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Social Inclusion Cases

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Pondicherry (India)

Geographic setting
The Pondicherry region is located in the south-eastern part of India. The region (and in particular the villages) are populated by fishermen and farmer families with low incomes (an average on 25 USD or below per family a month). The penetration of ICT and telecom is very limited.

Type and use of ICT
A variety of different ICS are used in the Village Information Centres project. At the central hub in Villianur, where information is collected by, often female, operators, translated into local Tamil language and fed into the system an ISDN connection to the Internet is used. Villianur is the central city in the region and they have relative good access to teleinfrastructure. However, there was no existing teleinfrastructure in the villages (below one phone per 100 inhabitants) and it would be very expensive to lay down copper or fibre optic cables to the villages. Thus, the central network (LAN) is maintained by the operators in Villianur, but when the villagers accesses the network from the central access point in their city they use a wireless VHF (full duplex) based accessing technology. Thus they have saved money by using the wireless technologies. Besides the connecting technologies used to access the Internet in Villianur to get access to the needed information resources, and the VHF-radios used in the villages to access the Intranet/LAN they of course use computers. As no ordinary people in the cities can afford to but their own PC a single computer was given to the cities who wanted to participate. This is a strong Pentium machine with loudspeaker as it needs to be strong enough to access multimedia material (sound and pictures).

Main contributors
The project was initiated and managed by the Madras based M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation with the support of the Canadiam Government.

Furthermore the project was dependant on support from the villagers. The operators working with collecting and feeding in information at the central hub in Villianur are voluntary. They do it because they gain status in the society because they can handle the technology as well as receiving some education (two week course in basic ICT skills). Furthermore, it is free of charge for the villagers to use the system, but in order to make the system a success and secure support from the villagers the village was asked to provide space for the central accessing point free of charge. Finally the villagers needed to maintain the system on a daily basis free of charge.

Main beneficiaries
The main actors benefiting from the Village Information Centres are, of course, first and foremost the local farmers and fishermen in the local communities. They can now gain access to external information that they can use in their daily work to improve their living conditions and their economic prospects. Information that is quite basic but very valuable for them and most important - information that was very difficult to obtain prior to the introduction of the system.

Furthermore, as the central hub in Villanur primarily is staffed with female labour and these receives some training and especially gaining social status in the local community because of their voluntary job as operator, the result has been better living conditions for these as well as better employment opportunities (due to received traning).

Background
The region Pondicherry, and its main capital Pondicherry is situated in South East India by the Bay of Bengal. The primary occupation of the area is agriculture and some textile-, chemical- and electronic industry. The district has a literacy rate of 75%, and a high poverty in rural areas. This case concerns itself with ten poor villages app. 10 km. From the capital, Pondicherry.

Objectives
The main objective of the Village Information Centres was to deliver value-added information to the villagers. Information that the local community could act upon in order to improve their living conditions and economic prospects.

Resources (apart from ICT)
Apart of ICT the main resources are:

- Labour, which covers two groups.

Operators located in Villianur who finds the data on the Internet, translates this into the local Tamil language, perhaps converts the text into voice messages (for people with a reading problem). The information is then fed into the Intranet and transmitted by way of a VHF (full duplex) radio to the local accessing points located in the villagers.

- Space

The villages needed to find a suitable room where the information centre could be located. They needed to provided this space free of charge as payment for their free access to the system.

Activities
The Village Information Centre project consisted of the following activities.

1: Project definition, what is the current situation and what is needed?
2: Identify local needs for information and assessing the possibilities of delivering this information. Perhaps also find ways to translate this information into multimedia presentations (voice or pictures) as many local villagers have problems with reading text.
3: Set up the technological platform in the central hub in Villianur as well as in the 10 local villages participating in the project.
4: Staff and train personnel working at the central hub as well as well as the people maintaining the equipment in the villages.
5: Secure support of the system / make sure that people uses it. This is done in two ways. By asking the villages to provide space free of charge makes the villagers more interested in the project. They are interested in finding out what they receive once they have offered the room. Subsequently, information meetings were held on a continuos basis in the villagers to explain the local communities on the kinds of information they can find in the system
6: The information resources in the system need to be updated and focus needs to be on additional information needed. This was done on a continuos basis.
7: The project was a success and by the year of 2000/2001 work was done on involving the local government in Pondicherry to fund a larger expansion of the project. The main target was to set up local Information centres in all villages in the region.

