Village Information Kiosks for the Warana Cooperatives in India

It is a combination of MIS (management information system), and delivery of services to

citizens, via the Internet. Village kiosks have a PC with a printer and most are connected to
the Central Administrative Building (CAB) via wireless telephony. Some of them, though,
save information on optical discs and bring the disks to the CAB as they cannot afford the
telephone bills. Kiosks also have email and Internet access, although connections are often
very slow or unreliable. Some kiosks have bought an Internet connection from the local ISP
(Internet Service Provider). The 54 functioning village information kiosks are facilitating the
Warana Group of Cooperatives (WGC) in the sugar cane production process at three stages:

First stage: With the yearly registration for plantation, when supervisors from WGC
record mutations (changes to land property).
Second stage: With the issuance of harvesting permits.
Third stage: With payment information.

The stated goal of the Warana "Wired Village" project is not only to increase the efficiency
and productivity of the sugar cane cooperative, but also to provide a wide range of
information and services to 70 villages around Warana. The project aims 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.
The main stakeholders affected by this application are farmers and the WGC. 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. The main economic activity there is sugar cane
growing and processing. About 50,000 farmers live in 100 villages spread in the 25,000 sq.
kilometer area covered by the cooperative. The WGC is formed by 25 cooperative societies
with a total turnover of US$130 million.
The project has 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 (many times,
even one week) for farmers to know their income and expenditure account with CAB. Now,
all it takes is a visit to the village kiosk. And as a result of computerization, fertilizer stock
inventories are better managed, which is said to have brought savings of about US$750,000 to
the cooperative. The estimated cost of the project is US$600,000.
This is a partial succes, but more failure. Depending on the size of the village served by a
kiosk, between 30 and 100 farmers visit the kiosks daily. However, some of the project's
features have not been implemented yet: these include distance learning at IT centers, the
digitization of land records, and the connection of all of the cooperative's "business centers."
Initially the system worked stable, recently was often out of operation during which time
farmers can not perform any transactions. The reason for this is that it has been several years
since last adjustment was made within system.
Enablers/Critical Success Factors
1. Strong human development . Relatively high levels of human development in that
region - the sugar cane belt of Maharashtra is one of the most prosperous regions in
the country.
2. Good infrastructure . For instance, there are no power failures in the area.

3. Local organizational capacity . For example, the strength of the local cooperative
movement and champions of this movement.
Constraints/Challenges
1. Top-down initiation . This was a somewhat top-down initiative, initiated by the Prime
Minister's Office Information Technology Task Force.
2. Overambitious goals . Some of the goals set were too broad and high, e.g. "bring the
world's knowledge at the doorstep of villagers through the Internet".
3. Lack of participation . Lack of local staff participation in the software development
and implementation process, which was done by a central nodal agency in Delhi, the
capital of India.
Recommendations
1. Assess the information needs of the community, promoting local ownership and
participation . While conceptualizing e-government initiatives, which use ICT for
development, the information needs of a community should be thoroughly assessed
using rapid, participatory rural appraisals and other survey instruments which have
been used for several years to ensure community ownership of development programs.
Development practitioners and software developers may plan to utilize a wide range of
resources and develop applications that are of potential use to a community. However,
what matters most is the information or application that has a direct impact on the
livelihood of the people. If applications have the potential to raise the income levels of
the community, they can become "killer" applications. The critical mass, needed to
ensure the success of the project, gets built up.
In the case of the Warana "Wired Village" project, the National Informatics Centre
(NIC) developed user-friendly software, using regional language (Marathi, the native
language of Maharashtra) front-end interfaces. The process of software development
and content creation precluded participation of the local staff from CAB, the intended
users of the software. This 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.
It is advisable that e-government initiatives follow an incremental approach, by which
both content that responds to the most pressing information needs of the community
and software that is appropriate for the local conditions are developed by the nodal
agency in collaboration with local staff. In this case, WGC would have probably
derived greater benefits through regular updates of prices and making effective 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.
2. Attend to women's and poor people's ICT access . In Warana, women generally visit
information kiosks to obtain sugar factory services; but where the Internet is available,
it is only men who are using it. Without finding means to get women involved in egovernment projects, and in particular to ensure that women are trained to become
information kiosks operators, they may be further marginalized.
Similar considerations apply to access to e-government by poor people. In Warana, the
information kiosks are mostly accessed by members of the cooperative; farmers who
own their land. The poorest, landless laborers 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 (like public awareness campaigns, radio spots - as even the
poorest turn to the radio for entertainment in India, street plays, etc.) should thus be
made to improve access by the poorest to the kiosks.
3. Empower grassroots operators: the local champions of ICTs . Finding motivated and
skilled grassroots intermediaries is a necessary condition for any project to succeed in
bringing e-government to rural communities.