Vol. VII No. 1
January 2009
The first monthly magazine on ICT4D
Tracking DesiCrew’s rural BPO: 2 years on DesiCrew’s rural BPO, Chennai, India Information for development
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Interview: Ashok Jhunjhunwala TeNeT: Innovation for rural transformation
Isuru: The face of BPO business in Sri Lanka
ISSN 0972 - 804X
Rural BPOs
Rural BPOs in Sri Lanka
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Contents
Vol. VII No. 1
Features 5 14 15
Editorial Rural BPOs can help in times of financial meltdown!
January 2009
Mail box Interviews 6
Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Professor, IIT-Madras, India TeNeT: Innovation for rural transformation
8
A Rajan, Group HeadOperations, HDFC Bank, India HDFC Bank’s rural BPO initiative
Rural BPOs in Sri Lanka Isuru: The face of BPO business in Sri Lanka Chanuka Wattegama
DesiCrew’s rural BPO, Chennai, India Tracking DesiCrew’s rural BPO: 2 years on Saloni Malhotra
19
Nemmadi, Karnataka, India
25
SourcePilani, Pilani, Rajasthan, India
India NASSCOM’s Corporate Social Responsibility
What makes Nemmadi sustainable Robert Schware
Empowerment, the rural BPO way Sabyasachi Kashyap
35
Rao, Chairman 17 Jerry NASSCOM Foundation,
Verma 23 Pallavi Assistant ManagerRural BPO, Drishtee Setting sights on rural development through BPOs
AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) AHF: Taking HIV testing to the doorsteps Dilshad Mohd
K Jocob 26 Verghese Chief Integrator, Byrraju Foundation GramIT: Empowering rural India
Rendezvous 38
IGF 2008, 3-6 December 2008, Hyderabad, India
29
Sujatha Raju, Director, SAI SEVA Serving God by serving man
37
Tan Boon Huat Chief Executive Director, People’s Association, Singapore Leveraging IT for social cohesion
IGF 2008: Internet for All Ritu Srivastava
Columns 42 45 46
Bytes for All What’s on In Fact Mapping rural BPOs in India
44
30
Books received Creating Value for All: Strategies for Doing Business with the Poor
GIS Applications in Agriculture and SCM, RMSI Remote sensing Indian agriculture K S Siva Subramanian, Yogesh Singh and Subrato Paul
4-6 August 2009, Greater Noida Uttar Pradesh, India http://www.eindia.net.in/2009
33
The Climate Confidence Monitor 2008, HSBC HSBC’s study: Climate Confidence Monitor 2008
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/biking_on_yamaha/3187033275/sizes/o/
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Climate Change: An overview
The first monthly magazine on ICT4D
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i4d Editorial Calendar 2009 Month
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eAgriculture i4d | January 2009
Editorial Rural BPOs can help in times of financial meltdown! ADVISORY BOARD M P Narayanan, Chairman, i4d Chin Saik Yoon Southbound Publications, Malaysia Karl Harmsen United Nations University Kenneth Keniston Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Mohammed Yunus Grameen Bank, Bangladesh Nagy Hanna e-Leadership Academy, University of Maryland, USA Richard Fuchs IDRC, Singapore Rinalia Abdul Rahim Global Knowledge Partnership, Malaysia
What really led to the major phenomenon of business process outsourcing to emerging markets? One of the key financial rationales was the slowdown as an aftermath of the 9/11 incident. The last year has seen a major crash of the financial markets, leading to an overall slowdown of the economy. But not all is lost. Take the case of new opportunities opened up with the emergence of a segment called rural BPOs. These are not simple ICT projects in the rural areas, which often remain only projects on pilot or testing stage, but are real business and entrepreneurial ventures that have steered local leadership, engagement of the youth in training and capacity building, and more importantly lead to value addition, and continued employment to the educated youth.
Walter Fust Global Humanitarian Forum, Switzerland Wijayananda Jayaweera UNESCO, France EDITORIAL BOARD Akhtar Badshah, Frederick Noronha GROUP DIRECTORS Maneesh Prasad, Sanjay Kumar EDITORIAL TEAM Editor-in-Chief Ravi Gupta Programme Co-ordinator Jayalakshmi Chittoor Sr. Research Associates Ritu Srivastava, Ajitha Saravanan
As has been seen in programmes stretching across different agencies in India, Sri Lanka, etc., the rural BPO as a concept has emerged to get an identity of its own. We have the case of HDFC bank which has incubated a rural BPO which provides back-end support for major banking services; the Byrraju Foundation has embarked on a well-designed integration of rural BPO services for leading service providing agencies; Desicrew is a rural BPO operation which was born out of the TeNeT programme of Indian Institute of Technology; Drishtree is operating BPOs in 12 states, wherein they have brought a franchisee model of telecentres to become financially productive enterprises and evolved them to become operating BPOs to provide employment.
Research Assistant Subir Dey Sr. Graphic Designer Bishwajeet Kumar Singh Graphic Designers Om Prakash Thakur, Shyam Kishore, Chandrakesh Bihari Lal (James) Web Programmer Zia Salahuddin i4d G-4 Sector 39, NOIDA, UP, 201 301, India Phone +91 120 250 2181-85 Fax +91 120 250 0060 Email info@i4donline.net Web www.i4donline.net Printed at R P Printers, Noida, India i4d is a monthly publication. It is intended for those interested and involved in the use of Information and Commnication Technologies for development of underserved communities. It is hoped that it will serve to foster a growing network by keeping the community up to date on many activities in this wide and exciting field. i4d does not necessarily subscribe to the views expressed in this publication. All views expressed in this magazine are those of the contributors. i4d is not responsible or accountable for any loss incurred directly or indirectly as a result of the information provided.
These are but small beginnings of a great movement. It is important to note that according to some estimates, the rural BPO business is likely to create over 2 million jobs in the next five years, which includes a range of services, from technical management of the centres, training centres to prepare the rural youth, diction and language training programmes, to direct employment and management opportunities within the BPOs. The auxiliary services that are likely to crop up will include food and transport services, courier services and other technical, maintenance and support services. These are not without challenges. The efforts to provide cheaper but quality services would mean a level of benchmarking of the quality of personnel who work in the rural BPOs. The NASSCOM Certification Course for BPOs is one of the efforts in this direction, which can be applied to rural BPOs that are beginning to mushroom around the country. We look forward to addressing key financial inclusion issues this year in i4d, and wish all our readers a peaceful, professionally stimulating and positive year ahead in 2009!
Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies, 2008 Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
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January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
5
INTERVIEW : ASHOK JHUNJHUNWALA, PROFESSOR, IIT MADRAS, CHENNAI, INDIA
TeNeT: Innovation for rural transformation www.tenet.res.in
Ashok Jhunjhunwala ashok@tenet.res.in
Ashok Jhunjhunwala is a Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai (Madras), India. He also leads the Telecommunications and Computer Networks Group (TeNeT) at IIT Madras. The TeNeT group incubates a number of R&D companies which work in partnership with the group to develop world class technologies. In an exclusive interview with i4d, he shares his ideas and thoughts on the scope of rural BPOs in India and connectivity and technologies barriers in establishing rural BPOs. What was the idea behind the launch of the TeNeT Group? And what is the vision of the TeNeT group? TeNet was established a decade ago, with a vision of ‘Worldclass Technology at an Affordable Price’ and with an objective of transforming India. The aim of the organisation is to address the
6
socio-economic needs of India and other developing countries through a market-driven and technological approach. Initially, TeNeT started research to foster telecom connectivity in urban areas, rural areas and Internet connectivity in rural areas. Now the organisation is visioning – how technology can be used to i4d | January 2009
transform rural India. The mission of TeNeT is to use technology in transforming India, use of technology to transform business in rural India and many other activities in transforming rural India. Currently, the organisation is focusing only on rural India. Can you tell us about the mandate and initiatives of the Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI)? RTBI is the most recent creation of the TeNeT group. RTBI aims to improve rural income and productivity through ICT-enabled business incubation and service delivery. The objective of RTBI is to create entrepreneurs with business and technical skills that transform rural India. RTBI designs and implements pilot projects that provide technological, business and service development solutions from village-based and ICT enabled kiosks. As of now, RTBI provides technical and financial start-up support with an aim to develop each initiative as a self-sustainable entity. All pilots of RTBI are designed to be scalable across India. Some of the initiatives of RTBI are DesiCrew, Rural Opportunities Production Enterprise (ROPE), Intelizon Energy Pvt. Ltd, eJeevika, Invention Labs and Uniphore. Could you share some information about current research being done on projects that will promote rural development? TeNeT is currently working in diverse areas including wireless communications, computer networking, digital systems architecture, network management systems, Integrated Voice/ Video/Data Communications, Indic Computing and applications for rural development. In order to empower rural sector, RTBI is working on various sectors like agriculture, health, education, outsourcing, manufacturing, vocational training, financial inclusion, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and energy. RTBI also plans to focus on water-related issues in the near future. RTBI’s inhouse rural research and database teams are strengthening and maintaining these sector-wise ventures. As I said before, RTBI has initiated DesiCrew, ROPE, eJeevika who work in the direction of rural development. How can modern communication tools like the Internet empower the rural economy? Do you have any ideas how barriers like lack of electricity, access devices, connectivity, etc. could be overcome? I think, modern communication technologies like Internet, telephony and mobile phones are not only tools but also medium to provide services to rural areas of India. We, at TeNet, believe that telephones and the Internet can have a larger impact in rural India rather than in the urban areas. Emerging technologies like wireless broadband are reducing the cost of access. IT has made some noticeable changes – railway ticket booking is probably the most visible example. We need to build services around these technologies. The organisation is currently using these modern technologies in providing various services like education, healthcare, agriculture, etc. There is a need to decentralise energy generation to overcome barriers like lack of electricity. What are the kind of barriers that rural BPO entrepreneurs usually face while trying to set up their business? Can you January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
elaborate on some of the innovative ways through which these barriers were overcome? In terms of infrastructure, Internet connectivity is an essential requirement, which will be taken care of in one or two years. The requisite computers and other hardwares can be brought from urban areas. For electricity, BPOs can use low-power system and even the existing power infrastructure can be used, provided there is a very good power backup system in place. Rural BPOs can also use decentralised energy generation, alternative energy generation, etc. BPOs do not consume large amount of electricity, so they can be run on back-ups or power generators too. Electricity is the bottleneck in rural areas, but it is not a major bottleneck for running a rural BPO. Then what is the biggest bottleneck? How do think can the bottlenecks be overcome? The first bottleneck is the mindset of the market. There are certain questions on: can rural BPO really do the work; on time service delivery; quality of services provided; can the services be delivered to metropolitan areas, etc., which may come in the mind of potential customers. Second is market itself, third issue pertains to the operational aspect - completing task on time and making it profitable. Just do it! Take some initial work and deliver the work on time with quality. One can always deliver the work from town, but the objective is to deliver the work from village. Unfortunately there are people who set up BPOs in small towns and call them Rural BPOs. The best way to change the market’s mindset is to go set up a BPO in a village and show the clients that we can deliver quality work on time even from villages. How can rural BPOs become sustainable and scalable? Rural BPOs can become sustainable as long as they are profitable. In every business model, if expenses are much less than revenue, then the business is sustainable. If the cost is less than revenue, BPOs are sustainable. Vis-à-vis the current economic crisis, what role do you visualise of the rural BPO initiative for the society in general? In general, rural people will still get employed and rural wealth will be generated. What is of utmost importance is that people will not migrate from villages to urban areas in search of job. So it is good for society as a whole also. Do you think knowledge of English is a pre-requisite for working in the rural BPOs? To some extent, yes, English is the pre-requisite language, but as it has become an economic incentive, more and more people will want to learn the language on their own. Until that happens, there will be a need to train people. Is there a possibility of a non-English BPO/KPO being operationalised and becoming sustainable in the current milieu? I think, voice BPO may not work as their work is based around English. But when we talk about non-voice BPOs, you require minimal English knowledge. So, there is a pretty good market of non-voice BPOs.
7
INTERVIEW : A RAJAN, GROUP HEAD-OPERATIONS, HDFC BANK, INDIA
HDFC Bank’s Rural BPO initiative
www.hdfcbank.com
A Rajan is the Group Head Operations of HDFC Bank, India. In his position, Rajan leads a team of senior Operations Heads who provide specialized operational support to various business divisions of the Bank like Corporate Banking, Retail Banking, Treasury, DP & Custodial Business, Credit Card Division, Capital Markets, Commodity Finance, Financial Institutions Group, etc. In an interview with Ritu Srivastava, i4d Team member, he shares his views on HDFC Bank’s initiatives in establishing rural BPOs and future of rural BPOs in India and other developing countries
What prompted HDFC Bank’s foray into the Rural BPO sector? Where was the first rural BPO launched by HDFC Bank? HDFC Bank has been working on hi-tech processing from the time of its inception, with large central processing units at Mumbai and Chennai. During one of my visits to some interior parts of India, I came across a group of youngsters who had put together a small BPO which employed a handful of rural youths working in a dedicated manner. That actually fired a thought in me as to
8
how some of our Bank’s processes can be diverted to support such initiatives and contribute to rural employment opportunities. Later on, I also had a meeting at Hyderabad with an organisation called Employment Generation and Marketing Mission (EGMM), a division of the Department of Rural Development, Government of Andhra Pradesh, having similar objectives. EGMM works towards identifying deserving rural based youngsters from the lowermost economic strata in the society and preparing them with adequate training to take up employment in various organisations. i4d | January 2009
With the support of EGMM, we started a pilot BPO project at a place called Nellore in Andhra Pradesh, where daughters and sons of farmers, labourers, carpenters, weavers, etc. from nearby villages were employed. We provided them with training facilities to work on computers to capture customer data from scanned images of application forms and bring back the data files to our central servers at Mumbai to open the customer accounts. Since scanned images were being sent to Nellore over broadband connectivity and brought back to the central server in the form of encrypted data files, we could manage the entire activity without any loss of turnaround time for the customers of the bank and without compromising on data safety. Is it a strategy to bring about a more HDFC Bank’s rural BPO at Trupati cost-effective system of servicing your customers? Honestly, I did not think about the cost-effectiveness at the time nearly 600 seats with facilities for recruitment, training, among of starting this project since it was started more as a Corporate other facilities. The reason for locating the BPO at Nellore and Social Responsibility (CSR) activity to do something to provide Tirupati was mainly due the excellent support and co-operation employment opportunities for the rural youth. that we got from EGMM, Andhra Pradesh in identifying and The cost aspect was considered to the extent that the Bank preparing deserving rural youths from the nearby villages for our should not be spending more than what it was incurring for selection process of tests and interviews. I will be happy to replicate similar activities in the metro cities. This was important, since it this model in other parts of India if I can get similar support is pointless to start an initiative unless it is economically viable from those state governments. More significantly, while it may be and self sustaining in the long run. Since the BPO is located at comparatively easier to set up a rural BPO, the real challenge is in a remote location to provide job opportunities closer to the rural sustaining such initiatives with a steady flow of viable processing areas, the bank incurs a high cost on leasing appropriate bandwidth business. While banks can support it to a certain extent, I am connectivity. However, this connectivity cost is likely to be offset hoping that this model will inspire other organisations in the by the fact that infrastructural cost like rentals and wage bills are country to build similar rural BPOs across the country. much lower there, compared to that of metro cities like Mumbai, Chennai etc. Moreover, at such remote locations, attrition levels Could you please define what kind of business model is HDFC are much lower, since these youngsters also manage to continue Bank using? Is it tough to migrate work from urban BPOs to support their family business after working for 7 to 8 hours in to rural BPOs? the BPO, providing a steady income to their family. This benefit HDFC Bank is using a sustainable and economically viable model is not available to them if they work in a far away city. – it means that the work which is getting migrated to the rural areas will be delivered at a cheaper cost and over a period of time, Does HDFC Bank provide training to the prospective the quality of the work will be at least equal to, if not better than employees of its BPO? similar output from the urban cities. Yes, we do. We provide them with very extensive training in Each employee in the rural BPO will work with realistic handling a computer keyboard, using software applications targets in terms of productivity and quality of output and in understanding basic banking products. It takes them with a dashboard that monitors and congratulates the better approximately six months to become really productive in their performers and motivates the weaker ones to improve work areas. themselves. Currently the BPO is located in Nellore and Tirupati. Do you have any plans of expanding your Rural BPO operation to other parts of India? Nellore was the pilot launch of rural BPO to test the concept. However, the BPO at Tirupati is a full fledged one, providing for
10
What is the size of your BPO? What kind of technology barriers did you face while establishing the rural BPO and how did HDFC Bank overcome the challenges? The Tirupati BPO accommodates 600 seats in a single shift. It can be scaled up to employ 1800 staff in three shifts as and i4d | January 2009
when the business volumes justifies the growth. There are several technology challenges in setting up a BPO at a remote location from the cities: 1. It is difficult to persuade the software vendors and the maintenance engineers to provide ongoing service and support in remote places like Nellore and Tirupati. 2. Connectivity and Internet access – while BSNL is our main service provider, for redundancy support, there is a strong need for an alternate service provider. 3. Transport and installation of hardware from urban places to remote locations is tedious and expensive. 4. Steady electricity supply is a concern forcing us to rely on gensets which are more expensive. What kinds of services are currently being provided by your BPO? Is it only servicing HDFC Bank? Do you have plans to offer your services to other companies in future? We provide back office activities like data capturing, part of retail loan processing, credit card application processing etc which are not customer interactive in nature. Currently, this BPO is only servicing the needs of HDFC Bank.
