Information & Knowledge driven Rural Society

Information & Knowledge driven Rural Society

Information and Knowledge Society

India is on the verge of takeoff as a dominant player in the Information and Knowledge society. There are more than a billion people, with over 70% of them living in rural areas. The tele-density in rural areas is about a tenth of that in the urban. 74% of households earn incomes of less than $60 a month. Under these circumstances, it is clear that no solution other than that which firmly incorporates self empowerment as the underlying principle can really make much of a difference. Key factors that could bring about significant change are education, health, productive employment and a lasting solution to ensure that natural disaster will not raze out the little progress that would be made over a period of time. Rural India is particularly susceptible to natural calamities such as drought, earth quakes, pest/ agricultural epidemics, human epidemics, floods, tsunami and so on which strike at slow though fairly regular intervals. If it’s not one calamity, it’s another! The regularity of occurrence is the common factor that levels down the economic status of the inhabitants to almost zero with little or no social claim or insurance of any kind.

Among the strengths of rural India are that it is dominantly an agricultural economy and has got a mine of specialized information in this sphere spread in different nook and corners of the country, which needs to be shared across the country. Rural products can be globally competitive. Rural India has a rich diversity of cultural traditions that can be of special interest to tourists. Rural India has a vast resource of NGOs and Self Help Groups (SHG) dedicated singularly to solving specific rural problems.

The last few years have shown, more clearly than ever before, that the telephone and the Internet is no longer merely a means of communication; they represent power. Electronic information now yields millions of rupees, provides employment, training, healthcare and education (among many other things) to hundreds and thousands of people as well as helps to build the economy of a nation. Lack of connectivity and access to communication is going to create strong divides within India.

Telephone in every village was a thing of the past. What is needed today is information sharing through internet over broadband in every village. Telecommunications and Information Technology (IT) have been known to make multi-fold difference in rural GDP. A unit of investment in Telecom and IT is equivalent of 20 times investment in other field in terms of yield and benefits. A unit of employment generated in the area of Telecom and IT can yield 4 times as much employment in other fields.

Impact of Information and Communications Technology (ICT)

Hundreds of pilot deployments have proven the success of ICT solutions and demonstrated how ICT can successfully be deployed for providing different services to the rural citizen. Yet, these projects have only but scratched the surface of the rural problem, which is truly of humongous proportions in terms of depth and coverage. The agricultural growth continues to dip ever so low and be the subject of the vagaries of weather.

There is need for a larger vision of a unified solution. A universal model flexible enough to address the specific needs of the vast rural diversity has to be adopted. The model should be in a position to replicate the hundreds of solutions already evolved. The model should bring all agricultural colleges and universities in a national networking mode. The model should offer an open, integrated, non-discriminative & convergent platform and a mechanism to setup diverse value chains on an end-to-end basis through stakeholder partnerships. There is need to recognize the enormity of the problem and that the problem is bound to hit hard again and again at the very roots of India’s overall economy and existence. There is need to understand that the solution can be realized only through a systemic approach. There has to be a rational approach, a sympathetic approach, a resolute approach and a nationalistic approach.

Transformation into an Information Society

It is considered that modern society is more and more dependent on Information for its sustenance. In fact, it is often referred to as Information Society and is driven by the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) engine.  India’s rural society would be no exception. Since the ICT engine and applications for the rural society are somewhat unique in character as compared to the urban needs, it would make sense to refer to what may be called the “Rural Information Society”. The telecom infrastructural architecture for the Rural Information Society is a Communications & IT Infrastructure model using the National NGN (Next Generation Network) Infrastructure of India to bridge the digital divide between rural and urban India. This initiative is in tune with the “Plan of Action” documented by the WSIS (World Summit on Information Society) in Geneva 2003, and further reiterated through the Tunis commitment in 2005.

