A little over six months ago Shankarlal, a resident of Dehrisarai village in Madhya Pradesh, was getting a rate of Rs 3,000 ($65.2) per ton from local traders for his potato crop. But the entire scenario changed the day he stumbled upon a small, obscure office near his village. Being run by the state government, the office was called Soochanalay, or information kiosk. An invitation to step inside and access a computer-which locals called "the magic box"-revealed a piece of information that he could not believe. It was a real-time quotation of a wholesale market in the nearest city, Indore, which showed that the going rate for potatoes was 33% higher than what the local trader was paying him. The "magic box" had lured another reluctant villager into its Net. "Since then, I decided to take my produce to the Indore mandi. Had I not checked the current rate in the Soochanalay, I would have lost so much money," a beaming Shankarlal said. He and fellow farmers in the village now check the going price for potatoesat all major markets in the state every day and accordingly decide where to take their produce.Shankarlal does not know how the system works, or what it is called, but Dehrisarai is now a wired village-one of the many in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh. Even tribespeople of this hamlet have begun visiting the state-run Gyandoot Intranet Information Centre to check if the middlemen are cheating them on prices.
It's the very project that was awarded the Stockholm Challenge IT Award, 2000 in June this year, and Gyandoot was adjudged winner in the category of "Public Service and Democracy" out of 109 IT projects from all over the world. And certainly, villagers like Shankarlal still swear by it.
"The villagers were indifferent towards the project first, especially when they were told that it would cost them Rs 5 to check the prices at the information kiosks. Then they realised that it was better than losing hundreds of rupees to the middlemen," Rajesh Rajora, the district collector of Dhar and the brain behind the project, said. Today, he explained, the Gyandoot Project, which was launched in January, provides daily market rates for a variety of crops to residents of 600 villages in Dhar district. These include quotations for locally produced foodgrain and vegetables, from not only the nearby markets of Dhar, Indore, Badanwar, Ratlam and Dahod, but even far-off markets in Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad.
"The ease with which the people of Dhar have taken to using IT shows the paradigm shift which can be effected with minimum investment. The whole district has been wired for just Rs 2.5 million ($54,374)," Rajora said. "The unique network ensures that the villagers don't have to run around block offices and district headquarters needlessly."
The Soochanalay has other facilities as well. Villagers can check their land records online to either dispose them of or use them as collateral to raise bank loans-a process which, the residents of Dhar say, earlier involved running around bureaucrats' offices and greasing numerous palms.
(India Abroad News Service)
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.