Outputs and results
The main outputs of the Information Village Project are as follows:

1: The general living conditions of the local population have been improved.
Besides these tangible effects, there have also been effects on women employment, status, and educational level and ICT skills.

The central hub is mainly staffed with women, who were previously unemployed. These women are not paid for their work, but they gain significant status in the local community by holding the responsibility as operator of the system.

It is not only the educational level of the female operators that have been improved, but also the general level of ICT skills and education among the users in the local villages. They learn how to handle the equipment and they find out that this can be used and thus create interest in the new technologies.

Lessons and conclusions
When introducing the Information Village Centres it was important to secure support from the users right from the start. Content in the system needed to be defined by the end users and furthermore support was secured by:

1: System is free of charge to use, but the villages interested in the project needed to (1.1) supply space free of rent for the location of the information centre in the village and appoint a person that could maintain the system on a daily basis, and (1.2) secure that content is generated locally using local labour. This is needed is order to tailor the knowledge to local socio-economic circumstances as well as tailor the information to specific cultural issues.

The main lesson is to adopt a "pull" strategy instead of a "push". A bottom-up approach is needed to secure support from the users and make the information delivered by the system useable and assist the villagers in their daily work practices.

A study was carried out, revealing that the communication habits of the population were mostly based on local and supra-local linkages. The primary sources of information were local traders and other farmers and as thus the internal and local communication linkages were very strong whereas links to external institutions were weak. It was decided that the information requirements of the villagers could best be met by strengthening the existing linkages. External information would have to be selectively compiled, edited and integrated with local knowledge in order to make it useful in the local context

Objectives
The main objective of the Village Information Centres was to set up a ICT-based information system, that could deliver value-added information to the villagers. Information that the local community could act upon in order to improve their living conditions and economic prospects.

Generally, the aim was information on various aspects of relevance to the villagers. Information that the, often poor farmers and fishermen could act upon. The types of information are as follows:

• Weather forecasts. Useful for farmers in order to enhance their possibilities for when to harvest the crops and fishermen in order to know when (and in particular when not) to set sails and go to sea.
  
• Information on market prices. Used by farmers to decided what crops to grow on their fields and what they can expect to receive when they eventually sells their products on the market.
  
• Information on personal health care, booking of medical examinations in the cities and also info on cattle diseases.
  
• Information on public support possibilities and plans.
  The project was based on the principles of the Swaminathan Research Foundation, which emphasises an integrated pro-poor, pro-woman, pro-nature orientation, which is focused on community ownership of technological tools rather than personal/ family ownership.

Resources
The information village project was created by the Madras based M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation with the support of a USD 120.000 grants from the Canadian Government.
Apart of ICT the main resources are:

• - Labour, which covers two groups.
  1. Operators located in Villianur who finds the data on the Internet, translates this into the local Tamil language, perhaps converts the text into voice messages (for people with a reading problem). The information is then fed into the Intranet and transmitted by way of a VHF (full duplex) radio to the local accessing points located in the villagers. The operators are mostly females. It was a part of the project to enhance the living conditions of females in the region and therefore females were preferred when the project staffed and trained the operators at the central node.
  2. Another group of labour is the people that maintain the PC and the network in the villages. The information system is free of charge to use for the villagers, but they needed to appoint a person who could maintain the system. This person did not receive any financial support, but received some training.

It is notable that all staff participating in the content generating process as well as the people in the villages maintaining the equipment is all voluntary labour - they do not receive any financial inducements. However, as the region is very poor and the educational levels very low it was not difficult to find staff simply because they received some education as well as gaining status in the local community.

• Space

  The villages needed to find a suitable room where the information centre could be located. They needed to provided this space free of charge as payment for their free access to the system.

Activities
The project began in 1998 at the village of Villianur, 20 km from Pondicherry. The first effort of villagers and the project staff was to develop a mutual understanding. Through techniques such as participatory appraisal, the villagers helped the staff understand the socio-economic dimensions of the rural information village that would take shape. A project definition was created, assessing the current situation and needs, for instance, selected relevant information needed to be presented in a way that would not exclude illiterate users.