Over half of India’s national income is generated in its cities and towns though 71% of its population still lives in villages. There is a dangerous trend of migration from rural to the urban. This trend if unchecked can further aggravate the digital divide and render it unviable to be bridged. It is therefore necessary to generate employment within the rural areas and help create what is referred to as ‘agropolitan districts’.  The learning from the IT experience of various small initiatives and experiments undertaken by private and public organizations, such as E-Choupal of ITC (in more than seven states), N-Logue’s village kiosks (in Tamil Nadu state), Bhumi Project (in Karnataka state), Akshaya (in Kerala state), Drishti (in M.P. & Delhi states) and Gyandoot (in M.P. state) show how an integrated model of the agropolitan district can create a new opportunity for investment in the rural sector that can reap rich dividends.

 The Architecture for Rural Information Society

The Rural Information Society would need to operate in an architectural framework which we may call the Rural Information Society Architecture (RISA). The architecture should aim at building a countrywide scalable, secure, viable and self sustaining model for an information engine that is capable of integrating the innumerable independent initiatives already carried out throughout the country. The architecture should take into account the projections and requirements envisaged by the Ministry of C&IT in respect of 100,000 Community Information Centers.  RISA envisages a generic model that should have the ability to deliver various services, such as ‘distance education’, telemedicine’, ‘e-Governance’, ‘e-Commerce’ and so on, seamlessly across different networks, with any customer being able to reach out to servers located in data centers of different service provider’s networks.

The architecture is conceived as a framework of projects bringing together and coordinating a variety of stakeholders through standardization of infrastructure and processes. The framework aims at providing off-the-shelf opportunity to small and big entrepreneurs located anywhere in the country through an organized and democratic “open” forum that accords different rights and access to information resources to its members. The overall concept of the architecture and the open forum is a loosely coupled federal structure relying on standardization of key infrastructure components while allowing innovation through individual participation of stakeholders.

The Rural Information Society architecture stands upon three pillars as shown in Figure 1.

o    Knowledge Centers

o    Rural Business Hubs

o    Connectivity Infrastructure

The model assumes that the knowledge centers are located one per village with an average serving population of about 500 residing within 2 km – considered walking distance for the villager. The model further assumes that the RBH serves an average of 100 knowledge centers with a serving population of about 50,000 residing within 20 km – a distance considered within half an hour of local bus journey. An average district would be served by about 24 RBHs covering a total population of about 1.2 million. With say 25 states and an average of 25 districts per state, a total population of 720 million served from an aggregate of 12,000 RBHs would be the final tally. These figures are intended only to give a feel of the proportion of the task at hand.

It is a well established fact that commerce in agro-commodities account for 50% to 60% of total GDP. The RISA model adopts the Rural Business Hub as the central rural infrastructure aggregating demand for physical services to which community based “Information Kiosks” called Knowledge Centers located in villages are parented, thus creating the “agropolitan district” concept. The agropolitan district is an aggregation of geographically contiguous (or near contiguous) people that have a common set of interests, such as growing of sugarcane, soya, etc. or handicrafts, manufacturing textile products, and so on.

The model recognizes the complexity of the rural problem and identifies the broad objectives in terms of rural imperatives. It provides for a connectivity architecture based on Internet Protocol. Wireless Access solutions shall initially dominate the connectivity of Knowledge Centers to the Business Hubs whereas Optic Fibre solutions shall dominate the backend aggregation networks connecting the Business Hubs to the District Headquarters. The backend infrastructure shall also consist of Data Center architectures that shall house scores of application servers. The entire network from district level to the state level and from the state level to the national level shall have to be integrated and convergent and could best be described by the acronym “NGN” or Next Generation Network.

There shall be provision for end-to-end quality of service and certain defined guarantees of security. NGN architecture shall make possible integrated national disaster readiness and management, supporting drought management, earth quake management, pest / agricultural epidemics control, human epidemics control, flood management and so on.

The model recognizes the scores of pilot ICT initiatives carried out by different organizations and aims at building a comprehensive system capable of supporting all such individual initiatives to setup value chains on an end-to-end basis through partnerships.