However, we can easily scale up this BPO to meet the requirements of other service sectors like insurance, mutual funds, utility companies etc. Do you think that Rural BPOs, in general, are a sustainable business model? I am not only convinced that Rural BPO is a sustainable business model, but also firmly believe that this is the best alternate for developing the rural economy of our nation. It provides a steady source of alternate income for the population of the rural areas who are otherwise largely dependant on the vagaries of monsoon and the climate for their survival. If this model inspires other organisations to set up similar Rural BPOs, we will be seeing a mini revolution in the country generating thousands of jobs in rural areas and dissuading the young job seekers from rushing into the cities which are already groaning under overburdened infrastructural issues. This will also fire the rural economy into an explosive growth mode by making available disposable income in their hands, in addition to their agricultural and other cottage income typical to the interior areas of the country.
A look at HDFC Bank’s rural BPO HDFC Bank, recently launched its first rural BPO in Tirupati. This BPO, with a seating capacity of around 600, was set up following the successful pilot launched at Nellore by the bank earlier. This BPO will hire about 1800 rural youth over the course of next one year, to work in 3 shifts a day. This launch of HDFC Bank’s rural BPO assumes significance as experts predict that by 2015, Indians under 20 will make up 55% of the population. With roughly 70% of India’s population residing in rural India, it is imperative that they are gainfully employed without which, an impending demographic disaster looms large in the horizon. Therefore, as a good corporate citizen, who’s philosophy has been to give back to the society it operates in, HDFC bank believes that initiatives such as the rural BPO have the potential to lay the foundation to change the face of rural India, especially in addressing its unemployment problem and countering distress migration to urban areas. The Bank believes that this, in turn, will also improve the socio-economic factors at rural level and contribute towards
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sustained development. The confidence to set up a fully fledged BPO facility in a rural area came from the encouraging response from the pilot in Nellore, where the bank was impressed with the dedication, enthusiasm and commitment with which the local youth took up the challenge. These youth coming from the lowermost economic strata and based in the nearby villages, soon proved that they could match and outperform their city brethren in coming up the learning curve. They achieved a status of almost zero error in a remarkably short period and caught up with the prescribed turnaround time very quickly. The HDFC Bank Rural BPO is backed by the Employment Generation and Marketing Mission (EGMM) of the Department of Rural Development, Andhra Pradesh, who has been of tremendous support in tracking and identifying deserving boys and girls from the rural areas through a network of committed volunteers and providing them with basic training in working in an office environment. The Bank will provide equal job opportunities to both
men and women in its BPO to ensure that there is an all round development among the rural population. HDFC Bank will identify several such activities which can be safely outsourced to the Rural BPO, without any risk exposure to the Bank and its customers, using high-end imaging technology and proven workflows. HDFC Bank is convinced that the project is economically viable and will provide a secure career for the employees of the rural BPO. The bank feels that the higher cost of data transmission through dedicated and secure leased lines will get offset by the anticipated almost zero attrition work environment as the rural youth are highly self- motivated to excel, stemming from their desire to raise the standard of living of their families from an erratic rain-fed agricultural income to a steady monthly salary income. HDFC Bank is quite confident of this business model and believes it is scalable and replicable in other parts of rural India. A Rajan Group Head - Operations HDFC Bank, India
i4d | January 2009
RURAL BPOS
IN
SRI LANKA
Isuru: The face of BPO business in Sri Lanka An inspiring account of rural BPOs and the young people behind them from the troubled island nation of Sri Lanka who chose the path less travelled When I first met Isuru Seneviratne in late 90s (in cyberspace) he was a twelve year old student. Life was not always sympathetic to this eldest of a family of three. Flickr still has a photo showing young Isuru and his sister assisting their parents in poultry. His father was a farmer – then the sole breadwinner of the family. Most farmers do not have a fixed income. Isuru’s father, on an average, made less than USD 75 per month, and nothing in some months. Growing up in a village surrounded by thick jungle, 40 km to the nearest town, and never having seen even a telephone, it looked like Isuru had his fate seaked. A way to not follow his parents’ footsteps to agriculture was joining the security forces. There is a thirty year old ongoing war in Sri Lanka and most village boys find the security forces an attractive career option. Isuru chose neither of the options. Ten years later, Isuru leads the first rural BPO in the island. It has eleven seats and is expanding fast. The barrier to expansion is the difficulty in finding staff and training and not the lack of business. Today, Isuru and his sister together earn a fixed monthly income of USD 300. Not comparable with the salaries of the urban call centre agents, but with low costs of living involved, it is far more than it sounds. In addition to supporting his younger brother’s education, Isuru has also bought a motorcycle, a dream his father could never fulfill. At 22 years, he is also the bread winner of the family. Isuru’s story cannot be detached from that of OnTime Technologies, the BPO he leads. It starts with Kapila Gunawardena from FARO (Foundation for Advancing Rural Opportunities) visiting the village of Mahavilachchiya several years ago
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a well known ISP provided another virtual private network connection free of charge. OnTime started business with two operators (Nirosh and Isuru) for a job assigned by John Keells Holdings one of the largest conglomerates in Sri Lanka. Dialog Telekom, the largest mobile operator was the next client. Isuru is not alone in the game. Isuru and his team OnTime Technologies, Mahavilachchiya Ja y a n t h a W i c k r a m a r a t n e o f Panamura Nenasala, Embilipitita to observe students having completed (a telecentre setup under the World education from Horizon Lanka Academy, Bank funded e-Sri Lanka program) their village IT training centre, another provides e-commerce services using first in Sri Lanka. The students needed the e-Bay model through the site assistance in finding suitable jobs after http://www.ecseva.lk. Advertisements placed completing their training. by service providers are made available to FARO’s idea was to setup a BPO the large base of the site’s users. The website company in Mahavilachchiya – in the also has space where users can request for middle of a jungle. Nirosh Ranathunga bids to complete a job that they may have. and Isuru Seneviratha were selected The job is offered to a bidder through a from the village to communicate with competitive bidding process. Gunawardena, who arranged a meeting Selvaratnam Sri Kanthan of Koslanda for these two young men with Michael Nenasala too runs a rural BPO service for Chertok from Digital Divide Data, a local and international clients. Partnered BPO company based in Laos. They were with NLingua Services of New Delhi, a accompanied by Chandima Gunawardana voice transcription and translation service, and Sumana Liyanage of FARO. After the his Nenasala employs Koslanda residents meeting FARO decided to train Nirosh and to translate and transcribe audio files from Isuru at Digital Divide Date in Vientiane, Tamil or Sinhala into English, or vice versa. Laos and Datamation Group in Delhi, Web Design is another service he offers. India. ICT Agency, the apex body for ICTs This does not mean everything runs in Sri Lanka formed under the World Band perfectly. There are so many issues to funded e-Sri Lanka program, covered the be addressed. (For example Isuru can travel and accommodation costs of the two do a better job with a link of higher for the entire period of three months. capacity than his present 256 kbps one) OnTime was formed in early 2007. Still these courageous and innovative Nirosh and Isuru designed a business plan young men and women bring us hope in with the guidance of FARO. Horizon agreed difficult times. Chanuka Wattegama, chanuka@gmail.com to provide computers, their broadband LIRNEasia, Colombo, Sri Lanka connectivity and office space. LankaCom, i4d | January 2009
DESICREW’S RURAL BPO, CHENNAI, INDIA
Tracking DesiCrew’s rural BPO: 2 years on www.desicrew.in
DesiCrew liaises with urban clients and takes complete responsibility for the outsourcing and timely delivery of the projects undertaken, and ensures that quality standards are met
Saloni Malhotra Co-Founder DesiCrew Solutions saloni@desicrew.in
January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
In my previous article in the July 2007 issue of i4d (http://www. i4donline.net/July07/content. asp), I asked readers to think of five words that came to their mind when they heard the word rural and 5 words when thought BPO. The picture painted by both is such a contrast. Can you imagine a quality conscious, punctual office in a rural setting? Can you imagine 99 percent uptime of infrastructure like electricity and Internet connectivity even at the Taluk level1? DesiCrew’s challenge was to convince the customer that this was possible and educate its employees that until these pictures became reality the customer would not trust us with their work. And as DesiCrew turns 2, we are all proud to say that we are close to 99% infrastructure uptime at our centres with a team that is focused on customer service. In 2005, when we started our research on the rural BPO model, most customers politely showed us the door, in 2007 when we started DesiCrew, a few (and I can count
them on one hand) forward thinking companies extended pilots cautiously. As we enter 2009 and everyone is looking at reducing costs, there are more than a dozen competitors and a lot of talk about the concept at NASSCOM forums. This is one of the key achievements – an acknowledgment from the industry. DesiCrew’s model is to set up a 25-seat office in a small town or a rural area and employ 50 resources from this set-up. Each office has adequate power back-up and connectivity to ensure 99% uptime. The employees resources are graduates with functional (reading and writing) knowledge of English. According to NASSCOM, the BPO industry in India is expected to face a shortfall of 262,000 professionals by the year 2012, a shortfall that can be addressed by the huge number of rural youth who, with, little training can work just as well as the urban youth. A BPO is as good as the people in it and going by the recent accolades by our customers, we can safely say DesiCrew has some of the best people in the industry – passionate, motivated and extremely hard working. Building DesiCrew to a strength of 100 fulltime employees has been a journey full of learnings and it was only possible because of the truly motivated people who joined in to make the rural BPO dream a reality. Some of our key learnings are no different than any other start-up – customer focus is the most important skill, compromise on infrastructure
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will amount to compromise on quality of service and people are the most important asset. Our biggest learning, however, was that the customer does not care where the work gets done. And some projects cannot be done without some support work in some large city. Thus, we evolved a hybrid model to accommodate such projects. The concept of a rural BPO is a means to an end, the end being – cost effectiveness, a larger talent pool and lower attrition rates. DesiCrew offers multiple services from the plain vanilla digitisation and data entry to more complex services in product testing, transcription and translation. With over 2.1 million pages of digitised data, DesiCrew has now invested in building a Virtual Data Factory for any digitisation effort. The capacity of the Virtual Data Factory will start with 1000 man-hours a day and quickly grow to 10,000 man-hours per day. The same has
been built based on our experience working for an e-Governance project for which we employed over 1500 people on a temporary basis. Apart from the Virtual Data Factory, DesiCrew has invested in other technology products to ensure that customer concerns on security, internal requirements on training and general functioning of the organisation are addressed. DesiCrew’s growth is also fueled by that fact that our customers are the top companies in their field of work. A BSE-listed insurance company and two of the top web property in all major global markets, have set the benchmarks for us and helped us build best practices to execute the processes we work on. The support from these key customers has accelerated our learning process and helped us establish a high standard of customer focus. In closing, I would like share a phrase coined by one of our founding team members – “They came to us for the cost, stayed for the quality, will work with us for the value addition”
Author’s Profile Saloni Malhotra, an engineer from the University of Pune, is the Co-Founder of Desicrew. DesiCrew links urban clients with a rural workforce through the Internet kiosk network. 1. Taluk: Sub-division of a district in some South Asian Countries.
Tata Group expands its footprint in the rural BPO sector Tata Chemicals Society for Rural Development (TCSRD), the community development arm of Tata Chemicals Limited (TCL), launched its second Rural BPO on 8th October, 2008. The call centre, inaugurated by R Gopalakrishnan, Vice Chairman TCL and Executive Director, Tata Sons, is the first Rural BPO in Uttar Pradesh at Babrala in the Badaun district, the community initiative is targeted at the youth of rural India. Situated close the to Tata Chemicals plant, ‘Uday’ is a 125seat call centre that aims to provide alternative employment to 123 call agents who have been selected and hired from Babrala and adjoining villages be further scaled up to 200 agents by the end of the current fiscal year. Uday, will function as a back office logistic support for Tata Indicom (the Tata Group’s CDMA mobile telephone service) customers in Uttar Pradesh. Uday Foundation established its first Rural BPO facility in Gujarat at the Mithapur plant of TCL. The foundation was established in 2007-08 to promote, undertake and assist activities that create employment for rural masses and promotes growth in rural economy. Uday Foundation will be responsible for identification and selection of human capital and will also impart training to the
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youth which includes enhancing of skill sets as prescribed by the statutory requirements of the BPO industry. Additionally, TCSRD will undertake the responsibility of facilitating capacity upgradation, integration and delivery for the business process outsourced by Tata Teleservices. Tata Chemicals Society for Rural Development was set up by TCL in 1980 to promote its social objectives for the communities in and around Mithapur, where its facility is located. This service was further extended to the communities in and around its Babrala and Haldia facilities. The Society works to protect and nurture the rural populations in and around TCL’s facilities, and helps people achieve self-sufficiency in natural resource management, livelihood support and the building of health and education infrastructure. Taking into account the different geographical spread of the three regions and their individual subcultures, different agricultural, economic and development programmes have been implemented in these regions. Programs undertaken by the society include Land reclamation, Integrated Watershed development, Integrated Agriculture growth program and pond management to name a few. Source: Tata Chemicals Ltd. i4d | January 2009
INTERVIEW: JERRY RAO, CHAIRMAN, NASSCOM FOUNDATION, INDIA
NASSCOM’s Corporate Social Responsibility
www.nasscomfoundation.org
What are the main aims of the NASSCOM Foundation? The NASSCOM Foundation, focuses on two key areas. One, how do the NASSCOM members themselves benefit from the foundation, and two, how do we impact the society at large outside our foundation. In this perspective, I could say that we have two main motives. The first, is a very selfish one where we look at our members’ benefits, looking at ways to increase the usage of computers etc, and the other, is a broader aspect which is to be there at the forefront and play an extremely important role that translates to enhancing lives of the lessprivileged people. Ultimately, by expanding the eco-system of IT in India. Already our reach is exceeding beyond our grasp. The digital divide is an issue. But I think it is only a sub-theme. The main issue is - can we impact the lives of our citizens the way its happening in other parts of the world? That is the main issue here and that is what we are ultimately looking at. What is the change that NASSCOM is looking at? India is a developing country, but we are going up the ladder. We see the opportunities expanding, the average spending increasing and India essentially getting richer. There is that change that India is headed towards and NASSCOM will be ready by then.