The technological platform of the project vas set up in the town Villianur, connecting to the 10 villages participating in the project. The value addition centre has access to the Internet via three dial-up accounts. It also functions as the hub of a local area network, which transmits voice and data to the project villages. Plans are currently being made for introducing tools for communication between the villages, and facilities for video conferencing meetings are being set up. In addition to this, each of the participating villages has a locally run knowledge centre with a computer. All PCs are powered by solar devices. The village knowledge centres all perform the same function, but are set up in different ways, corresponding to the wishes and abilities of the villages. Some are located in public buildings, some in temples, and at least one in a private house. All work being done in the project is voluntary.

The project rests on a pragmatic mix of technologies. For instance, information on wave height in the Pondicherry coast is downloaded from the US Navy website everyday, converted to an audio file (in order to facilitate the illiterate population as well) and transmitted to the coastal villages in the project through an age old public address system.
The project had a special focus on improving the living conditions for women and creating equal opportunities. Consequently, female applicants were preferred when hiring operators to work with content generation in the central hub/ value addition centre in Villianur, and maintain equipment in the villages. The operators received some basic training in PC and Internet-handling to enable them to fulfil their position. Even though the operators work on a voluntary basis, this minor bit of education has improved their living conditions and the fact that they hold a position as operator has increased their social status in the community significantly. The village volunteers, many of whom had finished only middle school education, took to learning how to use computers and operate the associated communication devices surprisingly fast. And are now able to teach others how to use computers. The operators type text in Tamil, which has 240 characters, into the database on a standard English QWERTY-keyboard.

Value addition centre operators find the information requested by the villagers, translates it into the local language, Tamil and feeds this into an Intranet from which the villages can access the information. The illiteracy rates in the villages are high so the system does not only include textual material but also video and sound in order to make the information stores in the databases and at the Intranet understandable for the users.
To ensure, that the local information needs are fulfilled, the value addition centre in Villianur has genererated a number of databases in the local language Tamil. Most of the databases are frequently updated. The following indicates the content of the database:

• current information, such as: news, weather reports, todays prices on vegetables etc
  
• Useful long-term information on government schemes and programmes.
  
• Citizens charter on social welfare, women’s issues etc.
  
• Cattle and feeds on fodder and cattle diseases.
  
• Health information: general advice as well as addresses of hospitals.
  
• Agricultural information on diseases as well as information about new crops and procedures.
  
• Educational information: addresses and model entrance examination forms.
  
• General information emergency telephone numbers, postage, national insurance plan, rules and regulations of employment exchange, information on minimum wages etc.

Additionally, a local yellow pages has been created in which people can insert advertisements for renting out equipment or selling machinery.
The database is responsive to local needs. When a village was affected by sugar cane red rot disease a knowledge centre volunteer contacted a sugar-cane expert to find out what could be done, and transmitted the information to the affected farmers.
Thus, the content provided in the Village Information Centre network is demand-driven, based on the needs of the community. The information provided to the villagers is area-specific such as prices of agricultural inputs and outputs, market information, entitlements, livestock care, transport information, and weather.

All this information is now accessible for the villagers by accessing the data that have been found and translated by the operators located at the central hub in Villianur.
Finally, support of the system needs to be secured, as well as making sure that people in the villages use it. This is done in two ways: Villages are asked to provide space free of charge, and information meetings are held on a continuos basis, to promote the system, and make people aware of the kinds of information they can find in the system. Asking the villages to provide space for the project enhances the interest in the project because people are interested in finding out what they receive once they have offered the room.

Activities - Key Factor: improved regional ICT infrastructure and services
A variety of different ICTs are used in the Village Information Centres project. At the central hub in Villianur, where information is collected and translated into local Tamil language and fed into the system an ISDN connection to the Internet is used. Villianur is the central city in the region and they have relative good access to teleinfrastructure. There was no existing teleinfrastructure in the villages (below one phone per 100 inhabitants) and it would be very expensive to lay down copper or fibre optic cables to the villages. Thus, the central network (LAN) is maintained by the operators in Villianur, but when the villagers accesses the network from the central access point in their village they use a wireless VHF (full duplex) based accessing technology.

As no ordinary people in the villages can afford to but their own PC, a single computer was given to the cities who wanted to participate. This is a strong Pentium machine with loudspeaker as it needs to be strong enough to access multimedia material.

An addition, ordinary VHF-radios are used daily to transmit important information derived from the database.