The creation of the Rural Information Society Forum, an “open” institutional organization representing different stakeholders, to drive standardization issues to bring down costs and open up competition, would therefore be required. Such a forum would effectively architect and support the four aforesaid entities.

RISA formally enlists the rural citizen through the existing institution of autonomous societies, etc. as an essential stakeholder and participant in decision making. They will find representation in the working groups of the forum. RISA would model its operations through adoption of transaction based e-Services running on converged IP network wherein revenue on every transaction would be shared in direct proportion to the equity put in by the different stakeholders. The key to self sustenance is the ability of the platform to support mass transactions leading to the required generation of revenue through running of multiple application services over a unified and convergent infrastructure. RISA envisages that the imminent Next Generation Networks (NGN) of Telecom Service Providers shall form a key component responsible for its success. The project envisages focus on health, education, agriculture, commercial transactions, entertainment and other services that can become a GDP spinner in the rural sector.

RISA platform is intended to support and provide the required synergy to various projects such as the PURA (Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Areas) initiated by the Hon. President Abdul Kalam, the Karnataka Government’s Bhoomi project, ITC’s e-Choupal project, Grasso’s and n’Logue’s Internet kiosk services, Drishtee’s e-Services and the innumerable other initiatives of different agencies in an open and non-discriminative environment.

The RISA methodology is expected to create massive employment opportunities and result in overall enhancement in socio-economic stability, law and order, security and national disaster readiness. The RISA model would eventually lead to significant enhancement in rural GDP and quality of life in rural India, thereby helping bridge the digital divide.

Organizational model

The enormous opportunity to transform rural India through profitable investment into the Rural Information Society is seen to have huge potential to attract large investment from NGOs, Self Help Groups and NRIs who would like not only like to become a stakeholder wherein their investment and hence their activity grows but also contribute substantially to nation building in the critical rural segment. The model therefore has to be autonomous in character with minimal Governmental dependence. The model should also be possible for adoption in a modular way so that a road map of seamless and integrated growth is possible that could cover the entire length and breadth of the country in a defined period of time.

The RISA initiative conceptualizes community based Knowledge centers equipped with micro facility for a group of villages with about 500 population, and large community service centers or Rural Business Hubs, typically one for every “taluka” or “block” serving a population of about 50,000 with macro facility capable of translating knowledge into physical services.

Role of the Rural Business Hub

The Rural Business Hub, as the name suggests, would therefore serve as a rallying point for the rural citizen for day-to-day activities such as commodity procurement and sale with transparent and standardized processes such as chemist, weigh bridge, etc., purchase of groceries and other requirements, Credit and Banking/ATM outlet (Kisan credit, etc.), Primary Health Center,  Seminar/Information/Education, Cultural, Arts & Crafts and Entertainment Centers, restaurant facilities, commodity retail sale and other amenities such as petrol bunk, and so on. This network of knowledge centers and business hubs are connected through an IP backbone network infrastructure to data centers. The working of the overall network may be said to be divided into two broad components – connectivity management and operations management. The connectivity management support would have to be delivered by the connectivity providers whereas the operations support needs to be built through a unique kind of Public-Private partnership by an entity that may be termed as the Local Service Coordinator. This entity may consist of one or more Private entrepreneur/NGOs in each State, depending upon their respective area of interest and expertise, to act as partner and facilitator to develop ICT based applications and content, generate demand for the services, build capacity and maintain the services. The supporting entity that completes the organizational model is the ‘open’ Forum.

