Volume 12, No. 1, April 2002
Warana: The Case of an Indian Rural Community Adopting ICT
Simone Cecchini, PREM, The
World Bank, scecchini@worldbank.org
Monica Raina, CEG, IIM Ahmedabad, monica@cclan.iimahd.ernet.in
Abstract
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) can be used as an effective tool for rural development. An example of the adoption of ICT by a rural community is the Warana “Wired Village” project, in the state of Maharashtra, India. There, the local cooperative is using ICT to streamline the operations connected with sugar cane growing and harvesting. This is benefiting small farmers, both in terms of transparency and time saved on administrative transactions, as well as the cooperative, in terms of monetary gains. The Warana example also allows to draw four key lessons on the use of ICT for development in rural areas: first, before launching any ICT initiative, the information needs of a community should be thoroughly assessed; second, content and software applications should be developed with continuous involvement and feedback from the community; third, special emphasis should be placed on women and poor people’s access; and fourth, operators from the grassroots are probably the best agents to bring ICT to rural communities.
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) can be used as an effective tool for rural development in India and elsewhere in the developing world. An example of the issues involved with the adoption of ICT by a rural community is given by the experience of the Warana Group of Co-operatives (WGC), which is using ICT to streamline the operations connected with sugar cane growing and harvesting.
Warana is a well-developed rural area located 30 kilometers northwest of the city of Kolhapur, in one of the richest states of India, Maharashtra. Much of Warana’s success is due to the presence of a strong co-operative movement, the WGC. About 50,000 farmers live in 100 villages spread in the 25,000-sq. kilometer area covered by the co-operative. The main economic activity is sugar cane growing and processing.
ICT was brought to this area by the Warana "Wired Village" project, launched in 1998 as a collaboration between the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the Government of Maharashtra, the Warana Vibhag Shikshan Mandal (Education Department) and the WGC. The right conditions to bring ICT to Warana exist both in terms of human development and of infrastructure, as, for instance, there is uninterrupted power supply in the area. The project aims at bringing agricultural, market and educational information to 70 villages around Warana Nagar and intends to simplify other business operations of the co-operative. Many of these features have not been implemented yet.
Development of Warana Group of Co-operatives
The origins of the WGC date back to 1951, when Tatyasaheb Kore, a local small businessmen, understood that Warana, whose main source of livelihood was (and continues to be) sugar cane growing, needed its own sugar factory. At that time there was only one sugar cane factory in the area, located in Sangli, and farmers had no choice but to sell their crop to the monopolist, with a very negative impact on their incomes. Kore started raising small amounts of money from farmers and in 1959 he was able to open a co-operative sugar factory in the village of Kodoli, now the hub of the WGC. Each farmer who had contributed to the creation of the sugar cane factory became a member of the sugar cane co-operative, which currently has a total of 20,000 members.
The sugar factory, however, could cater only to the 15-20 percent of the population in Warana who had irrigated land. In order to create employment for the marginal farmers and landless labourers, the WGC set up a dairy co-operative in 1975, which followed the successful model of Anand in the state of Gujarat. In the following years, many other activities were launched, and today, the WGC comprises 25 co-operative societies with a total turnover of $130 million.