Jaithirth (Jerry) Rao Chairman NASSCOM Foundation, India
Jerry Rao talks about how NASSCOM Foundation promotes linkages between NGOs and the IT industry and the role both can play in the nation’s development January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
What’s the role of NASSCOM members in the aspect of CSR? We are mainly engaged in the linkage programme. Linkages between NGOs that are doing great work and the organisations that can invest in the goal of development. A small state in the USA spends more than a couple of Indian states put together. Today, the same trend is being witnessed in India where the IT sector is spending more on development to ensure that awareness increases, and that’s how I hope to see it expanding. How are the participants of the ‘NASSCOM Foundation’s National Consultation 2008’ linked to your organisation? The participants were telecentre practitioners from different states of India. They were here to discuss and find solutions to various problems. And the main problem is of infrastructure, which includes power supply, bandwidth, connectivity etc. Technology is not the solution to all problems. Basic issues need to be resolved first. I think that ICTs can help when you have reached a certain level of development. This is just
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a platform for people with similar issues and concerns to come together and discuss. In India, do you see yourself playing a larger role? Do you see India as a potential resource? Yes. Certainly. All the statistics of our work done in member countries have proved what we aimed to achieve and India is certainly a resource that holds immense potential. As you said, a state in the USA spends more than many states put together in India. Could you elaborate on that in the light of ICTs? Yes. People have to realise that using ICTs creates a lot of advantages. For instance, it helps in improving citizen’s lives, policing, taxation, healthcare etc. That realisation is very important. Its an increase in the use of ICTs that sees the change. The Supreme Court of India has used IT in a major way, the Election Commission is doing an excellent job of it too. Its one of the best in the world where you have access to it (ICT tools) without electricity in the remotest of areas. Different Government agencies are slowly realising it’s potential and hence I expect a lot of growth in a big way. What is the situation like in the face of the ongoing economic recession? We are having a lot of discussions with the Central and State Governments. So, you could see in the next level an explosion in the usage of IT. As long as good business and service is there, its alright. Since, that’s what matters.
What’s the thought behind the creation of NASSCOM Foundation? What’s the big picture 5 years from now? We have three audiences, that we cater to. First, the NASSCOM members themselves. They have to learn how to monitor, which are the NGOs to be selected, which are the ones that need help in volunteering etc. The second audience is the NGO. We aim to help them by making them connect with us and to enable them to use their ICT skills. And our third audience is the Government, where we demonstrate the fact to the Government that NASSCOM Foundation is going to be a major catalyst for the overall development of the nation. At present what else is in the focus area of NASSCOM? We have set up a portal and have knowledge centers in several areas. Along with this we are also providing training to the NGOs. Thus, if you look at it at a broader sense, we are into a variety of service areas, working with different types of institutions, with the same underlying theme but with different outcomes. Do you see a gap or a vacuum in India’s voluntary service sector? No. Not at all. In fact, I think that India has a vigorous voluntary service sector. The problem of our country is poverty. We have to acknowledge that. Our country is poor and, honestly, computer education can’t help in solving the basic issue of malnutrition. The basic infrastructure is poor. But having said that, I see the voluntary sector is quite active and doing a good job.
NASSCOM assesses Indian BPO workforce NASSCOM, the chamber of commerce and the ‘voice’ of the Indian IT software and services industry launched the pilot of its NASSCOM Assessment of Competence (NAC) programme in August 2007. The programme is aimed at the potential employees of the booming BPO industry and is an industry standard assessment and certification programme that aims to ensure the transformation of a ‘trainable’ workforce into an ‘employable workforce’. The programme tests the aptitude of a candidate on different skill sets and includes listening and keyboard skills, verbal ability, spoken English, comprehension and writing ability, office software usage, numerical and analytical skills and concentration and accuracy. With the participation of Hewitt Associates, around 22 key ITES-BPO companies, state governments, educational institutions and 6,000 graduates, the pilot was run in 3 cities (Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bangalore) which started on August 20, 2005. After the successful implementation of the Pilot, NAC is currently being rolled out in partnership with multiple states in India.
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The National roll-out of NAC started from the state of Rajasthan and the first administration under NAC which took place in Jaipur and Ajmer on 18th November 2006 saw over 2,500 candidates being tested on that day. A job fair was organised at Jaipur between 31st March - 1st April 2007 for the candidates who took the NAC test. Eleven of the top ITESBPO companies participated in the job fair and some of the candidates also got on-the-spot offers by these companies. The Government of Mizoram also conducted the NAC test in November 2007. The Government of Gujarat organised the second round of NAC on 28th December 2008 at Ahmedabad, Baroda, Adipur and Gandhidham. Similarly, the Government of Orissa is also scheduling its first NAC test on 10-11 January 2009 which will be conducted simultaneously in Bhubaneshwar, Rourkela, Balasore, Cuttack, Berhampur, Sambalpur and Koraput. Over the period of one year, NAC is expected to spread to 25-30 Indian cities. More information about the NAC is available at http://nac.nasscom.in/
i4d | January 2009
NEMMADI, KARNATAKA, INDIA
What makes Nemmadi sustainable? This article seeks to explore the various ways in which a telecentre or a rural kiosk can, with the introduction of innovative services such as education services and BPO services, stand as a role model for other ICT initiatives. The accompanying box item highlights the lessons to be learnt from the Nemmadi experience
Robert Schware Managing Director Global Learning Portal rschware@aed.org
January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
Introduction Reaching the twin goals of commercial profitability and economic empowerment is complex in rural settings. Here it costs more to extend access to public infrastructure (roads, telecom, power) and to social services (health, education, government services) for low-density population distributed over sometimes difficult terrain than it does to high-density urban area dwellers. Lower income levels also mean service providers must accept lower average revenue per user. There are few examples of village kiosks or telecentres working well in terms of financial selfsufficiency and economic impact on citizens in rural areas of South Asia. Competing models of telecentres, rural access points, and/or kiosks are already employed in India in states with quite distinct political economies, namely Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka, among others. Recent studies have looked closely at the kiosks currently functioning in the former two states1. The rural business kiosk project, known as ‘Nemmadi’ in Karnataka is the focus of this article. It is worth investigating for two reasons: (i) it is providing financially viable rural kiosks that are realising ‘development’ benefits in terms of delivering government-to-citizen services (G2C) and business-to-citizen services (B2C), and (ii) Nemmadi is increasing employability prospects through education and rural Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services. Introduced in 2004, it is too early for a comprehensive impact analysis of the Nemmadi model, yet early indications are that this public private partnership may distinguish itself in bringing network infrastructure, services and job opportunities to ‘the base of the pyramid’2. This article is based on a study conducted over a period of one year involving 800
rural kiosks across Karnataka state. All of the kiosks that are part of this study are run for profit. A ‘rural kiosk’ is defined as a community-based centre with one or more computer(s), operating and managing ICT-enabled services to empower rural citizens and provide them direct access to government services.
Background The concept of delivery of citizen services in rural Karnataka started in a town called Maddur a few years prior to Nemmadi. ‘Nemmadi’ meaning ‘peace of mind’ in Kannada language, was coined by the Government of Karnataka. By February 2007, a network of Rural Business Centres (RBCs) were operational with digital services provided across 177 talukas (small towns) affecting over 30, 000 villages. The ‘roll-out’ period of the 800 RBCs officially took four months. The network of kiosks covers an area of 191,791 sq. kilometers, equal roughly to the U.S. state of South Dakota, or to Senegal. T h e K a r n a t a k a g o v e r n m e n t ’s Millennium IT policy, Mahithi, says the aim of Nemmadi is to ensure ‘that IT-enabled government services should be accessible to the common man in his village, through efficient, transparent, reliable and affordable means3.’ It began with the computerisation of 20 million rural land records across the state. This so-called ‘Bhoomi’ project changed the lives of approximately 7 million farmers by giving them easy access to their Record
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of Rights, Tenancy, and Crop Inspection (RTC), land records, eliminating the village accountants who created, modified, and supervised handwritten manual records. The project was a significant step in bringing transparency to the registration of land records, thus reducing an estimated USD 18.64 million in bribes annually, which in turn helped people gain access to subsidies and formalised credit4. RBCs have been key to the decentralisation of the Bhoomi programme. Rural citizens can obtain a copy of their RTC, which establishes land ownership and is used by the owner variously as collateral in legal cases, to obtain agricultural loans, and to ascertain property valuation for interested buyers of the land. Previously, villagers had to travel to a distant taluka office, waiting sometimes weeks, and paying bribes to bureaucratic gatekeepers. Digitising records cost an estimated US$2 million and another estimated US$3.2 million was spent to provide infrastructure at all taluka offices5. While this was going on, Comat Technologies Ltd. completed a pilot for the Karnataka state government of a comprehensive citizen database in Mandya district. First of its kind at the state level, it helped government realise the advantages of electronic access to a variety of applications in a society that relies largely on paper documents for caste certificates, income certificates, land title deeds and ration cards. Comat also began to pilot the RBC concept in Anekal Taluka, providing local citizens with a variety of public and private services, including utility payments, access to government records, and education programmes.
The organisational model The Karnataka government facilitates the Nemmadi project as part of a build-own-operate (BOO) model. The role of the public sector is limited to providing data and strictly enforcing a competitively bid, consortium-based service level agreement (SLA) that has been established between the state government and the three Indian private sector companies - Comat Technologies, 3i Infotech, and n-Logue Communication Ltd. The SLA specifies daily hours of operation, maximum wait time for services, and other metrics.
The business model The business model for Nemmadi is based on a combination of support for socioeconomic development and of commercial competence in quantitative, functional, and organisational scaling up of multiple services6. One of the lessons of Nemmadi is that the one without the others is not sustainable. A company or consortium that has strong values - e.g., to provide universal access or e-Literacy and e-Governance services for people in rural areas - but is badly run, without proper attention to translating values into profits, will plainly not do well. A combination of a firm commitment to providing multiservices and strong commercial competence gives a good chance of success. With a common infrastructure across these services, a RBC ecosystem develops whereby various stakeholders are working toward common goals and building on their service delivery strengths; this is the organisational scaling up. For example, because interactive education uses a significant amount of expensive satellite bandwidth, interactive education (VSAT-based)
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must be combined with computer-based education (non- VSATbased). What makes Nemmadi different from most models that currently exist is that its services are based on transactions per use, which allows Comat to build a business based on volume rather than the high up-front costs that other models have difficulties supporting. To illustrate: 20 million land records divided by 167 taluka offices are 120,000 records per office. Priced at INR 15 (USD 0.37) per RTC certificate, this averages INR 1,800,000 (USD 44,830) per office in revenues. This is sufficient over time to cover operating costs, provide a modest return to state revenues, ensure good service levels and result in a profit-making proposition for Comat.For other private services, such as ticketing services and topping up pre-paid mobile phones, the revenue model includes origination fee and transaction costs.
Operational challenges Comat has developed a technology platform to both deliver diverse services and manage the increase in the number of services and number of kiosks; it calls it a Government Services Infrastructure (GSI). This application allows for remote management of these centres, remote live training using the satellite channel, and cash management. It also allows a new service delivery module to be built without recreating the basic routines and procedures needed to enable the module to communicate, manage and deliver the demands of the overall business model. Kiosk operators are employees hired and trained by Comat. They are not independent entrepreneurs. This is an important and significant distinction from other individually-led entrepreneur kiosk models, such as Akshaya, Rural e-Seva, Rural Service Delivery Points, the Rajiv Internet Village Centres and Drishtee. In these models entrepreneurs come to operate telecentres similar to cyber cafes, providing entertainment for villagers to use computers, to watch movies or listen to music, without a core of essential public and private service offerings, and consequently haphazard returns on investment. As if to underscore this, interviews with 57 G2C Services B2C Services Record of Rights, e-Commerce including railway and bus Tenancy and Crop tickets, e-top-up for mobile phones1 Inspection (RTC) Rural Digital Services, including caste & income certificates, birth/ death certificates, residence certificate, old age pension, widow certificate, etc.
Education including coaching services for Common Entrance Test (CET) admissions to engineering and medical colleges, Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) training (currently for 70+ students at 12 centers), and medical transcription and English language training being planned, along with digital literacy and other vocational and employability courses. Financial services are being planned for insurance premium collections and using the RBC network to disburse payments and remittances. i4d | January 2009
entrepreneurs conducted in 2006 by Kuriyan, Ray and Toyama8 found that few were able to keep afloat the business of the kiosk, while having to subsidise the poorest users of basic education courses and other business services. Ultimately, a ‘developmentthrough-entrepreneurship’ model risks serving two masters poorly, commercial profitability and social development. Approximately two-thirds of the 800 Nemmadi kiosk operators are male and one-third female. Candidates are required to have basic IT skills, and those with a diploma in computer science are ranked higher. These operators now seem to be more employable because they have gained on-the-job ICT operations, and because they have developed ‘soft’ skills such as handling customers, and handling communication about the RBC with the villagers.
Take-aways and lessons learned The programme has resulted in eight lessons beinglearned. Location: The Rural Business Centres are located with convenience in mind. RBCs are close to government panchayat offices, typically within a half-kilometer distance from the panchayat office or government primary school. Kiosks need to be located in a commercial centre so as to be accessible to all citizens with ease. It is one clear early lesson of RBC experience that the number of students coming to RBC for computer training is significantly higher if the kiosk is nearby. Appreciate end users in innovation: The framework upon which new service delivery modules can be built provides opportunities to make customers in identifying new services, and rectifying issues to better respond to their realities. Shift attention to recruitment: The right kind of employees can determine the success of the kiosks, since the kiosk operator plays a direct role in the work of the centres, and provides a window of opportunity for new ideas and innovations in services relevant to customers. Extensive training is then needed for all the operators, back-office staff, and department officials to gain a solid understanding and familiarity with the multi-services. Make cash management a top priority: RBCs must pay close attention to handling cash, ranging from small transactions to large cumulative amounts. Cash must be protected against risk of kiosk operators running away with collections, or, being robbed in transit, mishandling, embezzlement. Cash management needs also to be integrated with software applications, with appropriate logging, reconciliation, tracking, control and audit processes.
January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
Participation and involvement: Accepting and participating in the technology change brought about by the Nemmadi RBCs has required redefining and reinterpreting existing norms and values, and developing commitments to new ones by local governments. When the local gram panchayat joins hands with the new local kiosk, it participates in a range of ways to enhance the basket of services offered at the kiosks, such as providing data for surveys, focus groups, feedback on both implementation progress and proposed options. Get employee incentives right: Comat began with a traditional model of the kiosk operator being just another company person, hiring people at fixed salaries as in traditional corporations. As a result, at first there was an inordinately high degree of absenteeism at RBCs, poor service delivery, and low levels of accountability. It then changed the pay structures to include fixed plus variable wages and attached monetary incentives to each factor. Never lose sight of the commercial imperative: It is, after all, by staying in business and providing products and services people want that firms do most good. Why should this principle of enlightened self-interest not apply to rural areas? The RBCs provide revenue-generating activities that maximise utilization of the infrastructure during off- hours. Amass technology solutions: For difficult-to-manage kiosks spanning large geographical areas, including cash management, remote attendance monitoring and service tracking. RBCs are configured as part of Comat’s cluster of servers throughout the state to ensure load balancing and rapid access to content between groups of RBCs. The cluster architecture minimises downtime at the kiosk due to equipment failure or other emergencies and also during an employee absence.