 Role of Knowledge Centers

The objectives of the knowledge centers are to provide primary access to telephony, internet and broadband for the village residents. The basic services could include file & print, email, web hosting & proxy, caching, streaming (voice & video), backup & storage, sql database, vpn, vlan services, voip, pbx services, pstn connectivity, ip-tv, video conferencing, application services and certain tertiary services. These basic services would be translated into specific services such as Portal based information & interactive services in local language, commodity prices, medical consultation, vet on the net, etc., Internet access with browsing, Interactive services such as Public grievance, forms, certificates and other e-Governance applications, Telemarketing via RBH, Word-processing, e-Mailing and Web surfing with every village having an e-Mail box, Public telephony for local, STD & ISD, Video Conferencing, Tele Health, e-Education, Web cast, disaster warning and management – weather, epidemic, advance information, education, entertainment and cultural programmes.

These centres will charge fees for these knowledge based services as a means of self sustenance and employment. The transaction revenue so earned shall be shared between the stake-holders contributing value to the activity. Typically, the revenue will be shared between the connectivity provider, the application service provider providing the application, the local service coordinator who is coordinating the activity and the operators at the knowledge centres and business hubs who act as the retail and wholesale outlets respectively. The entire range of activities in a state shall be coordinated by a project team consisting of representation of personnel from each of the participating entities including the user society.

Creation of the Open Forum

The RISA programme depends upon the creation of an open forum as it recognizes the need for a much wider involvement of all segments of diverse stakeholders, NGOs, financial institutions, user groups, and government, and taking all of them into confidence at the stage of the initial process-definition.  This forum of stakeholders shall be the platform for building partnerships and creating synergies between stakeholders, initiate discussions and work out standards, processes, methodologies and recommendations, set standards for common infrastructure such as  security, common databases, billing, etc., spread awareness of the entire value chain in the RISI model, initiate technical debates on IT legislation required to bring benefits of IT to common man, produce documentation to help stakeholders, help formulate public and legal opinions in a professional direction to achieve stated objectives, standardize certain infrastructural interfaces such as billing, centralize databases, etc.

Role of government

The government has a dual role to play. The first concerns itself with the execution of the various government driven programmes involving government spend. The second is its role as a strong regulator. It has to be a trusted umpire in laying down the rules for participants of the rural Information Society. To this end, it should adopt the sacrosanct principle of scrupulously avoiding the ‘executive’ role and restricting itself to ‘policy making and regulation’. The fast pace of technical developments in the context of the emergence of the new IP paradigm calls for a total review of existing rules of licensing. For instance, obligations of licensed operators in respect of interoperability, interconnection, quality of service and security have to be redefined.

The Rural ICT model should be fork-lifted and scaled to the national level with absolute focus essentially through private enterprise. This should be given the status of a national mission driven by a cabinet level “National Governing Council” which will spell out overall policy and regulation in respect of the objectives, coordination and management of the Business Hubs, management structure, registration of participants, firming up deliverables, keeping track of statistics, etc. These functions would be managed through an online electronic resource manager.  It should be aided by a “National level Executive Council” with say five or six full-time working members driving respective key sectors of Government and should essentially comprise of persons having subject matter expertise. The various government programmes that need to reach out to the rural masses would actually be executed by State level teams centrally coordinated and converged through an efficient on-line national, state and district level dashboard monitoring.

The adoption of a multi-disciplinary approach through the said instruments at the national level can facilitate involvement of different organs of government such as education, health, agriculture, power, telecommunications, finance, etc. at the very outset and can provide the government the ability to monitor each one of its projects at different levels.

Centrally sponsored projects such as citizenship identity, births, deaths, etc., census of population, electoral rolls, creation of accounts in Post Offices and banks for financial inclusion, micro credit schemes, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and Mid Day Meal (MDM) scheme, National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (RGGVY), Indira Awas Yojana, subsidy on food grains through Public Distribution System (PDS), National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme (NREG), Immigration Check Posts, Common Integrated Police Application (CIPA) and Crime and Criminal Tracking System are some of the projects that could be integrated with the RISA.

Role of Private enterprise

The participants are the doers who comprise of the many private agencies ranging from corporate entities to NGOs, Work Groups, Self Help Groups, and so on. The agencies could be non-profit making organizations or otherwise. The coordination and management of the Business Hubs would be guided by the regulatory arm of the respective state governments for which model legislation would be required to be in place.

