India Turns to Community Computing

Technology Review magazine interviewed Kenneth Keniston, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Human Development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Keniston, who serves as director of MIT's India Program, is interested in the proliferation of community information centers in India - kiosks where villagers can pay a small fee to access land records, market prices, and other information. A few programmes seem to have had success, despite language interface barriers. ISCII (Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange), he says, is not widely used. However, advocacy organisations have worked to create Indian language interfaces. Examples of initiatives that seem to have really taken off include Gyandoot, the Bhoomi land records project, and Drishtee's Community Information Centers.

However, Keniston says that evaluation of whether these programmes have in fact had an impact on communities - and what might help them flourish over time - has not yet been done in any sustained fashion. First, systems in rural areas often break down - organisers may be more focussed on keeping the centre running than evaluating its sustainability. (Beyond that, "there are projects that have a low impact, and therefore there is no motivation to do impact studies", he claims). Second, there are many competing priorities in high-poverty areas. He cites a personal experience of visiting an extremely poor village that was supposed to have a kiosk, but did not. Though hunger was a central issue, "The women were very articulate. What stood out was their determination to ensure that the next generation could read and write".

Nonetheless, Keniston urges, studies are essential: "We need to know what works and what doesn't work. It is not a philosophical question. It is a question of knowing the facts. Such studies have to be done by Indians themselves and not by people like me who don't speak the local language."

There should be two aspects to such a study, Keniston says: impact and sustainability. To study the impact, he says, a researcher needs to actually live in the villages, talking to a broad range of community members. In addition, hard questions must be asked about the expenses associated with building, maintaining, and sustaining the infrastructure. He adds that possible sources of revenue, like paying kiosk operators to teach village children how to use computers, should be explored.

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