Internets Role in Rural Development: A Review

P. K. Suri Department of Computer Science & Applications Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra Sandeep Kumar Department of Computer Applications Dronacharya Institute of Management & Technology, Kurukshetra Abstract: On his visit to India, then America president Bill Clinton in his address to joint session of both the houses of Indian parliament had said In 21st century world will be divided in two types of people, IT (Information Technology) literates and IT illiterates. As the time goes by we are discovering that this statement is so much true. Today there is no field of life where computers can not be used. It is becoming necessary for every person to have the Know hows of computers. Even to get up-to-date information regarding any aspect of life, we are dependent on Internet, the miracle of IT. As internet is helping in every field of life, how can it help in Rural Development? This is the main theme of this paper. Introduction Use of IT is expanding at a very rapid pace. At least this is the impression that people in urban areas of developing countries, particularly India get. But the expansion is confined to only 30% population of these countries. This is the population residing in big cities and towns. But 70% population in these countries live in villages and the question is Is the expansion as rapid in rural areas as it is in the urban areas? Answer is a simple no. Internet is one application of IT, and as the use of IT is increasing in developing countries so is the use on Internet although this expansion is still largely confined to urban areas. Rural communities represent the "last mile of connectivity" in developing as well as developed countries as far as access to internet is concerned. People in rural areas are generally unable to take advantage of the services available to their urban peers. Rural people generally have agriculture as their main profession and they are less privileged as compared to people living in urban areas. In last many years we have seen so many suicides being committed by loan ridden farmers in northern as well as southern India. Computers can never be on top priority for these less privileged farmers and food insecure residents and farmers. So, internet initiative for rural development need to be approached with a great degree of caution as this is still a controversial area. In fact in todays scenario these people can not avail the advantage of internet directly. But there are many intermediaries serving these populations such as extension field offices, rural NGOs, health clinics, government satellite offices and Gram Panchayats. These can offer communication services in numerous ways. Today we truly live in a global village, but it is a village with privileged information "haves" and many information "have-nots". To face the unprecedented challenges brought on by the changing global economy, dynamic

political contexts, environmental degradation and demographic pressures, and to make critical decisions, people at all levels of society - especially the food-insecure and the organizations that serve and represent them - must be able to access critical information and to communicate. Improved communication and information access are directly related to social and economic development (Tallero and Gaudette, 1995). The Internet is a multipurpose tool, a medium of communication and perhaps the most flexible medium currently available. It has the potential to be integrated within a wide variety of efforts that have objectives such as local participation, training, education, research (especially participatory research), technical support and institutional strengthening. Growth of Internet as peoples network The internet has grown from the early research prototype to a global communication system that reaches all countries of the world. However size is not as surprising as the rate of growth. Figure 1 illustrates how the growth of internet has evolved with time. The figure contains a graph of computers attached to the internet as a function of the years from 1982 to 2001.

100 80 60 40 20 0 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1997 2000

Number of Computer attached to Internet (Figure in Millions)

Figure 1: Growth of Internet Despite the graph, the growth did not start in recent years. The Internet was conceived and designed in 1963 by Larry Roberts, working for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with funding from the United States Department of Defence (Negroponte, 1995a and 1995b). ARPAnet, as it was then called, emerged as a communication tool in the late 1960s for a handful of Department of Defence workers and contractors. It was designed to be a fail-safe communication system because it would

