Several fishermen in the villages around Pondicherry use wireless and solar power-driven Internet for information on fisheries, weather, agriculture and healthcare thanks to the pioneering work of Prof M.S. Swaminathan. No fisherman has been lost to the sea in a fishing village in Pondicherry ever since it started obtaining village-specific weather reports over the Net and broadcasting it over the village loudspeaker. In Tamil Nadu’s Nellikuppam district, sugarcane farmers use a Wireless in Local Loop (WLL) system to check their accounts with a local sugar mill and market prices of fertilisers and pesticides. In Rajasthan, women have converted their chaklas into mousepads for learning the use of computers. In Punjab, the Jats receive dollars online from their nri sons and chat freely through cyber-cafes next to their farms. Women artisans and farmers from Patan and Sabarkantha in Gujarat have invested all their savings to buy a telephone connection.
Simputer, the uniquely Indian computer, is making waves in rural India. tarahaat.com brings information, products and services via the Internet to the underserved rural market in the Jhansi district of Bundelkhand region. The Warana ‘Wired Village’ project is providing a wide range of information and services to 70 villages around Warana in their local language about crops and agricultural market prices, employment schemes from the government of Maharashtra and educational opportunities. Farmers in several states are using mobile phones and intranets to find the best prices for their produce, completely bypassing middlemen. The Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Fellowship is establishing information service centres to serve as global information access points and e-commerce channels for about 100 Indian villages.
As part of the Computers on Wheels project, men on motorcycles bring wireless Internet access to residents in remote villages without telecommunication infrastructure. Karnataka runs one of India’s largest land records project, Bhoomi, with over 20 million land records available online. The database of the AP government is one of the most comprehensive in the country. Gujarat has computerised inter-state checkpoints to discourage corruption during the collection of tolls and fines when more than 25,000 trucks enter the state daily. IIT Kanpur used computer technologies to convey polymer saddle-frame designs to artisans, which amounted to savings of Rs 300 crore over the wooden ones. A Geographical Information System is in place in the TB and malaria-prone Deogarh area of Orissa that enables the villagers to locate health centres.