Where to go from here? There have not yet been any reliable studies on how much RBCs have actually improved the economic livelihood of the communities in which they operate. Certainly, they have spread awareness about the use of IT and the Internet, and Comat has already created nearly 1,600 jobs in RBC workforce, with skills and competencies attractive not only to the employees but to the IT-enabled service industry as well. Approximately 400 of these employees are women emerging from a rural pattern, in which even educated women from rural backgrounds don’t find employment opportunities, unless they travel to cities. From a citizen’s viewpoint, the opportunity cost of at least a day’s labour and productivity is saved by coming to the RBC for services instead of going to the nearest taluka office.
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References
BPO services: The educated manpower available in Indian villages and small towns is an untapped and under utilised resource9. The BPO initiative by Comat in Karnataka is shared with other companies in India such as Datamation Consultants, Lason India, and Satyam Computer, who have headed toward rural areas in part to maintain their productivity10. Comat’s BPO initiative is aimed at complementing the success of its urban and semiurban centres that cater to overseas clients. It offers cost-effective, high-volume data related services from rural Karnataka. The model provides cost-cutting alternatives to urban clients and new sources of income and employment to the villagers, by leveraging Internet technology. Comat has over 40 centres across the state delivering ‘check processing services’ for a leading developer of recognition solutions for the U.S. check processing market. The Comat central team in Bangalore integrates output, manages training of the rural workforce, distributes and monitors work, quality control and client interaction, all remotely. Comat’s BPO initiative is aimed at complementing the success of its urban and semi-urban centres that cater to overseas clients. It offers cost-effective, high-volume data related services from rural Karnataka. Plans are underway to provide medical transcription services from RBCs. The aim is to have all 800 plus RBCs operational.
Conclusion The findings from studying the Nemmadi project in Karnataka may be relevant to programmes and projects that will attempt to provide a set of services to the base of the pyramid through shared-access facilities. The initial focus of most telecentres on employment development and computer skills training based on individual entrepreneurs is not the most effective way to assure that a core set of government-to-citizen (G2C) and additional business-to-citizen (B2C) services are delivered. There are new business models emerging that offer insights into telecentres being able to functionally and quantitatively scaleup in the context of public-private partnerships. As a statewide infrastructure has developed, it is now possible to think about how to use the availability of this network to provide both access to worthwhile services that poor people are willing to pay for and employment opportunities through rural Business Process Outsourcing services.
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1. See Kuriyan, R. Ray, I. and Toyama, K., 2008. Information and Communication Technologies for Development: The Bottom of the Pyramid Model in Practice. The Information Society. Vol 24 (2)1-12; Kuriyan, R. and I. Ray, 2007. Public-Private Partnerships and Information Technologies for Development in India. Proceedings of ICTD2007 Conference. IEEE. Bangalore, India, December 2007; and www.akshaya.net. 2. See Fuchs, R. 2007.Telecentres for development: The next 20 years? Telecentre Magazine. December Vol 1, (1): 6-9, “innovation at the base of the pyramid” discussion. The “bottom of the pyramid (BOP)” phrase first coined in 2002 by Professors C.K Prahalad and A. Hammond in the Harvard Business Review “Serve the world’s poor profitably,” undervalues a huge portion of the world’s rural population, which has shown itself to be inventive and resourceful. See, for instance, the Honey Bee Network in India http://www.sristi.org/honeybee.html and several groups with which Honey Bee Network is affiliated such as www.nifindia.org, sristi.org, gian.org, scai.org.in, and indiainnovates.com, http://nemmadi.karnataka.gov.in 3. “Before Bhoomi, the process of obtaining land use documents took weeks and required farmers to pay between Rs.100 and Rs.2,000 (US$2.50 and US$50) in bribes to officials. Now, manual land records in operationalised taluks are illegal. All the mutations to the land records database are done on the computer to ensure that data is current.” Government of India, National Informatics Center, Bangalore. See also case study by R. Chawla and S. Bhatnagar, Online Delivery of Land Titles to Rural Farmers in Karnataka, in Reducing Poverty, Sustaining Growth.What Works, What Doesn.t, and Why. A Global Exchange for Scaling Up Success Scaling Up Poverty Reduction: A Global Learning Process and Conference Shanghai, May 25-27, 2004. 4. Goswami, K. 2007. Upgrading rural access. Real CIO World. September Vol. 2 (4): 60-65. 5. See this useful framework applied worldwide in Fillip, B. and Foote, D. 2007. Making the Connection: Scaling Telecenters for Development, Academy for Educational Development, Washington, DC. (Available by contacting the author: rschware@aed.org.) 6. Bus ticketing through the Nemmadi telecenters will leverage the power of the Internet and enable Karnataka’s rural citizens to book bus tickets to various destinations all over India. It will eliminate the tedious process of traveling to cities, standing in long queues or finding a travel agent to book tickets. 7. Kuriyan, R. Toyama, K, and Ray, I. 2006. Integrating social development and functional sustainability: The challenges of rural computer kiosks in Kerala. Presented at International Center for Training and Development Conference, May 25-26. 8. World Bank 2006. 2007 World Development Report: The next generation, Washington D.C., World Bank. 9. Sharma, C. 2005. Employment generation for India’s disadvantaged and marginalized in partnership with civil society organizations, presented at the Indian IT Forum, Singapore, September 27.
i4d | January 2009
INTERVIEW : PALLAVI VERMA, ASSISTANT MANAGER-RURAL BPO, DRISHTEE
Setting sights on rural development through BPOs www.drishtee.com
Pallavi Verma Assistant Manager-Rural BPO, Drishtee
pallavi.v@drishtee.in
What prompted Drishtee to start the rural BPO initiative? Drishtee tries and develops services which are required by the local population. Two years ago, Drishtee started delivering education programmes to youth and slowly the organisation realised that probably education will make little sense without providing jobs. Youth were migrating from rural areas to urban cities in search of job because there were little employment opportunities in villages. They usually get a job which is below their skill set. Therefore, Drishtee did an impact assessment study and we figured out that we need employment opportunities in the village itself to retain educated youth and to foster reverse migration from cities to village, so that both rural and urban economy prosper at an equal ratio. In how many villages are Drishtee’s rural BPOs operational? And where are your centres located? Drishtee’s centres are located in three places where we are operationalising the rural BPO concept – Jind in Panipat district of Haryana, Golaghat in Assam and Saurath in Madhubani district of Bihar, which also serves as quality hub. Therefore, we have a oneseater BPO in Panipat and Golaghat each and a ten-seater BPO January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
Pallavi Verma, joined the Rural BPO team of Drishtee as Assistant Manager, Operations in early 2008. Soon she started to take greater responsibilities within the vertical and now she heads the vertical with a new vision to take the project forward. Pallavi is constantly inspired and excited by the opportunities that Rural BPOs are able to provide to the unemployed rural populace. In an exclusive interview with Ritu Srivastava, Senior Research Associate with i4d magazine, she shares her views on growth and scope of rural BPOs in India
in Madhubani. We work through a decentralised network - the organisation works like a kiosk and the BPO service is one of the services provided through the kiosk. In addition to these, we have 30 more kiosks, which also provide BPO services, when required. These kiosks are operated and managed by entrepreneurs. As a rural BPO, how is Drishtee’s model different from others in the field? Drishtee works as a decentralised network with presence in 12 states: Assam, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Chattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and North Eastern states like Meghalaya and Mizoram. Drishtee follows the decentralised hub and spoke model. To explain this model further, the kiosks throughout Drishtee’s network, who will provide the actual services go through the regional assimilation quality centre, which is the first level of quality check and then the completed assignment comes to the main quality centre, which assimilates all the work and converts it into the format required and dispatches it to the client. Basically, there are three layers and the organisation is in the middle. Currently, Drishtee has been able to form two layers and the third layer will come up as the organisation scales up. The
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three layers are: local centre, regional centre and the centralised location quality centre. All the business development and client partnership operations are managed by the head-office. What kind of services does Drishtee rural BPO offer and who are the primary clients? Currently, we have two types of services; digitisation services (which include converting documents to .pdf format, book digitisation, typing, scanning, data entry i.e. conversion of hard copy into soft copy) and voice based services – inbound and outbound calling operations (in which we have tele-sales, tele-marketing, customer care centres, feedback collection centres, etc). We have in-house client like Drishtee and also external clients: • Government of Bihar - We have recently set up a call centre for sugarcane farmers • Drishtee has call centres for micro-finance education loan for the Governments of Assam and Haryana • The centres have also worked with different state Governments for online data entry, data entry of affidavits, etc. during the elections. When you talk about outbound services, is knowledge of English essential or do you provide local language solutions too? Yes, we do provide local language solutions. Being a rural BPO, we have an edge over others on that front. At a time when clients like Airtel are tapping into the rural market, there is a need of customer care associates who can provide services in local languages. We have that expertise. A regional call centre as part of a rural BPO translates into services in regional language. What are the key elements needed to establish a rural BPO? Could you please explain in terms of the technical and operational perspectives? From the technical perspective, there is a need of electricity and power backup, both of which are a challenge because in rural areas electricity supply is not very reliable. So you need a good source of power back-up which is not inexpensive. Then you need Internet connectivity, which is also not good in some rural areas, and is plagued by either inadequate speed or frequent breakdowns. Telephone connectivity is quite strong in India. Hardware and other computer equipments can be easily transported from urban location to rural locations. Then you require time-totime upgradation of system, machines and data security. From an operationalisation perspective, you need skilled rural BPO associates and proper flow of work from client-end. Another important aspect is to change the mindset of clients who doubt the quality of work that can be provided by rural BPOs because of their rural setting. Does Drishtee also provide training programmes to the youth to enhance their essential skills? Drishtee provides two types of training programmes: • Training programme for rural BPO associates, which covers soft skill, computer skills, data management skills, specialised training skills as required by, say, the BPO associates in our Sugarcane Call Centre
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•
Grooming programme for kiosk operators - We identify operators who can handle the kind of work that they will be expected to do. Whether s/he will be able to take up other assignments in future as and when required. Since the operator manages the kiosk, s/he has to take critical decisions about how to manage and secure data etc., where timely and informed decisions are key to the success of the enterprise.
What kind of barriers do rural BPO entrepreneurs usually face while setting up their business? Can you elaborate on some of the innovative ways through which Drishtee overcame these barriers? As I said, access to electricity and Internet were of primary concern, but they have been overcome thanks to the availability of multimode connectivity. Another big challenge is business development i.e., to convince the prospective clients that a rural BPO set up can match the timelines and quality of work that is provided by its urban counterparts. We showcase our business model and offer lot of advantages to our clients. We offer them decentralised network, data security and other advantages. Slowly and steadily, more clients are coming because today, they have faith in our business model and in the quality of services that we provide. Secondly, many of them also want to tap the rural market. In terms of financial inclusion, how do you think that a rural BPO can help in providing financial services to rural people? As I said, Drishtee has a microfinance product and has operationalised the microfinance product through the microfinance rural BPO. So, we are making microfinance activities sustainable by contacting borrowers through the rural BPO. We do all sorts of operations like monthly calling, application filling, repayment collection, feedback collection, doing customer service through BPOs, etc. Also in case of other services like business correspondence, BCBS model, also, BPO will manage the data of the financial services. In your view, can rural BPOs transform rural economy? Yes, it can transform the rural economy. If we go back 15-18 years from now, none of our fresh graduates had ever thought of earning around 15-20 thousands per month. If BPO as a sector is a good revenue generator for the youth, then I think rural BPOs have an immense potential to change the rural economy. The whole idea of cutting cost and out-sourcing your non-core competency activities is beneficial for organisation. By developing the skill sets and providing cost advantages, I think the rural economy can really flourish. Best thing is that the rural population is getting education and employment right in their villages. Where do you see Drishtee’s work in rural BPO segment in the next five years? Currently, we have three set ups. In the next five years, we will have 30 set ups. We have employed 15 people at the moment and in next five years our headcount will increase to 150-200 people. We want to add 10 times our current capacity and also expand our network in more states. i4d | January 2009
SOURCEPILANI, PILANI, RAJASTHAN, INDIA
Empowerment, the rural BPO way
www.sourcepilani.com
Even though around seventy per cent of India’s population live in villages, its contribution to the GDP is only about one fourth of the total. Around one hundred and thirty million rural skilled workers are unemployed due to lack of adequate employment opportunities. Rural BPO is one of the few avenues of employment for rural India and an attempt to combine entrepreneurship and social empowerment bridging the ever increasing rural-urban divide. SourcePilani is a rural BPO initiative set up in the rural backdrop of Pilani, Rajasthan. With focus on creating socio-economic value that can empower both rural India and corporate India, SourcePilani strives to achieve process excellence to deliver highest quality service to their clients. Adhering to values such as customer orientation, innovation, and integrity, it intends to restore and improve the cost arbitrage by providing high quality services at the lowest costs. The BPO started with the aim to transform livelihood of many in the region. In the begining, Manoj Vasudevan, CEO, in discussion with LK Maheshwari, Vice-Chancellor of BITS figured that a rural BPO operation apart from being a social entrepreneurship initiative can provide services thirty per cent cheaper than its urban counterpart with almost zero per cent attrition rate. The Goenkas of Laxmi Organic Industries contributed INR 20 Lakhs for setting up the business. Having received the biggest and most critical resource, 55 local graduates were identified by Vasudevan and provided with the foundational training which included basic computer skills, basic English proficiency with a strong emphasis on soft skills. After completion of the training, they were employed with SourcePilani. Set up in September 2007, SourcePilani is a 2,000 sq ft facility January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
providing back-end services to domestic as well as international clients. SourcePilani holds an apparent competitive edge over urban BPOs as it provides a clear 40-50 per cent cost advantage to clients because it has access to dedicated manpower and cheap infrastructure in a rural setting. To add to it, SourcePilani’s has adopted an innovative ‘Blue Ocean’ strategy which combines a robust business model with a strong social cause, contributing effectively in tackling spiraling operational costs faced by urban BPOs and in generating employment and livelihoods in rural India.
Services SourcePilani offers a wide array of services to its clients which range from the corporate to government organisations: Data entry and digitisation: SourcePilani offers cost effective and accurate digitisation of data from hand-written or printed records. Me d i c a l t r a n s c r i p t i o n : Me d i c a l transcription involves transcribing medical records dictated by doctors and other medical practitioners. SourcePilani is the first and the only rural BPO to offer highly cost effective solutions in medical transcription while maintaining global quality standards. List generation/Lead generation: SourcePilani provides services to build directories and databases having relevant data by utilising the information available on the Internet. SourcePilani developed an in-house product WebHound™ which searches for valid information and provides user interface to enter the data. Various Management Information System (MIS) reports can be generated in no time. e-Governance services: SourcePilani has been an active partner of the Government of Rajasthan in implementing many of the e-Governance initiatives like e-GRAM
and NREGS in the Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan. Vernacular call centre ser vices: SourcePilani also offers voice-based services, both inbound and outbound, in Hindi and Marwari languages.
