<TITLE: Global Challenges of eDevelopment Conference 1
ACADEMIC DOMAIN: technology
DISCIPLINE: information sciences
EVENT TYPE: conference presentation
FILE ID: CPRE08F
NOTES: continuation of and continued in CDIS08A, session also includes presentations CPRE08A-E/H (CDIS08B and CPRE08I/L/P are part of the same conference)

RECORDING DURATION: 15 min 7 sec

RECORDING DATE: 14.3.2005

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: circa 40

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 1

S17: NATIVE-SPEAKER STATUS: Japanese; ACADEMIC ROLE: other; GENDER: male; AGE: 31-50>


<S17> so i'm gonna talk today about a topic that was just introduced by er <NAME S10> and <NAME S14> and it will be about PC rural PC kiosks in india and this is work done by er several colleagues at microsoft as well as <NAME S10> who was visiting us for a month er in january and also er (vumangina kishunvasan) from the indian institute of information technology okay so first of all let me er er give you some context of rural PC kiosks so at one level they are a lot like internet cafes except that they happen to be in rural villages but at another level they're completely different in that the people who usually are running these projects are very interested in socioeconomic development of the village in itself so as opposed to er an internet cafe in a city where presumably the primary objective of the person is to run a business er most of these are run as sort of er social ventures so the so it's very important that there is some kind of social return in addition to any kind of economic benefit that er accrues to the kiosk operator now in india there are about erm (xx) about 150 different project agencies who are running projects like this and altogether they probably run between 10,000 and 12,000 total er PC kiosks in villages so that's you know 10 to 12,000 er villages that now have a PC in them as a result of you know somebody's initiative and er and er different organisations run these kiosks so everybody from government to er non-profits and NGOs er large corporations small start-ups er academics erm any- anybody else you can think of are are very interested and again as i said they're interested in social objectives as well as er very often to try to see whether they can make these kiosks sustain on their own as a business because ultimately if you put a PC in a village and you have to pump money into it for a couple of years and as soon as you leave er the kiosk closes th- there's no there's no value to that after after that two year period so people are very interested in er sustainability from a business standpoint and what most of this er talk is gonna be about is you know to what degree that's actually er worked out er at least for two particular kiosk agencies okay so the other thing that's interesting is that er the range of what's considered a rural village in india is quite large and this is probably true in er other other parts of the world as well so on one hand you know there are villages which are very agricultural and agrarian in the way that you might imagine that there are cows there are thatch roofs er and you know and most of the people are earning their money through agriculture and then at the other end there are villages where the population may be as high as you know 20,000 30,000 people they're still considered villages where you know the main part of the town looks much more urban and there are it's not immediately obvious to the eye that there are people who you know the primary occupation still remains agriculture so there's a range of these things and depending very much on er where a kiosk is located it may actually impact to the the ability for the operator to actually make an income okay so the we've been looking at er rural kiosk from a number of different angles er through literature reviews as well as site visits and what i'm i'll be talking about today are results from surveys that we've run with kiosk operators i'll talk a little bit about er what those are so we focused on two of the er two of the fairly prominent kiosk companies both of these were run as a start-up companies their end of all is to make a profit by running er PC kiosks in villages er drishtee was a spin-off from another er IT company and their int- you know as their vision says they're interested in connecting er villages in india <COUGH> and N-log is a group that was spun out of erm I-I-T madras which is an engineering school one of the top engineering schools in india and both of these come from people whose knowledge is first in information technology and secondarily in er let's say development and i think that also plays a part in how how how they fare okay the s- the survey itself er again was to understand rural kiosk operations from a business perspective and we basically issued three different kinds of questionnaires one is sort of a base line questionnaire to understand just the basics of the village what's the population what's the average income er what are the different castes that may exist in the village and so forth er second one is a is one that we do one per ki- er one per kiosk namely that for the operator and we ask various questions er about the operator and then ano- another series on kiosk customers so ho- you know ho- what's the customer side experience er these are all translated to local languages delivered orally er by erm currently employees of both er N-log and drishtee who are specifically hired for this purpose and for N-log we've done the survey for 150 villages this is ongoing over two years and the results that i'm presenting are sort of the early results we've gotten after the first two trials