be fundamentally a "decentralized" network. People could send packets of information from one computer to another, across the United States, and those packets could travel by a variety of routes to reach their destination. If one or several routes were destroyed or malfunctioning, the packets would find alternative routes and eventually reach their destination. ARPAnet grew during the late 1960s and 1970s because new "nodes" and routes were added to include university researchers. The many benefits of electronic mail (e-mail) were attractive to users and, as a wider community of faculty and students began to use the tool, it quickly gained popularity as a communication tool in North America. Because it was a decentralized network, there were few means to control its popular expansion, and it soon transcended its Department of Defence mentors. The Internet today is a people's network. Anyone with basic computer equipment and a telephone line can connect to it, communicate through it, host information on it and look through or browse it. Unlike many other media such as television and radio, every user of the medium can be an information producer and knowledge sharer. No one knows for sure how many people are using the Internet today. Internet in Developing Countries On a global scale, Internet growth has been little short of phenomenal. The network has increased from 213 host computers and several thousand users in August 1981 to more than 56 million Internet hosts by July 1999 supporting an estimated 190 million Internet users. Perhaps even more impressive is the number of countries connected to the global network. From just over twenty in 1990, there were more than 200 nations connected by July 1999. Though these figures are impressive, still there are great disparities in Internet hosts between high and low income regions. For example there are almost as many hosts in France as in all of Latin America and the Caribbean, there are more hosts in three highly developed countries of the Asia-Pacific region (Australia, Japan and New Zealand) than all the other countries in the region combined and there are more hosts in New York than in all of Africa. The majority of Internet hosts are in developed countries, suggesting that wealth and education are major factors driving Internet diffusion. Profiles of Internet users confirm that they are, on average, wealthy and educated as well as young, urban, and male. What are the barriers to increased Internet usage? The precise ranking of different obstacles differs, according to the level of economic and social development, but users around the world are unanimous in finding the price of Internet access to be a major constraint. Internet access prices for end users can be broken down into three components: hardware/software, Internet access provision and telephone service charges. In relative terms, the costs to get connected are much higher in developing countries. While prices may not differ drastically in absolute terms, there is a large gap between high and low income countries when costs relative to per capita income are considered. A shortage of infrastructure, notably of telephone lines, is a further big obstacle to increasing Internet access in developing countries. The high visibility of the Internet and the growing awareness of the importance of Information and Communication Technologies for socio-economic development is driving policy changes aimed at increasing the supply of telephone networks. Countries are tackling this problem through a variety of options including granting incumbent operators more freedom to

reinvest their earnings and attracting fresh investment from the private sector by selling shares in state-owned telephone companies, and/or by allowing new market entrants. Why is Internet so special? To address the question of what makes the Internet special, it is useful to consider a closely related question: what makes the Internet different from other telecommunication services, such as those which run over the public switched telephone network (PSTN)? There are arguably a number of differences. 1. Both the Internet and the voice telephone network run over the essentially the same wires but the equipment attached to those wires, and the use made of them, is different. On the Internet messages are broken down into digital packets of data which means that the wires can be used much more efficiently, to carry a much higher volume of information, at a lower cost. 2. The PSTN has traditionally been priced on the basis of usage. By contrast, the dominant pricing principle for Internet access is flat rate pricing. The model for wholesale pricing differs too. A service provider terminating a particular telephone call receives a fee for doing so. By contrast, on the Internet, there is almost no flow of cash on an end-to-end basis. On the telephone network, developing countries are net recipients of financial flows, but on the Internet they make net out payments, for carriage of their traffic. In most telephone calls, the traffic flow is approximately even between the caller and the called party. But with web-browsing, the traffic flow is highly asymmetric with the main flow being towards the party which originated the call, who also gains most value from the call. Whether measured by the location of Internet users, websites or the direction of traffic flows, the United States takes the lions share of the Internet. This is reflected too in the policy-making process in which all major decisions have, until now, been effectively taken in the United States. While it took the telephone close to 75 years to reach 50 million users, it has taken the World Wide Web (WWW) only four years to reach the same number (see Figure 1). On the supply side of the equation the number of international carriers grew to more than 1500 in 1999, but this is still a long way behind the estimated 17000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that have mushroomed around the world.

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One more fact is that internet is a great leveler. It has the power to cut across social and geographic distance and help people find new ways to facilitate the flow of information and knowledge.