Challenges In the initial stages, SourcePilani had to overcome many obstacles and challenges. The employees, due to lack of domain experience, had some teething trouble, but in a short time they not only acquired proficiency but also received acclaim for their work. Within two months of starting their operation, SourcePilani bagged its first client, the Government of Rajasthan for providing database services. Then, it tied up with Truworth Infotech for providing medical transcription services. Other clients include Khojlo.com, Indicorps, Organic Facts and India Travel Photos. Initially, poor Internet connectivity affected business. However, intervention from Union Telecom Minister, A Raja helped resolve the issue. Today, the firm has an annual turnover of INR 50 Lakhs and is set to add more clients this year. SourcePilani also plans to increase its headcount by recruiting 150 rural graduates over the next two years. Plans to venture into rural BPO consultancy by the end of 2009 are also on the anvil. It has also tied up with Wikinvest, Wikipedia’s investment-related offering, to create and manage its client database. The database will be used by the portal to provide financial details of companies to millions of its online users across the world. The SourcePilani experience demonstrates that given the opportunities, even rural youth can upgrade the quality of their lives. Sabyasachi Kashyap sabyasachi@telecentremagazine.net
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INTERVIEW : VERGHESE K JACOB, CHIEF INTEGRATOR, BYRRAJU FOUNDATION
GramIT: Empowering rural India www.byrrajufoundation.org
Verghese K Jacob is the Chief Integrator with Byrraju Foundation. In a corporate career spanning 25 years, he has worked as Division Head and CEO of large organisations. For the last ďŹ ve years, Jacob has been serving in the social sector and spearheads the activities of Byrraju Foundation as its Chief Integrator and Lead Partner. In an exclusive interview with i4d magazine, he shares his ideas and thoughts about the role and future of rural BPOs in India and also about GramIT, Byrraju Foundation’s rural BPO initiative How did rural BPOs as an idea come about? Byrraju Foundation (a non-profit organisation fully dedicated to rural transformation) and Ramalinga Raju, the founder of the Satyam group of companies, firmly believes that rural youth have the potential to deliver the best of the IT enabled services or BPO services to the rest of the world. Raju, with his vast experience in setting up IT as well as IT enabled services (ITES), primarily has been targeting the top companies in the world for meeting
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their IT and ITES needs. He was very confident that if the Indian urban youth can do these jobs, so can the rural youth. The Indian villages did not have the right infrastructure to establish rural BPOs and this caused the rural youth to migrate to the urban centres like Mumbai, Delhi, etc. The Indian cities are becoming expensive destination for ITES services and the next wave of migration will be to other low cost countries like Bangladesh or Vietnam. Instead of this happening, Raju wanted to link this i4d | January 2009
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
global opportunity to the 30 million trainable youth in Indian villages , who can do these ITES job very well. The Foundation was fortunate to have Satyam offering to do the outsourcing or to take the risk of outsourcing some of their back-end jobs, by which we could prove the sustainability of the model. For Byrraju Foundation, running BPO operations is not the end, but it is one of the major means to achieve our vision of sustainable, holistic rural transformation. Could you elaborate on the scope and future of rural BPOs in India and other developing countries? Rural BPOs can become a highly scalable business model. Since many urban centres across the world are becoming very high cost destinations, BPO jobs would soon become unviable in urban sector. Most probably 10 years down the line, 80 percent of BPO work, especially transaction processing, will be done by semi-urban and rural workforce. Though these rural areas may lack adequate infrastructure, electricity and broadband connectivity, availability of skilled manpower is not going to be a constraint, rural youth can be made ITES ready within three to four months. Does Byrraju Foundation also provide training programmes to youth to enhance their skills? Yes, Byrraju Foundation also provides essential skills and training programmes to rural youth. Our training syllabus provides four basic skills: 1. Computer skills 2. English language 3. Soft skills like work ethics, customer orientation, communication skills, team spirit, etc. 4. Six Sigma quality training programme. The Foundation provides the above skills to rural youth on a regular basis, to enable them to deliver world-class service.
Infrastructure availability Reliable bandwidth Good power backup for 24x7 operation Adequately trained people. Here the issue is to train people. People are there but there is a need to train them Migrating work from urban clients to rural BPO centres – where the challenge is to convince the global clients that work can be done and delivered more efficiently by a BPO unit located in a village
How do you convince your clients about the efficiency and timely delivery of services? Is it a very challenging issue especially for a new set up? We need to showcase 3-4 successful business models first. Talking conceptually and giving hollow assurances about the delivery of services is not going to work. We need one or two pioneering customers, who are willing to take the first plunge, and fortunately for us, Satyam took that step. Satyam has a lot of back-end processes, like HR, accounts, finance, etc., that were outsourced to our rural BPOs. In each of these processes, we ensure we are more efficient and cost-effective, as compared to urban efficiencies within the outsourcing organisation. Once this is ensured, more clients will come. What are the services offered by rural BPOs run by you and who are the primary clients? Initially we offered back-end transaction processing services like HR work, accounting, administration, which are basically non-voice in nature. Soon after, we shifted to voice as well as hybrid processes. The primary clients of our services are Satyam Computer Services, the Tata group, Andhra Pradesh Government, Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI), Health Management and Research Institute (HMRI), etc. How do rural BPOs contribute to rural development? Rural BPOs do contribute to rural development in a substantial way. Creating even a 50-seater BPO provides unparalleled sustainable employment opportunities within a village. We have already set up such BPOs in six villages, which means with two shifts, about 100-150 people are being employed in every village. So, providing regular employment to 120 people would substantially contribute to the prosperity of at least 120 families in
What are the key elements essential for a successful Rural BPO? Please elaborate from operational, technical and capacity building perspectives. There are five essential elements to make rural BPOs operational: January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
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the village. Normally a village will have around 400-500 families, so one-fourth of the village is directly benefited from this model on a monthly basis. In addition, there is a rural economic multiplier effect leading to other services like catering services, transport services, telephone services, etc. These services get enough traction at the village level because people working the BPO also need avenues for consumption. Hence, there is an additional rural economic multiplier effect of 2-3 times of the BPO salaries. So, not only these 120 families get employed; a major portion of their salaries get spent in the village itself. And around 50-60 people get employed through allied services that cater to the demands of this population. When we calculate all this, giving BPO jobs to 120 people in a village is equivalent to creating additional 400-500 acres of irrigated farming land in the village. Is this a primary source of income for people who are working in rural BPOs? No, many of them also continue to attend to their original vocation. For instance, for a full time farmer the farming activity lasts only about 100-120 days in a year. Most of these farmers have continued to be farmers and have additionally taken up our BPO jobs on a full time basis, working in the afternoon shift from 1400 hrs to 1800 hrs. One of the interesting things is that around 40 percent of the rural BPO workers are married women. Prior to taking up the BPO job, there were hardly any income generation avenues for them. The shift running from 0600 hrs to 1400 hrs is mostly ‘manned by women’ and they have enough time after that to take care of their household responsibilities. Since 40 percent employees of your rural BPOs are married women, do you have any plans to set up daycare centres for their young children? No, actually the villages of India have the advantage of a strong social support system. These families are not nuclear families but joint families. And these women get tremendous support from their in-laws. Not only do they look after the children, they also feel proud that their daughter-in-law is a working woman. There has not been any social problem. Rather there is an element of self-esteem involved here which prompts them to engage in a full-time white collar job. One of the key challenges for a rural BPO is sustainability. How can Rural BPOs become self-sustainable? The basic requirement of any BPO is client demand. Setting up a BPO unit first and then looking for clients would not be sustainable. First, there must be a sustainable demand for the service from the client who is already contracted. This done, rural BPOs can be 100 percent sustainable because anyway the operational cost of a rural BPO is 25-30 percent lower than a city BPO, and productivity would also be comparable if not better. So, the client will definitely get a cost benefit of about 25-30 percent as compared to a city BPO. This is what makes rural BPOs sustainable. Is this an initial strategy as well as a long term plan? Our initiative GramIT has long term customer contracts with all our major clients. We also make sure that, from the cost, efficiency
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and quality point of view, these are globally competitive centres. If we do only low-end work or give only cost advantage and not quality assurance, this will not become a long-term sustainable BPO model. Then it is important to make sure that these rural BPOs are as good or better than the city BPOs who are catering to global clients. In urban BPOs, we are used to a very high rate of attrition. What is the scenario in rural BPOs and how do rural BPOs tackle attrition? That is the major advantage for rural BPO. In urban centers, there are too many BPO jobs chasing too few experienced BPO workers. That is why urban BPOs currently face an almost 35-40 percent attrition rate. On the other hand, our rural BPOs have less than three percent attrition rate and mostly this is due to marriages and women employees leaving their village. Otherwise attrition rate is almost zero. We also have a few cases of reverse migration with people quitting their city BPO jobs and coming back to their villages to join our rural BPOs, even at a lower salary because here they do not want to spend on transportation or other establishment costs. Are rural BPOs a scalable business model? Yes, rural BPO is a very much scalable model. The world is becoming flatter and flatter and rural BPO is the future of BPO industry. In how many villages is GramIT operational? Could you inform our readers about your future plan? Currently we have six centres in six villages located in three districts of Andhra Pradesh, namely West Godavari, East Godavari, and Guntur. We employ around 600 people in these six centres. Our future plan is to scale up to 15 more villages over the next 18 months. We will increase the number of centres in both East and West Godavari because we have the largest number of adopted villages there. We plan to set up these centres in these villages where we also run all our other programmes offering 40 different services like healthcare, education, sanitation, drinking water, etc. So this becomes an essential ingredient of the holistic transformation of villages. „ i4d | January 2009
INTERVIEW: SUJATHA RAJU, DIRECTOR, SAI SEVA
Serving God by serving man Sujatha Raju, Director of SAI SEVA, a BPO with a vision. SAI SEVA’s revolutionary business model of simultaneously providing employment to the needy by moving jobs done in cities to villages and thereby offering lowered costs to the clients was conceived by Sujatha. In an interview with i4d, she talks about the SAI SEVA intitatives and their future plans
What prompted you to start the rural BPO initiative? SAI SEVA was inspired by the life and teachings of Bhagwan Sri Sathya Sai Baba. Baba often quotes, ‘Maanav Seva is Maadhav Seva’ - Service to Man is Service to God, and ‘Grama Seva is Rama Seva’ - Service to the village is service rendered to God. The promoter group of SAI SEVA comprises of students of the Sri Sathya Sai University and devotees of Sri Sathya Sai Baba. Being in the BPO field for over two decades, we felt that there was an enormous opportunity to take the BPO revolution to the village level, thereby also enabling us to provide sustained employment opportunities to the unemployed village youth. SAI SEVA is therefore not merely a business for us, it is also our way of fulfilling our commitments to society. In which village is SAI SEVA’s rural BPO located? SAI SEVA’s first centre was setup in August 2006 in Puttaparthi, Anantapur District, Andhra Pradesh. As a rural BPO, how is SAI SEVA BPO different from others in the field? Does SAI SEVA also provide training programmes to youth to enhance their essential skills? At SAI SEVA, we have attempted to faithfully replicate our citybased BPO setups. Every aspect of the operation - infrastructure, January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
www.saiseva.co.in
processes, scalability, training and controls - are as per the expectations from any professional BPO setup elsewhere. We have also taken care not to disturb the village culture - for example, we do not have night shifts and we also encourage employees to work in flexible shifts to accommodate their participation in the family business, like farming or weaving. Our conviction in a centralised setup with around 100-200 seats/centre arises from the fact that it facilitates handling large volumes of transactions for larger clients (like banks/telecom/ insurance companies). Several other considerations like frequent product update training, control of sensitive information, etc. can be better supported in this model. Every centre would be an independent, self-sustaining entity. We have realized that considerable time has to be invested on the rural youth to make them employable in BPOs. We take them through a structured training program in English, basics of computers and data capture skills before we hire them. Did you face any problems while starting your BPO service? Could you tell us about the barriers you came across and how you overcame them? We’ve encountered several challenges in the two years that we have been in operation. Things that we take for granted in urban employees like language skills, professional etiquette, exposure to a working environment, etc. are to be taught from naught. The lead time for these youngsters to be productive on the job is therefore considerably longer. Nevertheless, their commitment levels and the eagerness to learn compensates for this investment. However, the larger barrier which is no doubt faced by all Rural BPOs in the country is the lack of belief in the concept among the corporate business houses. The sales cycle for us is quite long, and many of them fail midway. SAI SEVA is however very fortunate to partner with BASIX and HDFC Bank, who have both shown tremendous confidence in our ability to manage their processes. What are your plans for the future? Do you plan to scale up/expand your rural BPO operations to other parts of the country? SAI SEVA’s vision is to have a presence in each and every state in the country. Before we do that, we want the Puttaparthi centre to be a centre of excellence among all Rural BPOs. Towards that, we are currently working on getting our processes ISO certified. We hope to extend our operations to Tamil Nadu this year.
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GIS APPLICATIONS IN AGRICULTRE AND SCM, RMSI
Remote sensing Indian agriculture www.rmsi.com
RMSI has established a geospatial approach to rationalise a competent methodology for Supply Chain Management which can combat food insecurity
Dr K S Siva Subramanian Assistant Vice President Agriculture and Natural Resources, RMSI siva.subramanian@rmsi.com Yogesh Singh Project Lead - GIS, RMSI yogesh.singh@rmsi.com Subrato Paul Project Manager Agriculture and Natural Resources, RMSI subrato.paul@rmsi.com
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Introduction In tropical countries like India with 127 different agro-climatic zones, the impact of global climate change is evidential through varied seasonal variances such as droughts in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and flooding in places like Assam, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, etc. Coincidentally, these are also the major agricultural states. Furthermore, the dominance of middlemen increases the extent of food insecurity. The end result is that the government has to import foodgrains from other countries. In India, we still predominantly use traditional techniques such as field based crop cutting experiments (CCE) to assess the crop yield and acreage. It is worthwhile to note that in India all crop exports and import decisions are still based on historical production data (previous year’s production records), as against the growing international trend of basing these decisions on more scientific and accurate methods such as assessing the current year’s yield and acreage much in advance of the actual production by using remote sensing and GIS techniques. The ramifications of taking crucial export and import decisions based on historical data is that there could be a perceived shortage or surplus. To cite an example, during FY-07, there was a bumper rubber production in India, as compared to previous few years. Still the same was imported and the price of Indian rubber went down, all due to non availability of timely data. Agricultural data is currently generated by multiple agencies in multifarious ways; both conventional field surveys based as well as advance information technology based. Some of the prominent agriculture data publishing programmes in India are: CAPE (Crop Acreage and Production Estimation),
FASAL (Forecasting Agricultural output using Space, Agrometeorological and Land based observations). Federal Agricultural department generates the data by field sampling surveys. Industrial houses send their own field team to assess the acreage and production data. Agencies like Agriwatch, CSE are also gathering Agricultural Intelligence (AI) data from multiple sources. However, a prudent examination reveals that all the above data varies drastically. Aiming to resolve such issues of vagaries in the AI data, RMSI has established a geospatial approach to rationalise a competent methodology for SCM (Supply Chain Management) which can benefit farmers, traders, exporters, industrial, government, and federal agencies to combat the exports. The author, in this paper highlights this through a specific case study conducted by RMSI for estimating crop acreage estimation, crop yield estimation and production estimation for various rice exporters.
