Background

The Warana Wired Village Project was launched by the IT Task Force of the Prime Minister's Office to demonstrate the use of ICT to accelerate socio-economic development of a cluster of 70 villages around Warana in the Kolhapur and Sangli districts of Maharashtra. The Warana complex was selected, as an example of successful integrated rural development through the formation of cooperatives. This complex includes 25 cooperative societies, with an annual turnover of Rs 6 billion involved in the production of sugar and dairy products, poultry, and building construction.

The Warana Project is jointly executed by (1) the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the Planning Commission, GoI, (2) the Directorate of Information Technology, State Government of Maharashtra, and (3) the Warana Sahakari Dugdh Utpadan Prakriya Limited (WSDUPL), Warana Nagar. The total cost of the project is Rs 25 million which was borne jointly by the three agencies in a ratio of 50:40:10.

Objectives and Goals

The following aims and objectives were envisaged at the start of the project:  

• To provide computerized facilitation booths in 70 villages, which are linked up to the central computer network at Warana Nagar.
• To bring Warana Nagar on NICNET.
• To increase the efficiency/ productivity of the existing cooperative societies by providing state-of-the-art computer communication network and latest database technology.
• To create a database of villagers on various socio-economic aspects.
• To provide tele-education to both primary and higher educational institutes by developing IT centres at most populous points.
• To establish GIS of 70 villages.
• To create greater transparency in the functioning of the cooperative society.   

Planning

Warana Wired Village Project was launched as a first wired village pilot with a joint effort of GoI, Government of Maharashtra  and a sugar cooperative. It was expected to wire 70 villages of Kolhapur and Sangli district of Maharashtra so as to establish a rural network connecting these villages with a computer network. Primarily, the project planned to provide IT facilities to sugarcane growers and members of the sugar cooperative societies. During the implementation of the project, various other services, like land records, prices of agricultural commodities in different markets and knowledge about various agricultural practices were provided. Some of the centres were linked with a VSAT and others were provided connectivity with dial-up modems.

Services Provided

The system includes web-based and Intranet-based applications. The web-based applications are the agriculture produce market information system, agricultural schemes and crop technology information system, computer learning aids, village information systems, educational and vocational guidance systems, government documents and procedures systems, and computerization of the local cooperative market. Intranet-based systems include the wired management of sugarcane cultivation, land records, the computerization of the Warana Milk Dairy, and a Grievance Registration and Redressal System.

Target Group and Intended Beneficiaries

The target beneficiaries are farmers, sugarcane growers and other villagers. It is intended to serve the information needs of farmers for cultivation practices, pests and disease control, marketing information and information on processing, bill payment position of sugarcane and dairy products.

Institutional Arrangements

The kiosk managers are usually government servants who are officially allocated the management of kiosks in rural areas. The content has been created in the local Marathi language by the NIC office in Pune, Maharashtra, through extensive interactions with the cooperative societies. The content is regularly maintained and enhanced at the location of the central system within the local university.

Technologies

NIC Pune is responsible for the design, development, and implementation of the Warana Wired Village Project. Both the University and business centres of Warana along with the six most populous villages (IT centres) around Warana have been chosen to house the VSATs. The IT centres are equipped with dial-up capability and UPS back-ups. Facilitation booths have been set up in 70 villages. These centres have one multimedia computer equipped with a high speed modem (33.6 Kbps), for the dial-up link. The protocol used is SLIP/PPP. The operating system on the computer is Windows 95, and an HTML browser installed for accessing the web server. Communication is sustained between the IT centres, business centres, and village booths using dial-up connections over the LAN. The Institute of Engineering Technology houses the Central Hub.

The Central Hub facilitates all web, database, intranet, Internet, and e-mail applications. The Central Hub's servers store updated market information along with information pertaining to the many databases, which include dairy, educational, geographical and agricultural information. Information such as land records has been put onto CD-ROMs. The intranet based e-learning program is menu driven with a variety of software applications. Application content is administered from the Central Hub. The system is maintained in association with NIC, Pune.

Primary Access Points

Primary access points for the services provided in Warana Wired Village project are the rural kiosks established in 70 villages. The information or services are available through a government servant managed kiosk. The connectivity available at these access points are either through VSAT or through dial-up modem.

Capacity Building

The project staff at the server end has been given extensive training in database management, networking, and hardware maintenance. The kiosk managers in rural areas were given training for three days to use software effectively and to operate hardware equipment efficiently.