At the field level, there would be need to coordinate the activities of the various agencies to ensure coordination between the users, local service coordinators, connectivity providers, investors, local government, etc.

Indispensability of Sub-GHz spectrum for rural growth

At the connectivity level, the rural telecommunications network may be conceived as an architecture consisting of nodes in three tiers – Tier I node in districts, Tier 2 node in Blocks (also referred to as Talukas or Tehsils, the terminology varying from state to state) and Tier 3 node in smaller towns or villages.  The country’s premier incumbent Telecom Service Provider BSNL, which is also a Public Sector Unit (PSU), has been credited with having a network of nearly 3¹/₂ lakh kilometers of optical fiber reaching every Block headquarter. This resource is capable of providing Core connectivity to the 6000+ block headquarters at the national level.

It is evident that connectivity between the Tier 2 blocks and the Tier 3 smaller towns and villages numbering about 6 lakhs has been a major issue for a long time now. So as a thumb rule, we have on average, about 100 villages to be connected to each block node located within a radius of about 30 kilometers. Presently, BSNL has fibre connectivity extended to only about 25000 town/villages where it has got its CDOT’s legacy telephone exchanges. Further, the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) has been envisaged to extend the fibre connectivity to 2.5 lakh panchayats.

It is important to realize that as we go to the smaller unconnected villages, not only does the population per village gets dispersed to smaller and smaller figures, but the per capita income and hence the purchasing power of the citizen also declines to very low levels. The traffic emanating from these villages are therefore expected to be very thin, thereby making the task of providing telecom services a non-viable business proposition. It is little wonder then that the private telecom operators have been loath in fulfilling the rural obligations attached to their respective licenses. The challenge to be addressed therefore is – ‘How do we provide real broadband connectivity to these dispersed villages so as to effectively support the concept of Rural Business Hubs of the Rural Information Society architecture?’

It is a known fact that the spectrum in the sub-GHz UHF band of 400 MHz to 750 MHz has maximum reach, with a single base transmitter capable of covering distances of up to 30 km. For the same coverage in higher bands, one would require more transmitters and associated towers in a given circular area of say 30 kilometers thus requiring enormous infrastructure costs for higher bands. A comparison between three typical bands is indicated in Figure 2.2.

The rural segment with all its poverty, unemployment and low growth rate should be allocated at least some portion of this spectrum, say a bandwidth of 60 MHz initially, as this would enable the required telecom infrastructure to be set up at minimal cost, thereby alleviating commercial feasibility issues. At the connectivity level, the rural sector should therefore receive its due share of spectrum for providing access to villages.

An estimate for spectrum valuation

There are as many as 67 TV broadcast channels of 6 MHz each in the 300 to 700 MHz band. Advances in broadband technology supporting convergence of voice, video and data, warrants a relook at this spectrum usage. Initially, if we consider the requirement of only 12000 Base Transmitting Stations (BTS) in each of the Rural Business Hubs across the country with provision to expand to 36000 BTSs eventually, and assume Rs. 800 as rental costs for a 2 Mbps bandwidth, a contention ration of 1:10 and a 18 Mbps throughput per BTS sector, a per month charge of 10% for spectrum charges for 6 MHz and an initial real estate value at 100 times the monthly rental for 36000 BTSs amortized over 8¹/₃ year period, we find that a 60 MHz spectrum is like real estate with value of Rs.25,920 crores that could generate a GDP of $520 bn.

It is a stark contradiction that the said bandwidth of 350 MHz (whose valuation may be estimated at Rs. 150,000 crore and which could potentially yield a GDP of a staggering $ 3120 billion) historically stands un-utilized in the name of TV broadcasting whereas all TV programmes are presently distributed either through Cable or through Satellite media. A re-look at the spectrum usage policy and consequent reallocation in the 300 to 700 MHz band in the light of the immense benefit to rural sector will therefore be in the best interest of the country.