Utility of Basmati Agricultural Intelligence (AI) data RMSI understands that AI data generated is used in different ways: 1. Industries - Use this data mainly for procurement and supply chain management 2. Boards - Use this data to streamline supply chain as well as to fix the price in the market 3. Insurance companies - Create an insurance product out of the agricultural yield data However, the conventional data does not suffice for many of the users. They need agricultural data modeled in such as changes in the cropping pattern from the last year, comparative analysis of the last i4d | January 2009
Subrato Paul
year data vs. the current year, production pertaining to respective mandis, settlement packages for farmers without affecting the profit margin of the insurance companies, etc. To create such intelligent data, RMSI followed two different aspects, namely, 1. Geospatial data validity of comparing Mandi data with remote sensing based outputs in rice production 2. Supply chain management methodology evolved from the above survey
Study area The study area covers major rice growing districts from the Indian Ganges flood plains. This includes 13 districts each in Punjab and Haryana, 29 districts in Uttar Pradesh, 4 districts in Uttarakhand and 2 districts of Jammu & Kashmir. Geographically, this spreads across 25° 83’ North to 33° 07’ North latitude and 73° 87’East to 81° 86’ East longitude covering an area of about 189,000 sq km.
Input data The study entailed collection, procurement and analysis of primary and secondary sources of information. The broad classification of agricultural acreage over the entire region was carried out using IRS P6 AWiFS satellite images with spatial resolution of 56m. Information, from regional to local, were extracted using medium and high resolution satellite images of IRS series 1C, 1D, P6 LISS III and LISS IV with spatial resolution of 23.5m and 5.6m, respectively. Secondary sources of information like Survey of India Toposheet on 1:50,000 scale, district maps for the study area were used as reference maps. RMSI also collected primary information for ground truth, field validation, sample based farmer survey and Mandi data through field based-surveys in Figure 1: The study area all the districts. Secondary information was also collected from district agriculture and state agriculture boards/offices for reference.
Methodology Major components of compiling a methodology for SCM included Market survey and assessment and Agriculture and Land Resource Mapping. While market survey is done through direct field authenticated data, agriculture and land use map was envisaged through interpretation of remote sensing satellite images. With a cursory look at mandi information, it is apparent that both quantity and expected time of arrival information are vital. RMSI selected a sample district mandi in each of the Basmati growing states. Mandi arrival data (quantity) and time of arrival was collected from important mandis and market board at block/tehsil level and mandi board at district and state level. It was observed that January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
Rice and Bajra (Pearl Millets) crops come early in the market i.e., September– October and Basmati and Sugarcane varieties come later in November– December months. To e n ve l o p t h i s Figure 2: Spatial Distribution of Basmati varieties in Punjab variation in time, a thorough, periodic and regular survey was carried out. Table 1 gives details of the mandi data collected from a sample mandi survey in Amritsar and Taran mandi in Punjab. Details of crop varieties availability, quantity availability and the market share in total purchase of produced crop was collected from different mandi head offices. Agriculture crop mapping was carried out using strict scientifically programmed algorithms of supervised and unsupervised classification in image processing software. Training sets collected from the ground survey were used in this process to identify and delineate different crops. Figure 2 shows the Basmati crop variety map for selected districts of Punjab. Analysis was carried out using the information collected from remote sensing interpretations and mandi survey from various sources. Final production estimation was carried out using combined analysis of remote sensing outputs and mandi data.
Geo-spatial data validity In conventional ways, after the estimation, second level sample surveys are carried out (crop cutting experiments) or remote sensing-based ground verification is done. However, the data produced, often does not sync with the final output data produced from mandis or markets or final government figure. This, in turn, leads to the question of authenticity of data produced from remote sensing. RMSI undertook a hybrid approach to compare and assess the accuracy of remote sensing-based production estimation of Basmati rice for kharif 2005 against the mandis arrivals and other related sources at the end of the Kharif season-2005. Mandi arrival data of rice and Basmati was collected for Haryana and Punjab, whereas in Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal only total rice data was available and the same was collected. The survey experts also collected data from rice mills, state marketing boards of respective states and the Agents (Arthias). Analysis was carried out based on information gathered from various sources like discussions with respective mandi officials, mandi agents (Arthias), and rice millers to arrive at the conclusion. Based on comparative analysis between Kharif 2005 estimates derived using remote sensing approach and Mandi arrivals (as well as allied sources) as on 31st March 2006 and considering certain calculated and logical assumptions and limitations, it is concluded that the remote sensing based estimated results for Kharif 2005 is matching up to an accuracy of 90% to 94% in the states of the study area. As a by-product, an interesting result on RS data being always higher than total supply chain sources confirms the reliability of this data. Table 2 gives the results so produced and the comparison analysis.
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Discussion In recent years, remote sensing has been accepted as an indispensable tool in the field of agriculture. It helps in crop acreage and yield estimation; health monitoring, agriculture information system, supply chain management, etc. by trimming the cost and human effort. It is increasingly being used to take vital decisions for crop marketing and export, crop inventory and commodity trading. The major activities in SCM that are answered through this RS & GIS approach are: 1. Satellite based crop mapping and acreage estimation at district/tehsil level 2. Crop health monitoring using temporal satellite images and derived vegetation indices 3. Satellite derived indices and weather parameter based yield estimation 4. Comparative analysis on remote sensing based production and actual arrival in the market 5. Spatial database creation of agri-market location and proximity analysis from the produce 6. Vehicle routing from farm to retail outlet using network analyses 7. Decision support system for supply-chain design and management It is evident from here that AI data produced using geospatial technology is authentic. However, the data in raw format may not yield results. Hence a methodology is discussed to use the above data for supply chain management. This approach uses a statistical model developed to use the AI data for making price forecast of different Basmati varieties, a robust statistical model was used as given in the following equation:
Price = {ƒ(ma, ta, cd, pv)}/ƒprice
Basmati 386
60-70%
Basmati 370
60-70%
HBC 19
Amritsar
Sharbati
50-60%
Pusa 1121
Amritsar & Tarn Taran Mandi, Punjab
20-30% 60-65%
Super Basmati
50-60%
Basmati 386
30-35%*
PB 1
Patiala
Super Basmati
15-20%* 20-25%*
Sharbati
30-35%*
Basmati 386 Pusa 1121
15-20%*
Hoshiarpur
10-15%*
Basmati 386 Ludhiana
25-30%*
Sharbati
20-25%* 15-20%*
PB 1 PB 1 PB 1
Gurdaspur Kaithal Sirsa
15-20%* 10-15%*
Table-1: Gives details of mandi data collected from a sample mandi survey in Amritsar and Taran mandi in Punjab.
Comparison of Kharif 2005-06 Satellite-based estimated production and Mandi arrival for Punjab, Haryana, UP and Uttaranchal
Uttar Pradesh
Uttaranchal
100.00 100.00 Satellite Based-Estimated Production of Basmati 2005 [a]
100.00
100.00
Total Basmati Arrival in Mandis [b]
49.16
63.36
68.97
65.45
Personal Use and Seed Purpose [c]
15.00
10.00
10.00
10.00
Contract Farming
6.67
1.00
2.00
2.00
Millers
6.67
2.00
2.00
2.00
Agents
6.67
7.00
1.00
1.00
Unorganised Sector
10.00
10.00
10.00
10.00
Sub-Total [e] = [c +d]
45.01
30.00
25.00
25.00
Total Basmati Accounted by Satellite Based Study [f ] =[b +e]
94.17
93.36
93.97
90.45
Punjab Haryana
Table-2: Gives the results so produced and comparison analysis
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Sources of Rice Arrived in Material Mandi (in %) (District)
* Depend on Mandi rate
Where, ma – Mandi Arrival
Sold through other channels d]
Basmati Varieties
Basmati 386 Saharanpur 20-25%* PB1 8-10%*
Equation 1
Description
Name of the Mandi
ta – Time of Arrival cd – Competitor details pv – Production of variety ƒprice = ƒ(last year low, last year high, Month, Mandi arrival)
Conclusion Conventional methods of generating data such as undertaking extensive surveys are time consuming and expensive. At times the government takes important decisions on importing wheat, rubber, sugar, etc with insufficient and pseudo-geospatial data. Similarly, traders rely on the information provided by the midd lemen who in turn get this information from the farmers. This methodology clearly depicts the advantage of Geospatial based supply chain management techniques. However, the study has a few limitations such as paucity of secondary data and cloud free satellite data especially during Kharif season. However, if the industrialists and federal government jointly produce such data, future generations will have easy utility of this supply chain management model. i4d | January 2009
THE CLIMATE CONFIDENCE MONITOR 2008, HSBC
HSBC’s study: Climate Confidence Monitor 2008 www.hsbc.co.in
The world’s leading banking entity, Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) recently (September 2008) conducted a survey to monitor and measure people’s concern, confidence, commitment, and optimism about climate change. The countries and territories surveyed were: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, France, Germany, the UK, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, and the USA. The research was commissioned by the HSBC Climate Partnership, which is a five-year partnership from 2007-2012 between HSBC and The Climate Group, Earthwatch Institute, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and WWF. The objective of the partnership is to combat the urgent threat of climate change by inspiring individuals, businesses and Governments worldwide. HSBC hopes to tackle climate change impacts for people, forests, water and cities by engaging with its partners and with its 335,000 employees. The Climate Confidence Monitor 2008, which surveyed 12,000 people across 12 countries in four continents – Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America, revealed that people are more concerned about climate change than other more immediate issues like the recent economic crisis. Despite the survey taking place in the midst of the financial market turmoil in September-October 2008, forty three per cent of the respondents, when asked about their top three concerns, chose climate change ahead of global economic stability.
The findings In a clear message to Governments around the world, the survey revealed that people are looking for greater leadership on the part of the Governments in tackling climate change. Whereas almost half of the people (48 per cent) felt that the Governments need to do more, only a quarter (25 per cent) think that they are doing so. The survey also revealed that people look forward to the Governments to focus on the ‘big issue’ of climate change and take direct actions like increasing investments on renewable energy, halting deforestation, conserving water resources and protecting ecosystems. Besides, a vast majority of the people interviewed (78 per cent) want their country to take a ‘fair share’ of the responsibility to reduce harmful emissions. Coming to the consensus that Governments are not doing enough, people are calling on Governments and, to a some extent, business/corporates, to play a greater role in tackling climate change. The respondents, irrespective of their country of origin, believe that corporates/business should be doing more while acknowledging that NGOs have traditionally taken on a bulk of the responsibility to tackle climate change. January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
However, there are slight differences of opinion over the contribution of individuals to tackle climate change. While consumers in most developed markets think individuals are being asked to play too great a role, consumers in the emerging markets think that individuals should be doing more. One more revelation of the survey is that lack of Government direction leads to reduced engagement about climate change among individuals. The proportion of people who say they have heard a lot about climate change has reduced from seventy four per cent in 2007 to thirty six per cent in 2008 demonstrating that in the news agenda in 2008, climate change has had less prominence.
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In most of the developing countries, concern and commitment about climate change have increased barring in Brazil, India and Hong Kong SAR. Concern and commitment have both risen in China, making it the only emerging country to have experienced both together. However, people’s willingness to change their lifestyles to reduce its impact of the environment has fallen to forty seven per cent from the previous year’s fifty seven per cent, as per the survey. The number of people agreeing to make other changes in their lifestyles, such as spending extra time and money to reduce the impacts of climate change, has reduced from forty five per cent to thirty seven per cent and twenty eight per cent to twenty per cent, respectively. According to the survey, people see ‘preventing deforestation’ and ‘conserving water/protecting ecosystems’ as having significant and immediate impact on climate change. On the other hand, people believe that worldwide, Governments are emphasising too much on indirect actions that pass the onus for climate change onto others, such as increasing taxes on fossil fuels, encouraging environment friendly activities by individuals, and participating in international negotiations such as the Kyoto Protocol. The research reveals that people have a reasonably accurate and globally consistent idea about the countries that contribute the most to carbon emissions today. Even people in countries emitting the most carbon dioxide, want their country to make a fair contribution to reducing in emissions. In China, sixty two per cent of people said the reduction in emissions by their country should be at least equal to the reduction by other countries, and only four per cent said their country’s emissions should be allowed to increase. In the USA, seventy two per cent of people said their country should reduce emissions by at least as much as other countries. Only four percent of people in the emerging markets believe their country’s emissions should be allowed to increase to enable their economies to grow.
HSBC on climate change
Implications
Conclusion
Though people are concerned about climate change, and demonstrate a fair attitude to national emission reductions, this year’s Climate Confidence Monitor has indicated that consumers are forestalling their own efforts and are not appreciating those of their Governments. One apparent revelation of the survey is that people want to see evidence of the efforts and the impact of Government decisions. They want to see Governments concentrating more on renewable energy solutions and halting deforestation. Further, respondents want to be informed about measures such as green taxation or carbon trading to help them understand how tangible these can be. One important observation of this survey was the sense of fairness behind people’s responses in both developed and emerging markets. Secondly, there seems to be a lack of understanding in developed markets about the share of the burden that these countries are likely to face in order to allow emerging market economies to grow. Besides, the survey showed that business/ corporates need to play a role in facilitating low carbon choices by individuals by making it easier for individuals to make these choices. There is an urgent need to rebuild momentum on climate change among consumers.
The research, coming at a time when the worldwide concerns about environmental issues need to be aired at a global level on a continuous basis, has reinforced the realisation that unless Governments, corporates and individuals come together to forge a consensus on the ways to reduce the emissions, climate change will continue to affect environment, lives and the future of the planet.
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HSBC believes the effects of climate change will have an impact on everyone, everywhere – Governments, businesses and individuals (including customers and staff ). People based in developing countries are likely to face a disproportionately more adverse impact than those residing in developed countries. Climate change is a challenge that will require global solutions, and business must play its part. Collective action will be required from Governments, business and individuals themselves to stimulate adoption of energy efficiency and clean generation technologies to stabilise carbon dioxide emissions. Banks are in a special position, as they work with a wide variety of business sectors ranging from the multinational conglomerate to the smallest start-up. They can support change – all the way from large-scale energy conversion projects to offering viable financing to new low-carbon businesses. Therefore, it is imperative for everyone to understand the impact of climate change.
The research The research, commissioned by HSBC with the input of the HSBC Climate Partnership NGOs, was based on a twenty-minute Internet survey. The sample consisted of 1,000 respondents in each of the twelve markets: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Mexico, the UK and the USA. Research consultancy Lippincott was responsible for the analysis. Respondents were selected through Internet panels in each market. There were no entry criteria to the survey. In the developed markets (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, UK, US) the responses were weighted to be nationally representative while in the emerging markets (Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Mexico) the responses were weighted to be representative of the online population in these markets.