Activities - Key Factor: improved regional human capital
Setting up the Village Information Centres has improved the general knowledge base of the villages. Prior to the introduction of the network, the villagers had no possibilities to obtain information from sources outside the region. Today they have access to usable and translated information of relevance to them from all over the world. They can use this to better understand their situation and enhance their understanding of the world. Furthermore, all the users gain basic computer skills simply by using the system and at least they now understand what a PC and Internet is and what it can be used for.

Activities - Key Factor: improved regional quality of life
The regional quality of life has been drastically improved after the introduction of the Village Information Centres.

The users in the villagers have gained access to information they can use in their daily work to enhance their productivity and economic prospects. Especially notably is it that the deathrates of fishermen have been reduced because they now have access to good weather forecasts. This is a clear example on improved living conditions.

Furthermore, there was a special focus in the project on improving the living conditions for women and creating equal opportunities. The result was the especially females were hired as operators to work with content generation in the central hub in Villanur. These women received some basic training to enable them to fulfil their position. This minor bit of education has improved their living conditions and the fact that they hold a position as operator has increased their social status in the community significantly.

Finally, the general welfare of the population in the villages has been improved as they now can find information on professional medical treatment possibilities as well as on-line booking of medical arrangements if needed.

Activities - Key Factor: improved regional inclusion
The village information system ensures that poor villagers have access to information they were previously not able to obtain and which allows them to improve their standard of living and opportunities. Furthermore, the set-up of the project focuses on educating women to become operators, thus heightening the status of women in the community.

Output and Results
The project was a success and by the year of 2000/2001 work was done on involving the local government in Pondicherry to fund a larger expansion of the project. The main target was to set up local Information centres in all villages in the region.
The main outputs of the Information Village Project are as follows:

• 10 cities in the region have implemented information centres. These are used approximately 150 times a month (in 1999), and the usage is expected to increase, especially if support from the local government in Pondicherry is secured.
  
• The implementation of the system has resulted in the fact that some cities and people have gained access to ICT and a valuable network of knowledge in a region where it was previously very difficult even to make an ordinary phone call.

The general living conditions of the local population have been improved. Due to the availability of better weather forecasts, the number of fishermen losing their lives by going to sea in bad weather has been reduced ! However, the main result is that the local population now has access to a wide array of information upon which they can act. They know the prices of the crops (when/where to sell, when/where to buy), they have access to information on cattle diseases and how to treat the animals (and can send e-mails and get answers from veterinarians by using the information centres). They have access to travel information and booking of health care services in the cities (which first and foremost secures that they get the proper treatment, but also makes planning of activities easier ( villagers do not spend lots of unproductive hours in the cities, waiting until the doctor has the time to examine them). Thus the living conditions and the economic prospects of the general population has increased by the regional establishment of a ICT based information system. The access to vital information had increased drastically.

Besides these tangible effects, there have also been effects on women employment, status, and educational level and ICT skills, because the central hub is mainly staffed with women, who were previously unemployed. These women are not paid for their work, but they gain significant status in the local community by holding the responsibility as operator of the system. Furthermore they receive education and learn basic ICT skills, (which was not possible prior to the introduction of the system). This again improves their quality of life and economic prospects.

Finally it is not only the educational level of the female operators that have been improved, but also the general level of ICT skills and education among the users in the local villages. They learn how to handle the equipment and they find out that this can be used and thus create interest in the new technologies.

Output and Results - Key Factor: improved regional human capital
There are 10 village information centres and these are used approximately 150 times per month (1999).

Today, the users of the system gain knowledge and information that was previously inaccessible and thus the knowledge bases of the people living in the region has been drastically improved.

Output and Results - Key Factor: improved regional quality of life

• Farmers are more productive, economic prospects are better because of access to market data as well as identification and treatment of cattle diseases. This improves the loving conditions of the farmers and his household.
  
• Fishermen knows when to set sails and when not to.
  
• Women get training and thereby improve their social status.
  
• General public gets access to info on medical treatment and bookings of doctors.
  
  

Lessons and conclusions
When introducing the Information Village Centres it was important to secure support from the users right from the start. Content in the system needed to be defined by the end users.