Village Panchayat Connectivity

The village or gram panchayat is the local government at the village or small town level in India. The gram panchayat is headed by the ‘Sarpanch’ who is elected by the village people for a term of five years. The responsibility of the gram panchayat ranges from keeping records of births, deaths and marriages in the village, looking after public health, hygiene, drinking water and sanitation, providing for education, implementing development schemes for roads, agriculture and animal husbandry,  maintenance of street lights  and road repairs, to organizing village markets, fairs, festivals and celebrations. The gram panchayat is considered the key to village welfare and is therefore essentially a political entity at the grass root level.

A gram panchayat can be set up in villages with minimum population of 300. Sometimes two or more villages are clubbed together to form group-gram panchayat when the population of the individual villages is less than 300. There are 250,000 gram panchayats in India. The political importance of the panchayat cannot be underestimated. The honorable president of India in one of her pre-budget speeches had spelt out government’s plan to have a fourfold increase in phone usage in rural India in five years. Mr. Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the honorable PM, has planned to provide 2 Mbps connectivity to every gram panchayat within a year and subsequently upgrade the bandwidth to 100 Mbps within a three year time frame. These plans could bring about spiraling growth in the rural market bringing opportunity at the doorstep of every segment of activity. An important issue that confronts such an ambitious plan is to what extent the bandwidth will be really used by the target customer. To just get an idea, we only have to ask ourselves what bandwidth levels are being used even by the most sophisticated enterprises in urban India today. It is relevant to realize that the PC penetration levels in India are dismally low despite various initiatives having been taken by leading PC and laptop manufacturers. It should not happen that we plan for the bandwidth and there are no takers for the same for years together!

The 2 Mbps Panchayat connectivity plan surely looks to be a reasonable target. The plan envisages utilizing at-least two important technologies – the land-line technology – ADSL2+, which BSNL has deployed in all its 25000 exchanges, and the wireless technology – WiMax, presently being deployed through about 7000 BTSs. Each ADSL2+ system cannot be expected to cover a radius of more than 3 kilometres, whereas each WiMax BTS would not cover more than a radius of 10 kilometres on a point-to-multi point basis with a roof top directional antenna. It may be noted that compared to 700 MHz (f1) band, the current 2.1 GHz (f2) WiMax band would deliver 1/(f2-f1)² times less coverage, i.e. nearly 9 times less.

In contrast, the 100 Mbps connectivity plan is envisaged to be implemented through the GPON technology, taking fibre pairs right up to the village level. This scheme would not be so much of an impossible task to install as much as it would be to maintain and operate. BSNL already has bad experience with fibre cuts owing to road construction, digging by various agencies, and so on. The experience of AP State Government taking fibre on over-head poles also has not been encouraging at all. The Central Government has now initiated a National Optic Fibre Network Project that envisages the setting up of a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) that brings together different entities such as the Public Sector Units (BSNL, Railtel, National Power Grid, etc.), the Central and State Governments, and other stakeholders. The Project mandates the State Governments to iron out the Right of Way issues before starting the implementation of the project in their respective states.

The project has three broad components. First, the laying of the optic fibre cables between the block level and the village Panchayats. Second, the Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) System developed indigenously by the Center for Development of Telematics (CDOT), an R&D organization directly under the Department of Telecommunications. And third, Carrier Ethernet aggregation network from the block level upwards connecting the GPON system to the Core IP network. BSNL, a wholly owned government enterprise already has fibre connectivity right up to the block level, and therefore can be well positioned to offer aggregation and core connectivity bandwidths of 1Gbps on a whole-sale basis at all the block headquarters. Providing coverage at the village level to individuals and entities such as schools, colleges, markets, etc. located up to 30 kms from the BTS, could be achieved initially through the use of a portion of the 300 to 700 MHz sub-GHz spectrum band, say 60 MHz. 

[Note: This article written by the author in Dec 2011 is believed to be applicable even in 2014]