Source: Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation
An opportunity to stay connected with i4d News Subscribe to daily, weekly and monthly newsletters for free Log on to www.i4donline.net i4d | January 2009
AIDS HEALTHCARE FOUNDATION (AHF)
AHF: Taking HIV testing to the doorsteps www.aidshealth.org
The AHF undertook the global initiative ‘Free and Easy HIV Testing’, through which AHF is providing confidential and sensitive services to bring HIV testing to the doorsteps of people
Remarkable progress to tackle the menace of HIV has been made across the globe, since the discovery of HIV, with the introduction of Anti Retro viral Therapies (ARTs) and by creating awareness about the infection. However, in spite of the number of global initiatives, the threat of HIV does not appear to go away very soon. Not only the people engaged in high risk behaviours such as those having unprotected sex with multiple partners, injecting drug users and people into sex work are getting infected with HIV, the general population is also getting affected by it. Everyone is at risk of infection and worldwide infection rates show that HIV is infecting men, women and children of all ages. Millions of people, who were earlier not considered to be at ‘high risk’, are now infected. According to UNAIDS estimates, the total number of people living with HIV globally was 33 million in the year 2007. Out of which, surprisingly, 2.5 million people got infected in 2007 only. Above all the most shocking fact is that till now 2.1
million people have died of HIV. In India the number of people living with HIV is 2.5 million. The very fact that there were over 6800 new HIV infections a day in 2007 globally and that more than 96% of them are in the low and middle income countries is very threatening. One of the obstacles in HIV prevention and management has been the lack of awareness among people about their HIV status. Most of the people living with HIV globally do not know that they are HIV positive. This has resulted in unintentional transmission of the virus to their partners and other individuals. With the availability of ART and other information on how to live with HIV, the impact of this infection could have been averted had people known their HIV status earlier. Various studies and experts suggest that there are three main reasons why people do not go for voluntary HIV testing. The first reason is there is no cure of HIV and people think that there is no point in getting tested if there is no cure. Second important reason is the stigma
Dilshad Mohd HIV Testing Coordinator AIDS Healthcare Foundation – India Cares mohd.dilshad@aidshealth.org
January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
35
attached with this infection. People do not even want to reveal that they had gone for HIV testing. The third important reason of unwillingness among the masses to go for HIV testing is lack of confidential and sensitive testing services. To address and help resolve all the three factors mentioned above, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) has embarked on a journey to educate people about the latest information available apart from providing treatment to all those who need it. To ensure that right information is provided about the availability of treatment and that people have access to quality, confidential and sensitive testing services, the AHF undertook the global initiative ‘Free and Easy HIV Testing’, through which AHF is providing confidential and sensitive services to bring HIV testing to the doorsteps of people – to the places where they are, where they work and where they live. The aim is to scale up the testing to the maximum extent possible and close the loopholes that are allowing preventable virus to infect individuals and causing death among masses. Recently ‘AHF One Million Tests World AIDS Day 2008 Campaign’ around the world organised pre-test counselling sessions to seek out new rapid test kit modalities, break out of the clinic by putting up a tent in places accessible to the community
to provide fast and easy testing services. During the process it was observed that people were not concerned about confirming their status due to lack of access to testing services, fear of stigma and discrimination, fear that the test will be positive, and lack of access to treatment. But the global testing initiative has made testing available to people at their doorsteps with confidentiality of status, proper counselling with follow up and access to treatment. With this, a new hope and a new beginning has been made.
FT Climate Change Challenge The Financial Times and Forum for the Future are hosting the FT Climate Change Challenge. Sponsored by HewlettPackard, the aim of the competition is to seek out and showcase the most ingenious solutions to the problems caused by climate change. The focus is on exciting and practical ideas that will reduce emissions and help us adapt to the impact of climate change. Ideas that can be developed upon, that can be brought to the market and be scaled up. The USD 75,000 prize aims to turn the best idea into reality. The winner could be a new technology, system or service, novel organisation or business model. The winner will be chosen by readers of the Financial Times and by a panel of global business leaders, innovators and climate change experts who include: Lionel Barber, Richard Branson, Eileen Claussen, Mark Hurd, Terry Leahy, Rajendra K Pachauri, Jonathan Porritt and Leon Sandler. The panel will select the five ideas which they feel can be developed and scaled up effectively to give the greatest contribution to tackling climate change. Each entry will be judged on a number of criteria including potential impact on climate change, originality, scalability and cost effectiveness. Shortlisted entries will be presented to the FT’s global business audience and readers will vote to select the winner.
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The deadline for sending in applications is January 30th 2009 and the winners will be announced by April 2009. To apply online visit: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/FT-climate-challenge-onlineapplication-form The application form is also available at: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/files/FTClimateChallenge_ applicationform.pdf The Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business news organisations, is recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Forum for the Future is a not-for-profit sustainable development group that partners leading businesses and public sector groups, helping them devise and implement sustainable strategies. For further details about the competition please visit: http://www.ft.com/indepth/climatechallenge i4d | January 2009
INTERVIEW : TAN BOON HUAT, CHIEF EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, PEOPLE’S ASSOCIATION, SINGAPORE
Leveraging IT for social cohesion
www.pa.gov.sg
and Residents’ Committee (RC) Centres and elsewhere in the community, to create opportunities for residents to come together, to make friends with people of all backgrounds. These programmes serve to deepen social engagement among residents and helped to build a stronger sense of community. We also leverage on IT to help us customise and tailor our programmes to meet individual needs, so that we can be more effective in bringing people of all walks of life together.
“Chief Executive Director of PA, Tan Boon Huat (right) receiving the Business Analytics Executive of the Year Award (Public Sector) 2008 from the Managing Director (Singapore and Emerging Markets) of SAS, Bill Lee.”
Prachi Shirur from CSDMS, in her conversation with Tan Boon Huat, Chief Executive Director, People’s Association (Singapore) asked some questions about the initiatives and management framework of the People’s Association and also enquired about the change in their focus in modern, cohesive, politically and economically stable Singapore The People’s Association was founded in 1960, when Singapore was a divided society, to help foster racial harmony and social cohesion. In the current changed scenario of Singapore, what is the vision and mission of People’s Association? The People’s Association (PA) vision and mission remains the same. We bring people together to take ownership of and contribute to community well-being. We connect the people and the Government for consultation and feedback. We leverage on these relationships to strengthen racial harmony and social cohesion, to ensure a united and resilient Singapore. We achieve our mission through our network of 1,800 grassroots organisations, five Community Development Councils, the National Youth Council, National Community Leadership Institute, Outward Bound Singapore and Water-Venture. What is the strategy being adopted by the People’s Association to meet its mission? Our task is to bring people of diverse backgrounds together. Through our network of grassroots organisations, PA offers many courses and activities at the Community Clubs (CCs) January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
The People’s Association provides a one-stop access to all People Association’s courses, activities, facilities, interest groups and memberships. Tell us more about this initiative? • onePA, a solution enabled by business analytics company SAS, serves as a planning tool that will allow us to carry out CRM efforts in a more systematic and holistic manner. • It allows us to know our existing customers in a more intimate way, thus allowing us to serve them better through fulfilling their needs. As an analytical tool, SAS’ solution also provides a better overview of our potential customers and provides possible leads on how we can engage them meaningfully. • onePA enables us to cater to the needs of a better educated population; its user-friendly features will allow working adults to learn about PA’s offerings (courses, activities, memberships, interest groups and facilities) from the comfort of their homes/offices. • onePA is also enhanced to allow easier online transactions through the portal. • With more transactions carried out online, the staff can then devote more time to value-added work like improving course content and attracting new users to the CCs. What is the return on investment achieved through the Customer Intelligence system? With a better way of managing customers’ information, information can be cascaded in a more efficient manner throughout the PA’s network using the SAS solution. Staff and grassroots leaders can then be in better position to recommend new programmes and improve existing products that will cater to the needs of our customers. While decision-making used to lie at the HQ level, we believe that when such relevant information are shared with the PA’s wider network, it will lead to ownership at the grassroots level. Grassroots leaders can be empowered by such knowledge so that they can better reach out and deepen their existing relationships with their customers/residents. More information at www.pa.gov.sg
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RENDEZVOUS IGF 2008, 3-6 DECEMBER 2008, HYDERABAD, INDIA
IGF 2008: ‘Internet for All’
38
Opening Ceremony and Opening Session The IGF 2008 was inaugurated by Union Cabinet Minister for Communications and Information Technology of the Government of India, A Raja on 3 December 2009. Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Assistant Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA); Nitin Desai, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General of the United Nations; Markus Kummer, Executive Coordinator, Secretariat of IGF, Geneva; Damodar Reddy, Minister for IT of the Government of Andhra Pradesh were the other panelists in the opening ceremony. During a opening ceremony, Jomo announced that the
2010 IGF Meeting will be convened in Vilnius, Lithuania. Jainder Singh, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of India; Subramaniam Ramadorai; CEO and Managing Director, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) and Chairman, ICC/BASIS; Lynn St. Amour, CEO, Internet Society (ISOC); Alice Munyua, Coordinator, Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) and Director, Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK), Abdul Waheed Khan, Assistant Director General, United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organisation (UNESCO); Meredith Attwell Baker, Acting Assistant Secretary
Thiru A Raja launches i4d’s special issue on Internet Governance at IGF 2008
Photo Credit: CSDMS
‘Internet for All’ was the key theme of the third Internet Governance Forum, held in Hyderabad, India between 3rd December - 6th December, 2008. The four-day conference was organised by United Nations Secretariat of the Internet Governance Forum in alliance with the Department of Information Technology, Government of India and National Internet Exchange of India (NiXi) and supported by Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) and other major corporates, including Sify, BSNL, Tata Communications and STPI. More than 1400 participants from 94 countries, including representatives from various Governments, International Organisations, Private Sector, Civil Society, Policy-makers, global Internet, and academic community participated in the four-day conference to share their knowledge and discuss how to make Internet accessible for all. With an eye on the outcome of the Second Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Meeting, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 12-15 November 2007, the third IGF Meeting was based around five themes, namely, Reaching the Next Billion, Promoting Cyber-Security and Trust, Managing Critical Internet Resources, Emerging Issues – the Internet of Tomorrow and Taking Stock and the Way Forward. Apart from the main themes, 94 workshops, best practice forums, dynamic coalition meetings and open forums were organised as part of the conference. The IGF programme was designed through a series of open, multistakeholder consultations to make the forum more interesting, interactive and informative for all stakeholders coming from diverse backgrounds.
At IGF 2008, Hyderabad, India, i4d’s special issue on Internet Governance (December 2008) was released by Thiru A Raja, Honourable Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Government of India. i4d acted as a dossier of information about Internet Governance with exclusive interviews and opinion pieces from various stakeholders, research articles about the different issues that were to be deliberated upon by the participants of the Internet Governance Forum. The special issue was much appreciated by all delegates of the forum. To read the special issue for IGF 2008 visit: http://www.i4donline.net/dec08/ content.asp Thiru A Raja launching i4d’s special issue on Internet Governance at IGF 2008
i4d | January 2009
of Commerce for Communications a n d I n f o r m a t i o n a n d Na t i o n a l Telecommunications and Information Administration Administrator, United States of America; Paul Twomey, CEO and President, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN); Graciela Selaimen, Executive Coordinator, NUPEF and Hamadoun Touré, SecretaryGeneral, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) were the nine panelists who addressed the opening session. During the opening session, speakers remarked that the Internet has a great potential for economic and social benefit to the world. Relating the freedom of Internet access with human rights, Abdul Waheed Khan pointed out the need of clear and globally applicable principles based on human rights and legal, ethical and technical standards and legal provisions to organise these channels and promote freedom of expression.
Day 1: December 3, 2008 The conference was organised in such a way that each day of the IGF delved into a specific theme among the multiple issues under Internet Governance. Each day started with the main sessions (which were more formal panel discussions) and was followed by an afternoon session which were open dialogue sessions aimed at giving an opportunity for all participants (including remote participants) to join the discussion and raise their issues. After the opening ceremony and opening session, Day 1 of the IGF started with the first main session, called ‘Reaching the Next Billion’. This session was divided into two panel discussions: January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
Photo Credit: CSDMS
Panelists in the Opening Session of IGF 2008
Realizing a Multilingual Internet This panel discussion was chaired by Ajit Balakrishnan, Chief Executive Officer at Rediff.com, India and moderated by Myriam Nisbet, Director of the Information Society Division, UNESCO. S Ramakrishnan, CEO of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), India; Alex Corenthin, President of the Internet Society for Senegal; Viola Krebs, Dynamic Coalition for Linguistic Diversity (MAAYA); Hiroshi Kawamura, President of Daisy Consortium; Tulika Pandey, who heads the Indian Government’s IDN development efforts and Manal Ismail, ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), Egypt were the other panelists in this session. Panelists in the first panel discussed issues related to multilingualism and the promotion of diversity on the Internet, including accessibility and the importance of Internet access by disabled people. The main focus of this session were the following five issues: • The importance of having content in local languages • The importance of localisation and availability of tools, both software and hardware that enable this localisation • Efforts to internationalise domain names • Need of multilingualism in mobile and multiple media • Need of common framework and language to address these issues Access: Reaching the Next Billions The second panel was chaired by Kiran Karnik, Member of the Scientific Advisory
Council to the Prime Minister of India and Founder-Director of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Development and Educational Communicational Unit, and moderated by Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive Director of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). The theme of the second panel was divided into three sub-themes; Demand, Supply and Development. There were two panelists in each sub-theme. Rajnesh Singh, Regional Bureau Manager for South and Southeast Asia, Internet Society (ISOC) and S K Gupta, Advisor (CN) Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) were panelists in the Demand subtheme. Jacquelynn Ruff, Vice President, International Public Policy and Regulatory Affairs, Verizon and Peter H Hellmonds, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Affairs Division, Nokia Siemens Networks were panelists in the Supply sub-theme. Alison Gillwald, Director of Research, ICT Africa and Brian Longwe, Chief Executive Officer, InHand Limited, Director, African Internet Service Providers Association (AfrISPA), board member of African Network Information Centre (AfriNIC) were panelists in Development sub-theme. The session concluded with a discussion on three main areas of Internet accessibility, roles of the different stakeholders; role of the state, of the private sector, civil society and technical experts and how they can collaborate and ensure complementarity. On the same day, workshops and best practice forums were also held on issues like building partnerships to bridge the digital divide, child online protection, public-private partnerships, information security, spam, electronic governance and data protection, preventing and fighting child pornography in developing countries, effective digital education and Internet accessibility for disabled people.
Day 2: December 4, 2008 Day 2 of the IGF saw all participants deliberating on the theme of ‘Promoting Cyber-Security and Trust’. The theme was again divided into two panel discussions; ‘Dimensions of Cybersecurity and Cybercrime’ and ‘Fostering Security, Privacy and Openness’. These panel discussions were followed by an Open Dialogue.
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Fostering security, privacy and openness Shyamal Ghosh, Chairman of the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) chaired this panel and Ambassador David A Gross, Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy in the United States Department of State moderated the session. The other panelists were Abdul Waheed Khan, Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO; Stefano Rodotà, University of Rome; John Carr, Secretary, Children’s Charities’Coalition on Internet Safety (CHIS), UK; Jac SM Kee, member of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Malaysia and Joseph Alhadeff, Vice President, Global Public Policy and Chief Privacy Officer, Oracle.
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Photo Credit: CSDMS
The Dimensions of Cyber-security and Cybercrime: A Mapping of Issues and our Current Capabilities The first panel discussion was chaired by Rentala Chandershekhar, Special Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India and moderated by Bertrand de la Chapelle, Government of France. Patrik Fältström, Cisco; Marc Goodman, International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Terrorism; Alexander Ntoko, ITU; Michael Lewis, Deputy Director, Q-CERT, USA and Gulshan Rai, Director, CERT-IN, Government of India were the other panelists in this session. The first panel was mainly focused on issues related to security threats like spam, viruses, malware and DDOS attacks, etc., illegitimate behaviours and attacks on the Internet. Panelists reviewed activities, resources, tools and instruments to tackle these problems. The session concluded with the following recommendations: • Need for proactive measures to prevent disruptions caused by these threats • Need for more resilient architecture • Need to establish a feedback loop between prevention, analysis of incidents and remediation • Need for coordination between actors involved in prevention, remediation and other related issues. • Need for cross-sectoral multistakeholder cooperation
CSDMS staff at IGF Village
The session started with a conflict in the sense of national security versus security for privacy. The session also deliberated on the issue of sexual rights defined in the Cairo Program of Action, as a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being related to sexuality. Speakers in the panel considered the different issues raised by privacy and openness, and drew attention to issues like child protection, privacy and freedom of expression. In terms of protection of children on the Internet, five risks were content, contact, addiction, commerce and privacy. During the Day 2, parallel workshops on issues related to cybercrime and cybersecurity, multilingualism on the Internet, access to local culture and language, the future of IP standard (IPv6), Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), and bringing Internet capacity and autonomy to developing nations. The parallel workshop was chaired by Pavan Duggal, President, Cyberlaws.net and Gulshan Rai, Director, CERT-In. The session was moderated by Jonathan Charles, BBC Foreign Correspondent and News Presenter and co-moderated by Natasha Primo, National ICT Policy Advocacy Coordinator for the Association for Progressive Communications and Everton Lucero, Counselor for Science and Technology at the Embassy of Brazil to the Unites States and Vice-Chairman of the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Dynamic
Coalition meetings on Open Standards and Internet and Climate Change were also held on the same day.