er where we expect to do questionnaires every three months and for drishtee it's alternating sets of villagers of 75 villagers each and this sort of glitch is basically it's comes down to the fact that drishtee doesn't have the capacity to do a 150 every every three months erm yawn so some of the questions we were interested in asking er from the point of view of the operator what's their main source of income er what services do they offer at the kiosk er how many customers they see per day and so on er k- kiosk customer identity demographs do- doa- er demographics for the kiosk customer er what kind of spending habits they have do they have the kind of er disposable income that might allow them to spend money on a rural kiosk and also you know how what's their er typical usage for for the kiosk , okay i'm just gonna jump right into some of the more interesting findings so quite a bit of our survey just confirms things that might seem very obvious you know things like if you have more customers you are likely to make more income erm er the fact that a lot of the customers tend to be grouped in the same caste as the operator and so forth and these are things that we expected anticipated beforehand so i'm not gonna talk too much about those i'm instead gonna focus on some of the more interesting findings so the first one is that despite the fact that these kiosks are targeted towards helping let's say farmers er do better with their farms or er fishermen do better with fishing the predominant customers are students and unemployed youth and these are people who have usually have some experience with computers or erm <COUGH> or if they don't they're interested in learning about computers from the from the kiosk itself and so we've actually in the survey you know early on we realised that just the sheer number of customer feedback that we were getting was fro- primarily from students so we intentionally tapped the survey to include only two students out of the five er customers per kiosk and even at that point it's it's saturated so every every kiosk we can basically get you can easily find two er customers who are who are students it another interesting finding is that kiosk customers are almo- er almost always the same sex as the person running the kiosk and so er and we you know what we found through asking erm additional questions is that if a man is running the kiosk then no women on their own will pr- will walk into the kiosk simply because it creates cultural issues er when there's a man and a woman in alone in a room erm and then from the male side if a woman is running the kiosk they're reluctant to be in a situation where they have to ask help from er from a woman and so there's an inhibition towards men walking into kiosks er er that are operated by women erm one of the interes- the other interesting things is that women it turns out er from anecdotal evidence are actually the they tend to better at operating kiosks they're much more willing to engage with the community from marketing and business standpoint and so a lot of the some of the in some regions the kiosk agencies will actually intentionally look for female operators er in other cases the- er they look for male operators simply because they they have certain cut-offs with things like level of education or er degree of er previous entrepreneurship that they're looking for and some of those cases there tends to bias towards men , we another erm interesting finding is that <COUGH> is that despite the fact that a lot of these kiosks start off with some kind of community event where they try to market the kiosk to the entire community and they'll post fliers and so forth ultimately customers say that the the fir- the first time that they go to use the kiosk it's because they've spoken to friends or family who encourage them to use it and so there's a this is i think this confirms some fairly well understood sociological phenomenons that er the adoption of technology often involves a word of mouth . <COUGH> erm er the other the another piece of information and this also confirmed by er the previous talk is that not all the kiosk customers need to be PC literate and so er in our survey we counted that 70 per cent of customers actually never touch the PC themselves and what that means is that the kiosk operator is basically mediating the interaction between the PC and the person so especially for us we're er you know as a research lab we're ultimately interested in finding technical innovations that might help these rural projects and one of the interesting facts about you know this kind of finding is that you know there's a lot of talk about improving the U-I for people who are not literate or improving the U-I for people who may not speak the you know the language that the computer is er pr- providing content in and a lot of those cases the effort that you may go through to provide that additional U-I may ultimately be lost on the kiosk where the operator i- you know if the operator's well trained they'll be able to supply all the services erm this model actually turns out to follow very much another model that appears in india which are these PCO er telephone boxes er which are basically phone booths that are manned so in that situation as well er there's a person there who'll help you dial phone numbers or you know er make international calls if you need to and so forth so there's sort of an established tradition of having somebody help you with the technology and especially in these environments where labour is you know reasonably ex- inexpensive that's a that's a very easy thing to provide at every kiosk , okay the er (xx) services that we find and