Economic Activities of the Co-operatives
The sugar cane factory, which produces 110,000 tons of sugar per year, employs 8,000 workers and collects sugar cane from about 35,000 farmers, is the main source of income for the Warana community. Other important centres of economic activity are a milk factory, a food-processing unit, a chain of department stores, poultry farming, and a series of women’s co-operatives. The milk factory employs 1,200 workers and collects 280,000 litres of milk per day from the 125 milk societies belonging to the dairy co-operative. The dairy co-operative, in turn, provides a series of services to its members, from veterinary aid to cattle shed design, from insemination to subsidy on animal purchases. A central poultry unit provides layer birds, feed, veterinary facilities, and marketing of eggs for about 500 small units producing 13 million eggs each year for an income of $90 million. An export-oriented food processing unit (the Warana Agricultural Goods Processing Society) employs 400 workers, and produces fruit pulp and purees from fruit purchased from Warana (bananas) or from other parts of India (mangoes). The chain of department stores (the Warana Bazaar) has 350 employees working in 2 stores and 30 retail outlets in and around Warana. Finally, several co-operatives wholly controlled and managed by women are active in the production of snacks and baked goods, school uniforms, containers and labels for dairy products, and employ hundreds of women
An Empowered Community
Warana is an example of a rural community, which has been able to empower its people not only with stable sources of employment, but also through participation, and access to health, education and financial services. All decisions concerning the sugar factory are taken by an elective body, the 19-member board of the sugar co-operative. Elections take place every five years in the 100 villages around Warana: three members are elected from each of five clusters of villages, while two seats on the board are reserved for women and two for representatives of backward castes. The board, in turn, elects a chairman and a vice-chairman. Vinay Kore, grandson of Tatyasaheb Kore, the founder of the co-operative, is the current chairman. Responsibility of co-ordination of activities of the different co-operatives lies with Kore and the sugar factory managing directors.
Healthcare, housing and banking are available to sugar factory co-operative members and to all the people living in the community. Education is available from primary school to college, and literacy is said to be close to 90 percent. Students from Warana attending the local Engineering College, which attracts students from different parts of India, are subsidised, having to pay $300 rather than the standard $1,000 for tuition. The Engineering College has 1,000 students, of which around 30 percent are women. People in Warana also have access to a 200-bed hospital, which was set up and continues to be financed by the WGC, with some government support. The hospital charges minimal fees to the members of the various co-operatives and offers free healthcare to the poor. It does away with the need for the farmer to travel to the city to receive healthcare (often accompanied by the whole family), that would otherwise lead to big losses of income.
Farmers in the Warana area also have easy access to financial services, and can easily get consumer and housing loans. A women’s co-operative bank, whose board of directors is composed of women, opened in 1990, has two branches, 1,835 members (all women), and a repayment rate of about 98 percent.
New Challenges
Presently, however, the WGC is facing a series of economic and social challenges. These include low sugar prices and difficulties in coordinating the many activities of a large and growing cooperative, which lead to losses in terms of efficiency and transparency. A big challenge is also to retain educated youth in the area when the prospects of better opportunities beckon elsewhere.
The Warana Wired Village Project
Goals of the Project
The Warana “Wired Village” project was initiated in 1998 by the Prime Minister’s Office Information Technology (IT) Task Force. The stated goal of the project is not only to increase the efficiency and productivity of the sugar cane co-operative, but also to provide a wide range of information and services to 70 villages around Warana. The project aims in fact at giving villagers access to information in local language about crops and agricultural market prices, employment schemes from the government of Maharashtra, and educational opportunities.
However, some of the project’s features have not been implemented yet: these include distance learning at IT centers, the digitalization of land records, and the connection of all of the cooperative’s “business centers.” Information on sugar cane growing and agricultural prices lies unutilized and has not been updated since 1998; this information was centrally provided by NIC, and local staff was unable to update it independently.
How the Project Works
There are fifty-four functioning village information kiosks that are facilitating the sugar cane production process at three stages: first, during the yearly registration for plantation when changes to property are recorded; second, with the issuance of harvesting permits; and third, with payments information. Farmers can go to the village information kiosks to receive payment slips. The sugar co-operative pays them for their crops in four installments that are credited directly to their bank accounts. The co-operative publishes payment dates on a local paper, so farmers know when it is their turn to go to the kiosks. Moreover, farmers can purchase fertiliser at deposits located next to the kiosks in cash or by using credit. If they buy using credit, they get a receipt for their purchase at the kiosk. Money spent on transport of the crop to the sugar factory is also entered in the system.
Village information kiosks have operators who feed the data into the computers, and are generally open between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Depending on the size of the village served by a kiosk, between 30 and 100 farmers visit the kiosk daily. Village kiosks have a PC with a printer and most are connected to the sugar administrative building via wireless telephony. Some of them though, are now saving information on floppy disks and bringing the disks to the sugar administrative building because they cannot afford big telephone bills. Kiosks also have email and Internet access, although connections are often very slow. Some kiosks are bypassing the sugar factory computer center and connect to the Internet through private providers.
