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Draft August 2001 Grassroots ICT Projects in India Few concepts have spread as rapidly as “digital divide” and with it, the hope of using modern information and communication technologies (ICT’s) to promote development. Groups as diverse as the G8 at Okinawa, private foundations, national, state and local governments, and private companies have seized upon the idea that introducing ICT’s into developing nations can help alleviate poverty, improve education and agriculture, relieve cultural isolation, increase social justice, rationalize business opportunities, and undermine corruption, inequity, and exploitation. One extreme is the hope is that ICT’s could enable even the poorest of developing nations to “leapfrog” traditional problems of development like illiteracy, disease, unemployment, hunger, poverty, corruption, and social inequalities so as to move rapidly into the modern Information Age. But the hopes so widely expressed are largely built on an empirical vacuum. We know little about the factors that make for effectiveness or ineffectiveness of grassroots ICT projects in developing nations. Thus, critics like Bill Gates can point out that the cost of creating a working Internet connection in a developing nation is the same as that of providing immunization against six fatal childhood diseases to thousands of children. Others argue that the introduction of ICT’s into communities otherwise unchanged will merely heighten existing inequalities. But instead of comparative research to counter or address such claims, we have only “stories” – to be sure, largely true stories of successes - from which trustworthy generalizations are impossible. The goal of my research is to begin the process of formulating systematic and empirically based hypotheses about the factors conducive to, or inimical to, the constructive use of ICT’s in rural communities in a developing nation, namely India. At least fifty grassroots projects are using modern ICT’s in rural areas in India. A few of these projects (e.g. Dhar, Pondicherry) have been publicized; the great majority has not. Surprisingly, these project have rarely been studied; no comparisons have been made between these projects; the projects are not in touch with each other; lessons learned in one project are not transmitted to others; appropriate technologies are rarely evaluated; financial sustainability and scalability are seldom addressed; and the opportunity to learn from the diverse and creative Indian experience is so far almost entirely wasted. My intention is to continue an ongoing-study of grassroots IT in rural India. From early September until late January, I will live in India, based in Bangalore at the Indian Institute of Science (National Institute of Advanced Studies), and study as many additional rural IT sites as possible. In my field research, I expect to compare projects with regard to issues like financial sustainability, costs and effects of technologies employed, involvement of the local community, uses of local languages, provision of information useful to ordinary citizens, businesses, and government, whether the ICT’s are actually used and by whom, effects on the social structure of the community, relationship to governance, and whether they actually increase prosperity and/or justice in the communities they serve. At the end of the project, I expect to produce an essay in which lessons from Indian grassroot projects can be expressed as generalizations to be explored further in more systematic, intensive research. The project has so far been supported from a variety of sources; including a Nippon Electric Company grant administered by the Provost’s Fund at MIT and the Ford Foundation (New Delhi). Suggestions about how best to conduct this project, about IT projects that should be visited, and about obstacles that need to be overcome would be welcome. Andrew Mellon Professor of Human Development September 7, 2001-January 20, 2002:
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