Article

Indian government deploys information kiosks to improve access

Kiosks are the latest developments of India's on-going e-gov movement. Researchers, reformers and American companies all share interest in Indian e-gov.

August 13, 2006

The writer is editor of selfservice.org.

Imagine having no access to the Web, but the same need for information.

That's the situation in India, where, according to 2002 census data, more than a billion people are spread across 384 cities, 5,161 towns and 638,365 villages. To address the needs of a billion people spread across 1.2 millions square miles, the Indian government has relied heavily on electronic government.

Electronic governance, or e-gov, is a system of delivering government information electronically. It uses data networks to make government more convenient, and deliver information to those who cannot receive it otherwise.

According to Dataquest India, the e-gov movement has grown in India for more than two decades. It first took off in the '70s with in-house networking between regional government offices; in the '80s, it was used with the establishment of the National Infomatics Center; and its adoption has widened since the birth of the Web.

In 2001, Project Bhoomi made 20 million rural land-title records available on kiosks, in order to clarify property ownership, settle land disputes and provide farmers with documents necessary to receive bank loans. By 2003, when the kiosk data was made available to private franchisees, a political firestorm, said Keya Acharya at InfoChangeIndia.org, loomed over the kiosks.

Because of expensive commutes and document prices, Acharya said that the kiosks, meant to help the poor, were more accessible to the wealthy.

"The project also fails to address gender inequality," Acharya said. "Land ownership has long been a male bastion in India - in Karnataka women own just 12% of the land - and this is reflected in Bhoomi. Women in Dharwad district do not know of the new system."

But the premise still gathered support.

"Information kiosks are particularly useful in rural areas of developing economies, where the populace may not have the means to own PCs or be linked to online channels," writes James S.L. Young, Cisco Systems director of public sector programs, in his essay, "Citizen-Centered Approaches to e-Government Programs." "In more modern societies with greater mobile computing usage, governments are also experimenting with the provision of information and services via various mobile and wireless devices."

Though e-gov is popular in a variety of developing and first-world countries, Indian e-gov maintains the trappings of a social and political grassroots movement. Bloggers, scientists, government officers, reformers and private companies cooperate to expand e-gov and enact a number of related laws, like increased access to information.

In e-gov Online, Wajahat Habibullah, India's chief information commissioner, adamantly lauds the country's recent Right to Information Act. He said the right to government information – that would be disseminated via e-gov networks and kiosks – is an intrinsic part of democracy, after e-gov groups lobbied for the law.

"The public can participate in governance if it knows what the government is doing and why it is doing what," Habibullah writes.

This story and all the great free content on KioskMarketplace is supported by: St. Clair Interactive Communications, Inc.   St. Clair Interactive Communications, Inc. is an industry leader in kiosk software for applications, remote operations, and content processing. Request free info from this company!

The kiosks are now often setup as collaborations between the government and private companies. Professor P.T. Rama Rao at The Indian Institute of Management's Center for Electronic Governance, describes the public/private partnerships through which e-gov kiosks are developed, deployed and managed in his paper, " ICT and e-Governance for Rural Development."

"These tasks include design and development of application software, population of data and content in the regional language, procurement and installation of networking and computer systems, deployment of software and delivery of services," Rao says. "Such arrangement seems to have helped in reducing the burden on the government, brought in the expertise, enhanced the speed of implementation, and offered a better value proposition to the citizens."

He also warns that pure commercial value should not determine kiosk content.

The demand for content and the high-tech platforms that transfer it has attracted many American companies. Nortel, Adobe, Cisco, Alcatel and Symantec sponsor the e-gov India tradeshow. Microsoft India, meanwhile, is building Project Saksham, which integrates public government functions with private business features like online banking and bill-pay onto public-access kiosks.

Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan, speaking at a company forum in July, said Project Saksham piloted 300 kiosks across India that involved about 4,000 users. From the pilot, he said Microsoft learned it needed to expand the function of the kiosks beyond e-government tasks; agricultural and clinical information is in wide demand, and users liked access to land records and the ability to submit land-related grievances.

Beyond e-government, Microsoft confirmed the value of financial tasks, including bill pay, death and dismemberment insurance, monsoon insurance and mutual funds, with U.S. $2 entry fees and U.S. 50-cent monthly pay-ins.

"We think as more people move up the economic ladder, as more people learn to use computers, in the long run, its good for the socioeconomic development of India, and its good for us," Venkatesan said. "We believe that learning to serve poor rural communities profitably will give us insights into the next 5 billion of the world's consumers and help us in innovating new business models."