Constraints and Implementation Challenges

Warana Wired Village Project, as a pioneering community network project, has faced numerous constraints and implementation challenges. The standardization of databases at the sugar cooperative was an initial challenge which was effectively handled. The problem of connectivity in rural areas was taken care of through VSAT along with dial-up modem connectivity. Software prepared by NIC was upgraded many times to facilitate smooth functioning of the services on the network. The kiosks have been managed by government servants which has created a situation where the services are available at the kiosks only on working days between 10 am and 5 pm. The initial inertia of kiosk managers in managing the kiosks in remote rural villages has caused a deterioration in the quality of services provided at the kiosk. Power shortage in rural areas of Maharashtra has also been a key issue.

Project Outcomes

The applications related to agriculture produce, schemes and crop technology as well as for education are not being used fully. One reason is the slow access to the Internet, insufficient awareness creation among the villagers, and the low levels of literacy in the area in spite of high levels of income. Although a number of different products and services were promised, this enormous infrastructural investment currently serves only as a distributed accounts system for the Warana sugarcane cooperative. The multiple utility card could not be made operational. There have been problems in the implementation of computerization of land records. The GIS has become obsolete, to a large extent, due to lack of updation of the database. Windows-based applications like crop guide, schemes of agriculture department, employment schemes, collectorate procedure, and vocational guidance are non-interactive and have not been updated. The market rates of the agriculture produce have been dysfunctional and lie unused due to poor information management. The network has been reduced to computerization of the sugar cooperative, mostly due to non-participation of the local villagers. Not even a fraction of the project cost could be recovered in the three years up to the time of the study. The project remained dominated by NIC officials and technocrats, causing severe problems in community participation and management of services. The pilot project, due to its very high cost, has not been replicated anywhere in India. But, it has provided innumerable insights to the knowledge initiatives in the field of local governance started in India after 1998.

Key Lessons Learnt

There are three key lessons:

1. Any application should be developed only after an accurate assessment of the needs of the people as the project is intended to create direct impact on their livelihoods.
2. Once the information needs of the community are assessed, content and software applications should be developed with the continuous involvement and feedback from the community. The lack of local participation in content creation, as well as in software development, might not bring the intended results. This partly explains why much of the information, including that on sugar cane growing and agricultural prices, lies unutilized and has not been updated regularly in this project. 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.
3. Specific efforts should be made to improve women and poor people’s access to information. It has been observed that women generally visit information kiosks to obtain sugar factory services while only men are using the Internet services where available. With no means to get women involved and, in particular, to ensure that women are trained to become information kiosks operators, there is a possibility that they will be further marginalized.

Similar considerations apply in case of poor people. In Warana, the information kiosks are mostly accessed by members of the cooperative societies and farmers who own their land. The poorest, landless labourers and tribal groups currently do not have a reason to visit the information kiosks because they do not need the services connected with sugarcane growing and harvesting. However, information on government schemes offering employment, or on educational opportunities for children, would be of significant importance to the poorest. Once such information is made available, efforts should then be made to improve access by the poorest to the kiosks. Finding people with the right mix of skills and motivations is a necessary condition for any project to succeed in bringing ICT to rural communities.

Sustainability

The Warana Wired Village project has been implemented with a high capital investment. Extra emphasis on hardware and technology has resulted in high capital costs. The project has been funded by GoI, the state government of Maharashtra and the Cooperative Society. The very high capital investment has resulted in the project becoming a research project. It has become less replicable mainly because of this. The returns from the initial investments are low. The kiosks are manned by government servants whose salaries are paid by the state. The project is not sustainable and is carried on with more funding from government.

Replication and Scaling Up

Warana Wired Village project has been widely replicated, in different forms and in different ways in different parts of India. It has been of the model all initiatives in India, which have used ICT for poverty alleviation and governance to rural kiosks as access points.

Recommendations

It is recommended that the sugar cooperative databases be more integrated and made more interactive so that cane growers can obtain all the services related to sugarcane growing and selling to the sugar cooperative. It is also recommended that land record databases be improved as they are not readily available from the kiosks and the available data is often not updated. Government servants and paid volunteers should be discontinued. Volunteers from the villages should be engaged in the management of the kiosk on a profit-sharing basis. It is also recommended that the focus of the project should shift from hi-tech technologies and technical equipment to community and social participation.

Human Interest Stories

Making Life Easy

Ramakant Kale, a sugarcane farmer, owns one hectare of land in Pargaon village of Kolhapur district. Delays and shortages in the sugarcane weight and sugar content when monitored by the Sugar Cooperative Society. There were long delays in sugarcane deposits and often there would be complaints about the content of the sugar in the cane. Ramakant goes to the kiosk now and can find out the weight of the sugarcane he deposited. He can also cross check the amount of money he is supposed to receive from the Cooperative Society. Warana Wired Village project has thus made his life much easier.