends one person from their household to go and get trained in the telecentre for which the household has to pay 20 rupees which is i i can tell you in dollars that's about er er 50 cents as are it's in euros more or less the same and and and and er that's 50 cents that the family pays and the state pays about er about er a hu- 100 rupees that's about two dollars and er each telecentre like this has about five PCs and so on and so forth er what's interesting is that each telecentre has an entrepreneur who is selected by both the state and the local village council coming together er this entrepreneur is trained at the ce- at the state capital with a number of er er er in a number of areas besides er basically just running an internet er er cafe which include things like er er er fixing hardware er training in software er er er multimedia and so on and so forth and it's done in an interesting way so there are 600 telecentres they're broken up into bunches and bunches of 100 in such a way that if i'm living in one maybe like a block that's what er er er administrative er er er packet of a district is there is only one telecentre in that block which does multimedia only one which does hardware only one which does software and so on and so forth so as to spread the er way in which there is er entrepreneurs can make money so the intres- the important thing about it is that the government planned that there'll be illiteracy which will be the first stage of making money but following that they have to have some other way for the owners of these telecentres to continue making money and they did that by adding in these services so er i've already been through most of this before and in in interest of timing we will just skip over this er the interesting thing is that the government basically has facilitated the whole thing after the village councils came into er to the picture so there's some important political issues about er why how something like that happens so it's also important that there were a lot of financial subsidies added into the project because it was believed that if this was created and basically just handed over to entrepreneurs they won't be able to run it because the people over there simply won't be able to hold any kind of subst- er any kind of pro- projects products so the government both subsidised people er the the the entrepreneurs buying e- equipment and setting up the facilities as well as thereafter people coming and taking courses er the other thing that the government did is that it started making all its services available online so you could start going and paying a bill online and so on and so forth so that people actually had a reason to go to a telecentre i mean why for instance even i know that there's a computer and it works and it does this and that but none of it is is applicable to me but almost everybody has in this state and in th- this district not in the rest of india has some access to electricity if there's a system whereby people have to go to this telecentre and start paying el- electricity bills instead of having to go the state capital and do a paper transaction that makes it faster so basically the government er put in services like that , er so when we were starting this project we took an intere- er er a research approach of so the reason why it's important to study this project is because the state that we were talking about is planning on expanding the one district er er project and put the entire state of the coun- er o- of into the entire state and so we wanted to look at what is the best way to go about doing this henceforth so what we did is that we did a regional analysis of that state and that district in particular to see if a project which was there are is there a good enough reason to believe that it can be replicated elsewhere within that state and secondly much more importantly we looked at the state as a whole to see whether the state compares with the rest of india well enough so that if you come up with an analysis of this particular project using this akshaya project as successful can you replicate it in the rest of india we thought this was really important and most people who are studying telecentres aren't doing this kind of work because every reason er region has some very specific er er er economic and and and and human development er er sort of erm characteristics which are unique and which contribute in a very large way to making these projects work and we were trying to identify that in addition to that what we did is that we did a network a- analysis of what has been running in akshaya already to test a couple of important hypotheses first to see whether the network is built optimally for the kind of uses that they want to put there and secondly to look at w- so there's a lot of er er er er talk in india at least at least over creating er applications for farmers for fishermen and so on and so forth but once these systems are set up are farmers and fishermen using it or is somebody else using it or what kind of uses has been put to it so for that we looked at the network and er er the network logs and and we come to those er present those findings anyways so in in short what we are basically saying is that you can't examine kiosk type projects without contextualising them both regionally and technically , so the first thing that we did we did this er er we did an analysis of the sectoral issues relating to kerala and we found that one really important thing about this state is that it had the highest it had incredibly important population density which made going and coming from any of these telecentres very easy the average village size of this state is ten times that of india and india already has a very high high er er er er population density er <COUGH> there was very high er unemployment rate in the state and the unemployment rate was mostly related to the manufacturing sector so people were looking for service sector jobs there was mhm a trend in the last ten years for the state to move incredibly toward much faster towards er service sector jobs than the rest of india and er in fact it it it was i i think about ten per cent more than rest of india and almost 50 per cent of the employment was still in the private sector er in the in the primary sector despite er that sector becoming smaller and smaller er as as as a part of the net domestic prod- er product so tourism is the biggest growing sector that we found in this area and most of the people we've we've spent a lot of time at these er e-centres in in kerala most of the people who are coming to these e-s- e-centres were trying to get skills to get into some kind of er service sector jobs , the other important thing about this state which we found was that this state had the highest migration rates in the whole country this included migration both within the country and from this state to outside of the country now why is this important so if you look at it this this this this first chart actually maps the percentage of the contribution er of of remittances from abroad to the GDP of that state and towards the end of it you see it's at the rate of about 25 per cent that is a massive er portion of the monies that were coming from foreign er remittances now a lot of the traffic a lot of the use of the telecentres in this first er er district of malappuram was people getting on chat to talk to their er foreign er er relatives or so on and so forth and the second er big component was training for people who wanted to go abroad so lot of the telecentres were making money by teaching people some basic word and so on and so forth skill so when they went abroad for to look for jobs er then this would come in handy so so er the that the er graph down there is is an interesting graph because that maps out how the er bo- the pop- the the migration has been happening in that state versus the rest of india and that that's sort of interesting if you read the paper because that talks about how there's technology migration going on anyways but the important thing about it is that this whole network relies to some extent on the migration which is a big engine for this (xx) the other really important thing is the education now if you look at the two two graphs on top er er er the f- the f- the first graph er is is what er er education is in kerala so the one being 100 per cent of the people in so the 100 per cent of people in the first grade are going to school and then you see it continues so on and so forth until about sixth grade more or less a 100 per cent people in kerala still going to school and then it starts dropping off so in middle school there's a problem so but what's interesting is if if you see the first graph that's kerala all three of them are more or less all the three lines are more or less somewhat alike and so the so the green line which are the poorest are still of over 90 per cent of them are still going to school at at the end of sixth grade and you compare that to the rest of india you see the green line starts below 60 per cent and it keeps falling so there is like a huge gap between so the average poor person in kerala is much much likelier to be educated than the average poor person in the rest of india it's also important that if you look at it in the urban to rural context in india the rural f- espe- especially the rural females they really start dropping off in terms of their er retainment in school whereas in kerala it's almost throughout that that the urban rural ratio remains the same in fact kerala is the only state in india where the rural females are more likely to go to school than the rural males so all of these factors they have huge role in creating the kind of population which can actually use these telecentres once they are made , so i'm gonna hand over to <NAME S14> now who's got a much better voice and and he's going to talk about the (xx) </S10>