Benefits from the project
The project has already increased the efficiency of the sugar cane growing and harvesting process, both in terms of time saved by the farmers on administrative transactions as well as in terms of monetary gains. Before computerization, it used to take two or three days for farmers to find out how much they had spent and how much they had earned during the harvest, while now all it takes is a visit to the village kiosk. And as a result of computerization, fertilizer stocks are now smaller and better managed, which is said to have brought savings of about US$750,000 to the cooperative.
Potential for new ICT applications
The area around Warana Nagar is already quite well served by telephone services. Many households have a telephone at home and there are several local and long distance phone booths. The community uses telephones mostly for social purposes, to keep in touch with other villagers and to organise weddings. But the Internet could answer other needs. Farmers, for instance, express interest in accessing information on agricultural techniques and innovations, as well as on crop prices. This information, if provided in the local language, would have a direct impact on their livelihood, allowing them to raise productivity and to sell their products at a better price. The younger generations, in turn, are more aware of the potential of the Internet. At an information kiosk which is connected to the Internet, for instance, they are already paying 45 cents per hour to surf the web (mostly for job searches and entertainment), and to email distant friends and relatives. Young people also express great interest in computer training, as this will help them find better job opportunities. Access to government services through the Internet would also benefit people in Warana. Currently most grievances about government services are said to be solved through the local village committees (panchayats); but when the panchayats cannot help, farmers have to go to the government offices in the city, which involves a great loss of time and money. Thus, the usefulness of sending grievances and downloading government forms, as well as the possibility of accessing land records.
Key Lessons
By examining the Warana “Wired Village” example, we can draw four key lessons for this and other ICT projects for rural development in India and elsewhere in the world.
Assessing the information needs of the community
Before launching any ICT initiative, the information needs of a community should be thoroughly assessed. Development practitioners and software developers might have in mind a very wide range of resources and applications that are of potential use to a community. However, it is information that has a direct impact on the livelihood of the people that matters most, and any application should be developed only after an accurate assessment of these needs. Rapid and participatory rural appraisals and other survey instruments have been used for several years to ensure community ownership of development programs. These tools could be used in the context of ICT initiatives.
Local ownership and participation
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. For the Warana “Wired Village” project, NIC developed a software which is easy to use and all information is in Marathi, the local language. The process of development of the software, however, was far from ideal. The lack of local participation in content creation, as well as in software development, partly explains why much of the information, including that on sugar cane growing and agricultural prices, lies unutilized and has not been updated since 1998. If an incremental approach were followed, by which content that responds to the most pressing information needs of the community, and software that is appropriate for the local conditions, are developed in collaboration with local staff, the WGC would have probably been able to update and make good use of the information initially provided by NIC. Local ownership and participation, in sum, ensure continuity, while 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.
Women and poor people’s access
Particular efforts should be made to improve women and poor people’s access to information. In Warana, women generally visit information kiosks to obtain sugar factory services; but only men are using the Internet where available. Without finding means to get women involved in the use of ICT and in particular to ensure that women are trained to become information kiosks operators, there is a severe chance that they will be further marginalized. Similar considerations apply to access to ICT by poor people. In Warana, the information kiosks are mostly accessed by members of the cooperative, 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 sugar cane growing and harvesting. However, information on government schemes offering employment, or on educational opportunities for children, would be of great importance to the poorest. Once such kind of information is made available, efforts should then be made to improve access by the poorest to the kiosks.
Empowering grassroots operators
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. In the case of Warana, operators at the information kiosks generally come from the grassroots, and have a great faith in the potential of ICT to improve the standard of living of their community, especially of the rural youth. They feel that the Internet will allow young people to find information about educational and job opportunities, and they see IT as the best sector where to find stable and well-paid employment. Many operators have the capability of teaching computer skills and software to children and youth, and would be willing to provide training if given the necessary incentives. Furthermore, some of the operators have good programming skills; in the village of Tope, for instance, an operator has developed a database to manage the local store’s orders and purchases. Some of these young operators have had job experiences in the city and decided to return to the Warana for the strong attachment to their community. If they are given the necessary incentives, these grassroots operators can become champions for ICT in their villages, easing access to information for farmers, providing training to children, and creating new economic opportunities through software development.
