Taking computers to rural India
By Harsh Kabra, Pune

Kalyan, a thickly-forested village located in western Indian state of Maharashtra, did not have a telephone connection until about six years ago.

Then one day in 2001, the village’s only secondary school received a computer as a gift.

The students, who had never even heard of a computer, were visibly excited.

When a girl student, Shraddha Dimble, was asked to key in her name, she sweated and fumbled nervously and took a good five minutes to do so.

But a few months later, when the crew of an American news channel visited the village, they were impressed by the ease with which Shraddha was using the computer.

They were specially surprised when they learnt that she had first seen a computer only a few months ago.

‘Useful tool’

Shraddha went on to become a computer teacher. “I wanted others to understand that the computer is a useful tool, not something to be afraid of,” she says. Her school has received two more computers since.

Taking computers to a remote village like Kalyan is a Pune-based entrepreneur Pradeep Lokhande.

Mr Lokhande has gifted more than 450 used computers, obtained from organisations and individual donors, to secondary schools in rural Maharashtra.

“Issues like English language keyboards or frequent power outages do not deter these rural computer enthusiasts,” says Mr Lokhande.

“For most students who often have to walk several kilometres to reach the school, the computer has come as an incentive to go to the school.”

Mr Lokhande is the founder of Rural Relations, a 14-year-old Pune-based rural consumer relations organisation. He supports his work through his own earnings.

Hailing from a poor village family, Mr Lokhande braved numerous hardships to complete his graduation.

In 1984, he joined the marketing division of a multinational company. His 18 months of work there involved frequent travel.

He realised that although villages constituted more than 50% of the market for consumer goods, not enough marketing data was available for companies to reach out to rural consumers.

‘Non-resident villagers’

In 1993, he gave up his job. Over the next three years, he travelled across more than 4,000 villages in five states, looking at village life and collecting data.

He built rapport with the villagers and regularly kept in touch with them through handwritten postcards, something he continues to do even today.

The letters he gets in response – an average of 100 per day – inform him about the developments in these villages.

These responses provide an insight into rural consumer trends. For over 14 years, Mr Lokhande has made a living by providing this information to private companies, which use it to analyse rural markets and consumer behaviour.

“I only interface between the villagers and the corporates,” he says. “I’ve never sold their products.”

Mr Lokhande has also been using a part of his fee to help village schools.

In 2001, he launched the Non-resident Villager (NRV) movement to enable Indians to do their bit for the development of their native villages.

“Every Indian, irrespective of where he is based, has his roots in some village. This makes every Indian an NRV,” he says.

The movement has generated encouraging response from people like Sanjay Jagtap, a US-based computer engineer.

Mr Jagtap has donated a computer with a printer and an internet connection to a school in the Jaitapur village of Satara district where his father studied.

“It is an extremely fulfilling experience. I couldn’t have done this otherwise for want of time and opportunity to visit Jaitapur,” says Mr Jagtap.

Mapping villages

Mr Lokhande has now embarked upon a programme to compile audio-visual data on Indian villages.

These videos are aimed at drawing attention to the condition of these villages, inviting contributions by way of ideas or money for their improvement, and keeping the contributors informed on the action taken.

Mr Lokhande has already organised videos on 2,000 villages across nine states, and eventually wants to create videos on 75,000 of India’s 650,000 villages.

These videos are shot by local village youth, who were helped by Mr Lokhande to buy camcorders and trained as “village developers” to spread the message of development across the villages in their region.

Ganesh Yeole, 23, from Wahegaon village in Aurangabad district is one of the 240 “village developers”.

Mr Yeole used to work at a roadside tea stall in his village until he met Mr Lokhande four years ago.

Today, equipped with a camcorder and a laptop, he travels across villages in his region to film the conditions there. “I had never imagined I could lead such a respectable life,” he says.

In these videos, the villagers talk about their villages and the efforts undertaken by them to improve their condition.

“This can be a strong motivator for others to act,” says Mr Lokhande.

“I look at my work as an investment that has both monetary as well as social rewards,” he says. “If I can achieve all this, even a few thousand more entrepreneurs like me can make a huge difference.”

Source http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6994677.stm Read the original story with pictures.