The system is free of charge to use, but the villages interested in the project needed to:

1. Supply space free of rent for the location of the information centre in the village and appoint a person that could maintain the system on a daily basis.
2. Secure that content is generated locally using local labour. This is needed is order to tailor the knowledge to local socio-economic circumstances as well as tailor the information to specific cultural issues.
The project group tried to implement the system in a village where there was only minor support to the system. It was very difficult to convince the villagers that they should provide space free of charge. Eventually the project group succeeded, but the centre was closed down soon after as there was only minimal interest in the system from the villagers.

Thus, generally the main lesson is to adopt a "pull" strategy instead of a "push". A bottom-up approach is needed to secure support from the users and make the information delivered by the system useable and assist the villagers in their daily work practices.
The Information Village Project in Pondicherry has drastically improved the regional ICT structure and the amount of services accessible for the users. Measured in money, the project has been quite cheap to carry out, but this, off course, is to a large degree due to the huge work done by voluntary labour located at the central hub as well as in the villages

The bottom up approach used to identify the need for information and subsequently the content of the information system has helped making the introduction of the system (expressed in terms of usage rates) run more smoothly. The villagers are interested in the system and use it because they experience that they can use the information in their daily work. Thus if one are to create a better regional ICT structure and create better services, the Pondicherry case point out that the end users needs to be involved at an very early stage of the project to secure support.

Information in the system needs to be very specifically tailored to the needs of the users. This is the only way, to actually make people use the system, and consequently also the only way to ensure continued support. After its introduction, the content has slowly evolved to become more and more advanced and today includes quite advanced information on, for instance the use of fertilisers. The knowledge base was expanded by, at first, matching the content closely to the needs of the local population and then, as the human capital of the population grew and people became used to the services, by introducing more advanced and specialised content.
This in the start match the and as their knowledge bases increases the content can be more advances and thus the human capital (measures as the general knowledge base) increases.

One of the main results of the Information Village Centre project is the improved quality of life. There is no doubt that the system has contributed to this development, but it did not happen by chance. To harvest the possibilities it is necessary that people actually use the system. This is not just something that one can expect to happen in a region populated with poor fishermen and farmers. To make these groups use the system, involvement is essential. The users must be the ones who decide the initial content of the system and how it should be presented. Furthermore, subsequent information campaigns are needed to keep focus and the system fit.

Lessons and conclusions - Key Factor: improved regional human capital
Information in the system needs to be very specific tailored to the needs of the users. Only by doing this it is possible to get support for the system and actually making people use it. After its introduction, the content has slowly evolved to become more and more advanced and today includes quite advanced information on, for instance the use of fertilisers. This in the start match the content closely to the needs of the local population and as their knowledge bases increases the content can be more advances and thus the human capital (measures as the general knowledge base) increases.

Lessons and conclusions - Key Factor: improved regional quality of life
One of the main results of the Information Village Centre project is the improved quality of life. There is no doubt that the system had contributed to this development, but it did not happen by chance. To harvest the possibilities it is necessary that people actually uses the system. This was not just something that one can expect to happen in a region populated with poor fishermen and farmers. To make these groups use the system, involvement in needed. The users should decide the initial content of the system and how it should be presented. Furthermore, subsequent information campaigns are needed to keep focus and the system fit.

Lessons and conclusions - Key Factor: improved regional social capital
By insisting on adopting a 'pull' strategy rather than a 'push' strategy it is ensured that the villagers co-operate and invest genuine commitment in the project, thereby making the information system useful for everyday purposes.

References and links
Appropriate Technology, Vol 27, no 1, page 8-11: Internet reaches rural poor. (www.mssrf.org/informationvillage/internetruralpoor.pdf )

Oxford, Human Development Report, 1999: New Technologies and the Global Race for Knowledge. (www.mssrf.org/informationvillage/humandevelopmentreport.pdf)

Students Britannica, India: Information Village. (www.mssrf.org/informationvillage/britannica.pdf )

Mr. Subbiah Arunachalam: Paper Presented at the IFLA General Conference, Glasgow, August, 2002 (www.mssrf.org/informationvillage/ifla.html )

www.uncrd.or.jp/ict/cases.shtml

www.uncrd.or.jp/ict/pondicherry.html

www.mssrf.org/

www.mssrf.org/informationvillage/informationvillage.html

Investments and Costs
Investment amount (in thousand Euro)
Canadian Government 121
Investment Total 121