Conclusion: An ICT Project Strengthening an Empowered Community
In conclusion, we observe that it is not the “Wired Village” project that has empowered the Warana community; this is rather an example of a fairly developed and empowered community adopting ICT to bring efficiency and transparency gains to its main economic activity, sugar cane production. Thanks to its good levels of human development and infrastructure, the Warana community will be able to use ICT to further streamline other services offered by the cooperative and to give its people wider access to knowledge and information through the Internet.
End notes
1 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines ICT as the set of activities that facilitates, by electronic means, the capturing, storage, processing, transmission and display of information.
2Per capita income in Maharashtra stands at Rs. 19,207, which compares to an Indian average of Rs. 12,278 (Government of Maharashtra 2001). In terms of progress in raising average household consumption, Maharashtra was the fourth best performer among Indian states over the 1957-1991 period. The growth process, however, was associated with adverse distributional impacts from the point of view of the poor (Datt and Ravallion 1998). As a result, in 1993-94 the percentage of the rural population living below the poverty line stood at a high 38.6 percent, slightly above the national average of 37.5 percent (Chandrasekhar and Sen 1996).
3 Often times, farmers’ contributions were made in the form of gold jewels, part of women’s dowry.
4 The farmer-owned Amul co-operative in Anand has shown since the 1960s that an integrated approach along co-operative lines could enhance production, procurement and marketing of milk; it has become a model for most dairy development projects in India.
5 Sugar cane by-products are processed at a paper-manufacturing unit and at a distillery set up by the WGC. Bagasse, the waste material generated out of crushed sugarcane, is utilised to manufacture paper, and molasses are converted into industrial alcohol (Machado and Vagdaonkar 2000).
6 Products of the milk factory include pasteurized milk, milk powder, butter, sreekhand, lassi, and ghee. Owing to the high standards of the milk factory, Cadbury, a multinational corporation, produces its health foods in a nearby plant managed by the dairy co-operative itself.
7 The “Mahatma Gandhi Hospital” is a general hospital with all specialities, although it is proving very difficult to get specialist doctors to a rural area like Warana.
8 At the time the Government of India had no Ministry of Information Technology, which was instituted only in October 1999.
9 In Warana, there is a strong local IT capacity with which to build the project. The Engineering College has a computer laboratory with around 200 PCs, where each student can practice two hours per day, and offers courses in software development (Java, C++, etc.).
References
Cecchini, Simone. “Information and Communications Technology for Poverty Reduction in Rural India.” World Bank: Washington D.C., forthcoming.
Chandrasekhar C.P. and Abhijit Sen. “Statistical Truths: Economic Reform and Poverty”. Frontline, Madras, February 23, 1996.
Datt, Gaurav and Martin Ravallion, "Why Have Some Indian States Done Better Than Others at Reducing Rural Poverty?", Economica, Vol. 65, No. 257, Feb., 1998, pp.17-38.
Government of Maharashtra. Maharashtra at a Glance. 2001. [www.maharashtra.gov.in]
Kohli Vanita. “Getting Wired, the Warana Way”, in Business World, February 22, 1999. [www.businessworldindia.com/archive/990222/mktg4.htm]
Machado, Julius and Vinu Wadgaonkar. “From Wilderness to Wonder: The Warana Miracle”, in NABARD Parivar, House Journal of NABARD (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, vol. 13, no. 2-3, July- September 2000.
National Informatics Centre. “Project Proposal for Wired Village Project at Warana Nagar, Maharashtra”. NIC (WR) Pune, June 22 1998.
Vijayadita N. “A Wired Village: The Warana Experiment”, in Information and Communication Technology in Rural Development, Case Studies from India, Subhash Bhatnagar and Robert Schware editors. World Bank Institute Working Papers, October 2000.