Volume 18, No. 3, October 2008
Greetings for the festive season! In India we are right in the midst of the festivals and for others the season is just round the corner. We need to keep ourselves in good cheer in these difficult times of deep financial crisis.
I have been teaching a course on Digital Inclusion for Development based on the premise that access to technology in rural areas will lead to social and economic development. Popularity of the concept of fortune at the bottom of the pyramid has created some interest in the corporate sector to scout for opportunities to serve the rural markets. I recently had a chance to listen to Satyan Mishra who founded Drishtee with three others. Drishtee was able to open up more than a thousand kiosks in the first seven years of its existence and earn a reasonable revenue from the franchisee entrepreneurs to cover its costs. However, over the years it discovered that it is difficult to achieve economic viability through information and government services channeled through the net. The demand is scattered geographically and it is virtually impossible to discover the right basket of service which can earn revenues that provide adequate returns to the entrepreneur. So Drishtee has decided to become a distributor of consumer goods with a deep penetration in rural areas. They use the network of kiosks to collect orders from small rural shops and handle the logistics of supplying the goods. The commissions are adequate to help Drishtee run as a profitable company, even as they have tapped only a small part of the full potential of spend of rural India.
To me it is the fading away of a cherished dream of many development thinkers of using technology for building a Knowledge Society. Perhaps this was a dream of those who were far removed from the reality of rural populations. We need to draw lessons from Drishtee and e-Choupal the few who have achieved some scale on the composition of the "magic" basket of services. We also need more research on this theme. The first article in this issue draws similar conclusions based on stories from different parts of the world. Also included is an article on India's dream of creating 100,000 rural Community Service Centers under the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP).
Talking about the NeGP, I have often mentioned a large impact assessment study of e-government projects being undertaken across twelve states in India. A summary report comparing the impact across states and across projects has finally been put out in the public domain by the sponsors - the Department of Information Technology, Government of India. IIMA which provided the overall guidance for the study carried out by eleven market research agencies will hold a workshop at IIMA on November 19-20 to discuss the lessons from the study. We hope to disseminate the findings of the study in various other ways - through a webcast and through Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers published by IIMA. Please look out for further announcements on this.