JUST TWO hours out from
Bangalore on the railway main line to Chennai, Kuppam is a
two-minute halt on most trains. But that is time enough for most
passengers to snatch a quick look at the posters lining the two
platforms, welcoming them to Kuppam's `inclusive' or i-community.
For those who choose to alight, the contrast with other rural
clusters in this southern corner of Andhra Pradesh is palpable:
Neatly signposted lanes, a clean bus shelter and something one
is unlikely to find anywhere else in rural India: bright
red-and-yellow booths which say: `Emergency Telephone' in Telugu
and English.
They are free phones supported by a wireless ( 802.11b) network
and connect instantly to the local police, fire and hospital
services.
They can also reach two other numbers: World Corps India, the
voluntary agency that has been instrumental in training local
entrepreneurs to set up over 15 wireless Internet-enabled
Community Information Centres (CICs) spread across the five
villages or mandals of Kuppam; and Hewlett Packard, whose
adoption of Kuppam as one of the first sites of its global
e-inclusion programme of `appropriate' Information Technology,
has inspired the state government as well as a dozen private
companies, charitable foundations and non governmental agencies
to come together and co-create a sustainable future for this
so-called backward area, using cutting edge technologies that
have largely been the preserve of urban pockets of plenty.
Digital photography
Like digital photography. Last week was a busy time for Neelamma
and 15 other local women mobile photographers to the Kuppam
community. Armed with Photosmart digital cameras, they `covered'
dozens of Ganesha `nimarjan' ( immersion) ceremonies, and using
the field kits loaned to them by HP, converted the shots into
instant colour photos using solar-powered direct photo printers
and sold them at Rs 30 a print.
On other days, they routinely cover weddings, baby `naming'
ceremonies, bus route inaugurations, accident sites or dead
cattle, for insurance companies and the occasional `rowdy
sheeter' mug shots for the police... They earn anything from Rs
750 to Rs 2000 a month, and are currently moving from a model
where HP supplies all the material and takes away Rs 20 for
every print to a more lucrative one where they just lease the
camera and buy all the consumables.
The change has come because, the sudden access to doorstep photo
services in Kuppam, has created a big enough market for nearby
towns to stock digital printer consumables. " We want to move
away from the pappad-and-pickle stereotype of employment for
rural women,'' says Anand Tawker, Director of HP's emerging
market solutions in its e-inclusion programme, who has nurtured
this initiative from day one. "We are thrilled that they are so
confidently handling technology that may seem disruptive even to
hardcore professionals in the metros".
In his community kiosk in Kothaindlu village, proprietor M.
Kumarswamy, has just one PC and a multi-function printer. He
sells toiletries and sweets to attract the local customers then
offers to cast their horoscopes using special software, at Rs 30
a go.
He has also discovered a new and gainful use for the spare disk
space on his PC: He calls it `surakshita dakhalalu'( `electronic
safe deposit locker'). Villagers usually have a hard time
preserving their precious documents: birth certificates, land
title deeds or `pattas'... from the ravages of time and weather.
Kumarswamy charges a one-time fee of Rs 20 to scan and preserve
the documents on his PC for as long as the customer wants. He
has probably not heard the word `demat' but his service is
filling a very real need.
`Touch typewriting'
At the Mamidipudi Nagarjuna Social Welfare Residential School
for Girls, 10 year olds crowd around a dozen PCs, learning
`touch typewriting' in Telugu, or browsing language software
created by the Azim Premji Foundation, another partner in
Kuppam's i-community. A single PC running Linux fuels four
monitors which can work independently — not a particularly high
tech application, but one that might be crucial in an
environment where the cost of a single PC for a whole school,
might be the hurdle.
They are the first beneficiaries of an exclusive 2 MBPS `pipe'
provided by the state government and fed from the Software
Technology Park at Tirupati, via fibre, to all five mandals of
Kuppam. From here, a WiFi umbrella set up by Convergent
Communications, Bangalore, unfurls over the whole community of
3.2 lakh citizens even while fuelling the community Net portal (www.kuppamhpicommunity.stph.net)
that is already delivering a variety of local services under the
`Yojanalu' head. Last week, a domestic gas outlet was
advertising a vacancy, as were World Corps and some of the local
voluntary agencies. However the nearest government employment
exchange is yet to be linked to this online service.
The Web for Kuppam, is also the gateway to a range of health and
educational services: telemedicine software from TeleVital
which connects remote villages to the P.E.S. Speciality Hospital
and Medical College and computer-aided-education steered by
World Links and the America India foundation; documenting farm
land productivity, using remote sensing satellite data collated
by Samuha, a voluntary agency.
On Friday last, Kuppam's i-community mobile van was parked in
Vasanadu village. Local residents brought soil samples for
immediate testing in the field lab even as others queued up to
have their eyes tested for a possible referral to the Arvind Eye
Hospital. And a crowd of school children waited to take
possession of a laptop computer — their weekly treat.
This was my third visit to Kuppam since the inception of the i-community
project 30 months ago. The mobile lab was new this time — and so
was one sight that I found most thrilling: The sight of four
young local students, in a small room, each in front of a PC,
editing scanned images mailed from a U.S. state's Vehicle
Licensing department, filtering them through an OmniPage
character recognition engine and painstakingly licking them into
shape as Acrobat PDF files.
The job has been farmed out to them by Datamation, an Indian BPO
player, which had the vision to share some of its work with this
rural reach. The kids were proud of what they were doing:
putting Kuppam on the world BPO map with its own 4-seater IT
Enabled Services centre. Now, one saw why they needed 2 MBPS on
the Internet backbone.
`The HP way'
The formal experiment launched by HP, comes to an end six months
from now. The company long known for `The HP Way' a less
commercially motivated, more socially driven work culture,
encouraged by its co-founders, has found in Kuppam a lively
laboratory for its ideas of electronically driven `inclusion'.
It is very much in the spirit of Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam's
favourite blueprint, PURA: Programme for Urban Amenities in
Rural Areas. The challenge remains to sustain the `inclusive'
drive, even while striving to create hundreds of other Kuppams.
Anand Parthasarathy |