Internet for Rural and Agriculture development Use of Internet in rural and agriculture development can be broadly divided in five categories: economic development for agricultural producers, community development, research/education, SME development and media networks. Economic development for agricultural producers According to Monica Besoain, field worker for the Chilean NGO, INPROA, Rengo, Chile (personal communication, July 1996), The change to a global market economy over the last ten years has produced some very big changes for small producers. Now they need to understand global market situations to make better decisions about timing, marketing and management. Global economy affects the agriculture producers in a great way. If small scale producers are provided with sufficient information and knowledge, they can compete with large operators. Green Revolution in India is a great example of this fact. Information can be provide to these small scale producers on how to have lower cost inputs, better storage facilities, better use of pesticides, better use of water resources, better use of power resources, better use of agriculture equipments. Information can also be provided on nature of various types of soils, which soil is better suited for which crop etc. This flow of information can be enhanced with the help of internet. Information can be given to farmers on latest global market trends of agriculture products. This information can be given on individual bases and if that is not possible, it can be given to farmers via local radio stations, newspapers, Gram Panchayats, NGOs and other intermediaries. Community Development According to Manuel Calvelo Rios, FAO Communication for Development in Latin America Project (FAO, 1996b) Modern communication technologies, when systematically applied and adapted to conditions in rural areas of developing countries, can be used for rural communication to increase participation, disseminate information and share knowledge and skills. The establishment of new institutional frameworks, including all stakeholders, which are autonomous and income-generating, can lead to sustainable and cost-effective efforts, as opposed to working only with government agencies. Internet services can be used to provide knowledge and information to communities about 1. Bucketful development strategies. 2. Small scale industries that can be set by youth in the villages. 3. Community sports 4. Training and Education to farmers and small entrepreneurs. 5. Enable rural youth to learn about use of computers 6. Enable local NGOs to contact potential donors on world stage.

Research and Education According to some volunteers in Technical Assistance (Tallero and Gaudette, 1995) Toolnet is a network for small-scale development projects that fosters exchange of information, experiences, expertise and solutions to technical problems. It provides multifunctional electronic mail to link field workers, local organizations, technological institutions, international development organizations and individual ... directed toward technology transfer among developing countries ... Points are operating or planned in about 25 countries world-wide. Keeping farmers in centre of research process man strategies have been developed so that they can increase their knowledge base and share it with each other, laborers, researchers, purchasers, vendors etc. Rural youth does not get access to education as their urban counterparts get. Sometimes they have to pursue their studies through distance education. The cost of books and printing material being very high in developing countries like India, poor students may find it very difficult to purchase these items. Problem can be solved with the help of electronic distance learning. This can again be done on the community level. These types of programs are already going on in some of the African countries such as Ghana, Egypt and South Africa. Overall, the Internet holds significant potential to enhance learning and research relationships among researchers, academics and students wherever they may be located. SME (Small and medium enterprise) development Tourism sector in developed countries and urban parts of the developed countries have been quick to recognize the benefits of internet for advertising. Nearly every famous tourism destination has information about it available on internet. But still there are a large number of unexplored destinations in developed countries, including India. These tourism destinations have a great potential for tourism but lack of knowledge about them at the global front make it difficult for them. Tourism operators in rural and remote areas have a difficult time marketing their destinations through traditional media owing to production and distribution costs. The Internet now represents a very inexpensive way for them to showcase their sites to the world and interact directly with potential tourists. News and Media Network It is a difficult job to send newspapers and magazines to remote villages. Due to this difficulty people in these rural areas do not get information about the latest happenings in world. This problem has been solved by the Internet. Today almost all the national newspapers post their latest copy on Internet. These newspapers not only provide the news but also provide information about job openings for youth in these rural villages, matrimonial services, Government policies about employment, political developments and so on.

Conclusion There is a vast difference between living standards of people in urban areas and in rural areas. People in urban areas get all the luxuries of life whereas their rural counterparts are not that much lucky. Situation is worst in developing countries. This gap can be shortened if people in rural areas are provided with proper knowledge and information. Internet can help achieve this goal. Although Internet is not a magic wand that can solve all the problems of people living in rural areas, but it can definitely bring new information resources and can open new communication channels for rural communities. It can help bridge the gap between Information haves and Information-nots

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