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Agrarian India re-packages its schedules, thanks to a silent IT revolution.
Balu Jadhav owns less than a hectare of land, a buffalo and a cow. He used to worry incessantly about his son, who suffers from polio. Now Jadhav says he needn't worry. An IT revolution has silently swept through 70 villages in Warana, Kolhapur district, Maharashtra. Jadhav has watched the $ 600,000 Warana Wired Village Project change everything in these villages where livelihoods centre around sugarcane farming and dairying. His son needn't be involved in either, Jadhav grins. All he needs to do to earn a decent living is learn how to operate a computer! Is such faith in information technology justified? It would seem so in these 70 villages which once lived in the shadow of development in the outside world. Before this project came to Warana, sugarcane farming and milk procurement were hard work. Now the networking has solved a major problem faced by sugarcane farmers. Once the crop is ready for harvesting, each day's delay in harvesting reduces the sugar content of the cane and as a corollary the price it fetches at the sugar co-operative factory. The one harvester that the co-operative owns would often be monopolised by the rich farmers. Through the network, harvesting dates at each farm and village can be predetermined, and farmers can complain online to the co-operative chief if the harvester does not arrive on time. Each farmer is provided a code number that helps him decide when to take his crop to the factory. His bills are cleared online as well. Co-operative dairies are now selling their products online and milk collection centres have been upgraded to cybercafes! The Warana Group has also opened an office in Europe to market its milk produce. The network provides farmers pricelists of farm produce in the region. So it's easy for them to monitor the rates of agricultural produce in Agricultural Produce Market Committees across the state. They can also access daily weather forecasts, information on cropping patterns, soil conservation and government schemes. An information package called Disha has also been developed to provide vocational guidance to village children, provide information on career options and educational institutions they can enroll in. "The basic objective is to use IT as a tool for development, and to bring government to your doorstep," says N Vijayaditya of the New Delhi-based National Informatics Centre, the state-owned technical agency behind the project. Contact: National Informatics Centre
Ministry of Information Technology
A-Block, CGO Complex, Lodhi Road
New Delhi - 110 003, India
Tel: 91-11-436 2628
Email:
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