It’s a sad fact that though everyone talks about taking IT to the masses, not enough has been done on this front. However, there are some projects which could serve as beacons for others. Pankaj Mishra chronicles a project that has benefited the lives of rural women below the poverty line

The kiosks are multilingual and smart card reading is also possible at a few locations, says Daniel Ingitaraj

There has been a lot of talk about how India’s success in the field of IT has not percolated down to people below the poverty line, and that the ‘Digital Divide’ is all that rural India has got so far. Recently, some state governments, including those of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Karnataka, have started working towards helping the rural population through IT. A small district in AP called West Godavari has realised the potential of IT to usher in a social revolution. This has been made possible by Web services. While IT pundits are busy discussing how Web services can change the way we interact and do business, and argue over the competitive strengths and weaknesses of SunONE and .NET, villagers in West Godavari are reaping the benefits of this technology.

The goal
The collectorate of West Godavari wanted to help women below the poverty line, to encourage savings and help them get easy access to government agencies. It turned to CoOptions, a company that had been working with women’s self help groups (a self help group or SHG is a group of rural poor who have volunteered to organise themselves into a group for eradication of poverty among the members within a time frame of three years) to develop a banking management solution that would facilitate and encourage savings and maintain records, help women interact with banks, co-ordinate with government agencies for grants and schemes, as well as facilitate fund transfers and fund management. It would also help them learn about economic activities, and provide access to information on health, childcare and sanitation.

Mahila Spurthi 1.0
CoOptions developed “Mahila Spurthi 1.0” for the women’s SHGs in rural areas to facilitate bank transactions and lending records, communication with different agencies like government offices (public health centres, police stations, etc), dissemination of information to users via IDACs (Information Dissemination and Acquisition Centres) and performance reviews of all the groups that transact business at IDACs. CoOptions was in a position to get an early look at the .NET platform and was one of the early adopters of .NET Alerts in India. .NET Alerts provides a messaging system which can advise depositors at, say, a bank, confirming their transactions. “In February, kiosks with instructions in Telugu were installed at 15 villages to see how the system worked. Now there are over 100 kiosks and the authorities are planning to install another 600 or so,” says Daniel Ingitaraj, senior marketing manager at Microsoft India. “The beauty of this implementation lies in the ‘fit’ provided by Web services for this unique problem. After analysing the situation and evaluating various options, Web services came into the picture.”
Mahila Spurthi provides links to the mandal revenue officer, commercial banks, police stations and public health centres. CoOptions plans to extend this package to offer information and services pertaining to women’s and children’s health and development.

The basic feature of Mahila Spurthi is that it works at the village level over dial-up connections.

Mahila Spurthi 1.0 provides:

• Remote transaction updating.
• Support for existing third party components using COM Interoper-ability.
• A single data set to replace multiple record sets.
• Reduction of database to a proportionate size.
• Ease of integration of current and future services.
• Interoperability on data.
• Reduces expenses (brings down travel cost to nearly one-fifteenth of original costs.)
• Automatic maintenance of 100 percent accounting.
• Reach to global and domestic markets.

“XML-based Web services offer much of the functionality that we currently need as we do not have to develop from scratch. Microsoft’s .NET technology helps not only seamless integration with the Internet, but also smooth migration of existing applications developed in Visual Studio to Visual Studio .NET,” says K Anil Kumar, technical head, CoOptions India.

This solution is scalable to the district level; it gives the district collector access to data pertaining to the entire district. The collector can view data with a drill-down approach to a specific mandal, an IDAC in that specific mandal, an SHG, and even the savings and borrowings of an individual member of that particular SHG. While all government services and schemes need the data, Mahila Spurthi frees the collector from maintaining the repository at every location and at all levels of the hierarchy.

These Web services let the end-user know and understand the acknowledgement process for all activities done by him by means of Alerts that are easily understandable even by a layperson (though Web services is a high-end technology). Web services let developers plug into a localised service as a desktop application, to client/server architecture, and to an Internet-enabled application. “All these kiosks are multilingual, and smart card reading is also possible at a few locations,” says Ingitaraj.

Social revolution
“In West Godavari district we have 22,000 women’s SHGs; they have formed themselves into small thrift groups and are saving every month. While we were at this stage we looked at ways and means of further empowering them. We wanted to use the latest technology to better the lives of these rural women. It was at this time that we had a series of discussions with CoOptions, and we have now come up with a model where the women’s groups are able to handle some issues on their own,” says Poonam Malkondiah, collector of the district.

“Today, if a woman in a rural village wants a caste certificate or the particulars of her land she is able to do it online. Accountability of grassroots institutions has definitely increased with this technology. I am happy that CoOptions has come up with this .NET solution that I believe is going to reduce the cost of project execution...it will be very useful to expand these projects in rural areas. I hope that we will be able to link up with this technology very soon in West Godavari, not only in this mandal but in all 45 mandals,” she adds.

Benefits

• Ease of integration of current and future services
• Interoperability of data
• Increase in benefits in terms of integration without implication on cost
• Seamless integration with the Internet
• Scalability
• Replicable across departments

Software and services implemented by Microsoft

• .NET Alerts (web services)
• Windows Messenger
• Windows 2000 Server
• SQL Server 2000
• Visual Studio.NET
• Microsoft Consultancy Services