this is by revenue er one of them is computer skills education so this turns out to be very important erm many many parents who er er see the computer as a way o- for out for their children out of the village and they see computer education as a one such way and so the amount of money that they're willing to pay for their child to get some level of computer education is actually quite high for them it often ends up being something like 400 rupees per month which is a significant er part of their monthly income er and then the other ap- applications like entertainment er e-government where you fill out various forms online er it may save you a trip or two to the to the nearest town which may which may cost you a q- quite a significant amount of money otherwise as well as er daily wages and also desktop publishing , okay and finally co- coming to whether or no these kiosks can sustain themselves from an income point of view er there's a lot of er interesting information on this slide so this is a breakdown of the income that households make er by profession and and how much of that income is based on er the kiosk itself and in all of these cases you can see the kiosk makes less than let's say 3000 rupees per month erm estimate between N-log and drishtee of how much ami- er a single kiosk needs to make in order to sustain itself are between 3500 and 6000 rupees per month which means that at least on this graph none of these none of these averages are actually making that making that cut-off erm we've we done other surveys where we found that about a third maybe a third of the kiosks are close to breaking even and that seems to be fairly true across projects er everybody else isn't basically not making money from the kiosk and so what this means is that most of these other mo- er most of the other income that's is basic- other income is basically subsidising subsidising the kiosk in some cases these kiosks were closed if the person decides to make a business decision simply saying you know that i am paying this much for let's say connectivity and maintenance of the PC and that's nothing in accrue nothing for my making of the kiosk erm it's er this is i think one of the more erm difficult findings for this area simply because there is so much energy in trying to make er P- rural PC kiosks work in india and so one question is you know why does why does this keep happening so <COUGH> so this is sort of a schematic of a imagine each of these little dots is a village in india okay and and on the Y axis you can imagine anything that might correlate with let's say wealth income education er existence of infrastructure even population of the village and erm the interesting thing is if you go if you go to enough little villages in india sometimes you've notice that spontaneously there are these internet cafes that work that aren't run by an outside project agency they're just some entrepreneur in in the village has decided that it might be a good idea to set up an internet cafe and presumably the fact they exist means that they are able to sustain themselves and so er think of those dots above this line as being those villages erm what's interesting is that right now there's a lot of interest in trying to make these kiosk projects er sustain and to me what that means is is trying to find a way for this line to lower and you might then be able to find a few more villages that can now sustain a kiosk and if you put in a lot of effort maybe some of this line you know comes down further but as you saw quite a few of these er efforts are not allowing the kiosk to sustain in on itself and what that means is in the long term this line will just snap back and so another alternative and i think this is the one that we really wanna look at especially from a you know policy perspective it is instead of focusing on the sustainability of the kiosk are there other models of applying information technology that will help overall development and the idea there is that instead of trying to bring that line down you're actually helping villages develop so that even if you suddenly at some point let's say your money runs out and you're unable to you know sus- you know sustain the kiosk itself maybe there's er you know some other benefit that goes to the village that will that will allow them to engage in other er other activities which m- which may which may prove valuable so based on this erm we've been spending some time trying to find other possible models for information technology in er development and that might involve non-PC computing platforms so the biggest possibility i think is with mobile phones er mobile phones are exploding in usage you know throughout the world er and and particularly in emerging market countries it's amazing how fast their take-up is er i think one of the you know the two key aspects of of mobile phones is that their cost is obviously much lower than that of a PC and then the other is that they have they provide immediate value to the user that is you know undebatable whereas for PC you often have to make the case erm and then the other possibilities are if if let's say you're gonna insist on using PCs are to find other ways to put them in villages some of these are already being done and then to see to what degree we can support those particular uses and it might not be the case that in you know in any or just single one of these that you're actually closing the let's say the digital divide in the sense that maybe not more people in the village will have access but in some way you're aiding the overall development of the village and i think that's it thank you </S17>
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