Day 3 – December 5 2008 Day 3 was focused on the theme of ‘Managing Critical Internet Resources’. Like Day 1 and Day 2, the theme for the day was also divided into two sub-themes; ‘Transition from IPv4 to IPv6’ and ‘Global, Regional and National Arrangements’. These panel discussions were followed by an open dialogue. Transition from IPv4 to IPv6 The first panel discussion was chaired by Gulsham Rai, Director of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, India and moderated by Bernadette Lewis, Secretary-General of the Caribbean Telecommunication Union (CTU), Trinidad and Tobago. Adiel Akplogan, AFRINIC/NRO, Mauritius; Kurtis Lindqvist, Netnod; Milton Mueller, Internet Governance Project, USA; Satoru Yanagishima, Director of Internet Policy, Ministry of Communications, Government of Japan; Jonne Soininen, Nokia, Finland and Tulika Pandey, Government of India were the other panelists in the session. Speakers in the discussion described the process through which the allocation and management of numbers with the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) can be controlled. The panel also discussed that there is a need i4d | January 2009
Global, Regional and National Arrangements The second session of the day was chaired by Ramlinga Raju, Founder and Chairman of Satyam Computer Services Limited moderated by Emily Taylor, Oxford - Nominet (UK), Director of Legal and Policy. The other panelists were Haiyan Qian, Acting Director, Division for Public Administration and Development Management, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA); Everton Lucero, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brazil; Richard Beaird, Department of State, USA; Parminder Singh, IT for Change; Byron Holland, President and CEO, Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) and Raul Echeberria, LACNIC. The panel discussion began with a review of ‘Critical Internet Resources’ and enhanced co-operation. Speakers in the panel also discussed issues related to policy, community understanding in driving the Internet, difference between high-end users of Internet bandwidth and low-end users, impact of the global financial crisis on the development of the Internet, ethical, privacy and security issues of Internet accessibility. The session concluded with following recommendations: • The meaning of ‘enhanced cooperation’ is to facilitate and contribute to multistakeholder dialogue. • The purpose of such cooperation is sharing of information, experiencesharing, consensus-building, fund-raising, technical knowledge transferring and capacity training. • Thematic focuses of those arrangements covered by those organisations are very much in line with those being discussed at IGF. • Cooperative arrangements have already taken place among those organisations, and more are being developed with other partners and with these nine organisations. January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
Photo Credit: CSDMS
of addressing the hardware and software issues according to needs of customer. In this regard, the panel also noted, this is a shared responsibility of private, public sectors and civil society, so they should also be involved in this process. There is also a need of promotion of and enabling a smooth transition from IPv4 dominance to IPv6 dominant environment.
Speakers addressing IGF Press Meet on 6 December 2008
Day 4 – December 6, 2008 The fourth day focused on two themes; ‘The Internet of Tomorrow: Innovation and the evolution of the Internet’ and ‘Taking Stock and the Way Forward’. The Internet of Tomorrow: Innovation and the evolution of the Internet The first session was moderated by two moderators; Jonathan Charles, BBC and Stephen Lau, CEO EDS Hong Kong. Herbert Heitmann, Head of Global Communications, SAP AG; S V Raghavan, Professor and Chairman, Computer Science Department, IIT-Madras; Ian Peter, Internet Governance Caucus Co-coordinator, Ian Peter and Associates a n d H e a t h e r C r e e c h , D i r e c t o r, Global Connectivity Programme, International Institute for Sustainable Development were the other panelists in this session. The discussion was focused around five themes; the opportunities and challenges associated with the growing popularity of social networks and user-generated content; the impact of policy frameworks on creativity and innovation from an entrepreneurial perspective; the policy changes and frameworks needed to ensure an ‘Internet for all’; the impact of the global nature of the Internet on jurisdiction and legislation; and policy changes
needed to ensure an environmentally sustainable Internet. Taking Stock and the Way Forward Nitin Desai, the Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General for Internet Governance moderated this session along with Markus Kummer. Speakers in the second session discussed about: Access and Diversity, Security/Privacy and Openness, Managing Internet resources and Vision from the host country. Jeff Brueggeman, VP Public Policy, AT&T; Katitza Rodriguez, Electronic Privacy Information Center & DiploFoundation Associate, Peru; Georges Papadatos, Government of Greece and N Ravi Shanker, Joint Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of India were the other panelists in the session.
Conclusion The Internet Governance Forum 2008 raised many issues related to multilingualism on Internet, accessibility, cybercrime, Internet security, existence of IPv4 and IPv6, managing critical Internet resources, protection of children online, etc. The four-day IGF 2008 concluded with an announcement about the fourth annual IGF Meeting which will be held between 15-18 November 2009 in Egypt. Ritu Srivastava, ritu@csdms.in
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Bytes for All... Online book: ‘How to Bypass Internet Censorship’ http://en.flossmanuals.net/CircumventionTools
You can also download a free PDF here or buy the book : http://www.lulu.com/content/4904448
Next billion, or a market push Click reporter David Reid travelled to Hyderabad for the Internet Governance Forum–where governments and net users discuss what’s next for the web. The talk at the IGF was about how to get the net’s next billion users online and how it can aid economic development. In Hyderabad the hi-tech boom has taken hold-a part of town called Cyberabad has in recent years been transformed from sprawling scrub to hi-tech hub. But opinions differ on how the Internet and hi-tech should best be used, especially in those places on the planet where few can afford a computer. Some suspect the debate is driven by hardware and software companies scrambling to gain a hold in new markets. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7790655.stm
30 applications that cover everything from word processing to games and music making. http://tinyurl.com/9k9e48
Phones do not change the world, people do Inspired by the Wired article ‘Scientists Hack Cellphone to Analyse Blood, Detect Disease, Help Developing Nations’ by Dave Bullock there has been a lot of activity under the change.org post ‘The Cellphone that could change the world’ by Nathaniel Whittemore. http://tinyurl.com/9udzwq
Feel the power of the crowd You are pattering away on the keyboard working on a tricky module for an online multi-player game. A chat window pops up in which a friend who lives in Denmark wants advice on another module of the same game. The developer in Sri Lanka who found twelve bugs in your earlier module is back with seven more on email. This scenario is not uncommon among those involved in collaborative open source software development.
IGF, IPR, etc.
http://www.thehindu.com/edu/2008/12/22/stories/2008122250181200.htm
The third annual United Nations-led Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad, India last month addressed a range of topics related to intellectual property rights and the free flow of information, and provided a venue for doubts about a closed-door international anti-counterfeiting treaty negotiation being led by the United States and Japan.
How is ‘development’ measured? One view...
2009 IGF mobile competition reveals record number of entries The organisers of the Independent Games Festival Mobile have revealed a total of 107 entries for the second year of the event, more than doubling the amount of entries seen in the inaugural competition. The entries were bolstered with a strong showing from the emergent iPhone and iPod Touch platform, but entries spanned platforms including mobile phones, DS, PSP and the Zune. The event (organised by Gamasutra parent Think Services) is a sister competition to the long-running Independent Games Festival, which announced record entries last week. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/12915
One Laptop Per Child ready for version 2.0 The ultra-cheap XO computer from the One Laptop Per Child project is now being used by 600,000 children in the developing world, the ambitious project’s founder Nicholas Negroponte told New Scientist in an interview. “That’s not promised machines, or machines that might be on their way, that is actual laptops in use by children in their schools and homes today,” the former MIT Media Lab director said. The XO is a small, ‘netbook’-sized laptop built into a very tough, clamshell casing. It runs Sugar, a (GNU) Linux-based operating system developed especially for the XO, and around
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Most measures of ‘developed’ status focus mainly on money, principally GDP per person, which tells you nothing about the distribution of income or wealth, and nothing about how the money is used. Only Bhutan has an official Gross Domestic Happiness measure, and no country has a usable sustainability measure. Various organisations, including NGOs, UN Agencies, and the World Bank, offer measures of human rights, corruption, and other relevant information. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/12974
Wikipedia has emerged the 4th popular website With a staff of just 22 people, Wikipedia Foundation, a not for profit organisation, headquartered in San Francisco (USA) has gone on to emerge as the fourth most popular website globally, after being founded in 2001. Speaking on the origins of the largest information resource and free knowledge repository in history, its legendary founder Jimmy Wales, known to his friends as ‘Jimbo’ said, Wikipedia is on its way to soon establish ‘Wikia Search’, an open search engine soon. http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Dec142008/city20081214106609.asp
ITC in Bangladeshi Election Manifesto This is what the Awami League offers, see what the others have to say - stop corruption through computerisation; Preserving government records and documents in computer; Promoting software and IT service industry through providing support to the young entrepreneurs; Building digital Bangladesh by 2021; Making IT education compulsory in secondary level by 2013 and in primary level by 2021; Making IT Taskforce active and effective; Setting i4d | January 2009
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Bytes for All... up High Tech Park , Software Technology Park, ICT Incubator and Computer Village; Administrative reform, ensuring information rights and start e-governance; Bringing all Upazilas under Internet connectivity.
with 220 million Internet users followed by China (210 million) and Japan (88.1 m). Brazil comes next to India with 53.1 million users, UK 40.2 million, Germany 39.1 million, Republic of Korea 35.5 million, Italy 32 million and France 31.5 million.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/12971
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/12908
NASSCOM links
Kerala University distributes hall ticket online
NASSCOM Foundation: Social development arm of National Association of Software and Service Companies. An online technology donation programme is a partnership between NASSCOM Foundation and TechSoup, the San Francisco-based non profit technology capacity building organisation, that links technology donations from leading software and hardware manufacturers and the Indian nongovernment organisation (NGO) sector. The programme assists your organisation by making donated software available for a very low administrative fee, thereby helping you to make the most of your ICT purchases and infrastructure. Receiving technology product donations frees up stretched NGO budgets for both technology priorities and other programme areas.
For the first time in the state, a university has put in place a system for online distribution of hall tickets. The hall tickets of those examinations of the Kerala University with the governing part computerised will be provided online.
http://www.nasscomfoundation.org/index.php
Open Government is Its Main Plank But What About the Roadblocks? by Dr D C Misra. Many of these items are routine, mundane and incremental. Nevertheless three items of his agenda are striking and deserve close look.
In parliament, digital debates Subbiah Arunachalam writes: I hear from an insider that Rajya Sabha Secretariat has initiated digitisation project to digitize Rajya Sabha debates from 1952 to 2007. Current debates are born digital. NIC in partnership with HP has developed the protocol, tested and demonstrated to the Rajya Sabha Secretariat using open source software DSpace. Nearly 1,30,000 debates are now available on Intranet of NIC network. Very soon, NIC may make these debates available to the public through Internet. Right now, one can access Rajya Sabha debates from 2000-07 on the Rajya Sabha web site. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/12970
9% Indian Internet users prefer email in English A report says that 99% of the users prefer to use email in English, despite of the fact that rediff provides the service of email in 11 different languages. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/12959
Health Sciences Online This week marks the launch of Health Sciences Online (www. hso.info) the only site where anyone can search for and find more than 50,000 courses, references, guidelines, and other expert-reviewed, high-quality, current, cost-free, and ad-free health sciences resources. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/12954
With 81 million Net users, India gets 4th slot India has been ranked fourth among the top 10 nations in the world with 81 million Internet users. United States leads the chart January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/12900
Nepal, FOSS FOSS Nepal Community has been declared one of the winners of the SFD 2008 Best Event Competition for the second consecutive year. http://softwarefreedomday.org/Competition2008
Barack Obama’s agenda for E-governance
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/12939
Maps for Advocacy http://www.tacticaltech.org/mapsforadvocacy
Nepal’s first FOSS Training and Research Centre This centre has been opened at Brihaspati Vidyasadan School (BVS) at Naxal, Kathmandu, Nepal. This Center has been made possible by the financial help from Help Nepal Network and BVS Alumni and technical help from FOSS Nepal, the community involved in spreading free and open source technologies in Nepal. http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/113609/
Pidgin, now in Bangla Pidgin 2.5.3 is released with 100% Bangla translation, done by Ankur. So from now on you can use Pidgin fully with Bangla interface. http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Localization/Ankur-1297.shtml
Bytes for All: www.bytesforall.org or www.bytesforall.net Bytes for All Readers Discussion: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ bytesforall_readers To subscribe: bytesforall_readers-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Bytes for All Discussion summary compiled by: Frederick Noronha, India, fred@bytesforall.org
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Books received Creating Value for All: Strategies for Doing Business with the Poor Publisher : United Nations Development Programme, July 2008 Pages : 180 pages Inspired by, ‘Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for the Poor’, a report published in 2004 by the UN Commission on the Private Sector and Development (UNCPSD), this report is the first in a series that attempts to elucidate how businesses are creating value in the market conditions that characterise poverty and how they can also create value for the poor. The report is a product of research based on 50 case studies and submissions by a network of developing country academics and an advisory group of institutions who have expertise in the developmental role of the private sector. It aims to advance the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) efforts to turn the Growing Inclusive Markets Initiative’s ideas into action through dialogue with the private sector, government and civil society. This report lists examples of many firms that are generating profits, creating new growth potential and improving the lives of poor people by doing business with them. The 50 specially commissioned case studies of businesses that have successfully included the poor, despite the constraints of limited or non-existent financial systems, infrastructure (transport, communication, market) have been showcased in the report to demonstrate how the Private Sector does not have to keep its social obligation on the sidelines (with its Corporate Social Responsibility programmes), but can actually develop an inclusive business model that will not only open up vast untapped markets for the entrepreneurs but also benefit the society as a whole. The poor, it seems suffer from a lack of information about them and end up being marginalised even when they are willing and able to pay for goods and services, there have been cases where they’ve had to pay more than rich consumers for essential commodities - “People in the slums of Jakarta, Manila and Nairobi pay 5–10 times more for water than people in high-income areas of those cities—and more than consumers in London or New York.” The report demonstrates, with many instances, how
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quite a few companies have consistently earned profits while also giving value to (the have-nots). The Private Sector has the potential to improve the lives of poor people and contribute to human development by facilitating their access to basic needs like food, water, sanitation, electricity and healthcare. The sector can also provide alternative income sources for the marginalised communities around the world. Access to water and electricity can increase their productivity. All these factors have the potential to empower the poor people and help them gain control over their lives. The study goes on to ascertain why, despite all these obvious and demonstrated benefits, very few companies have stepped in to take advantage of the opportunities of growth. The report gives examples of some businesses that developed a specialised set of solutions based on the local conditions to work around the difficulties they faced while operating among their target communities. Since the study conducted for this report looked into a wide range of countries and industries. Despite these differences, the case studies reveal a common pattern. The entrepreneurs responded to the constraints by working around them or by removing them. The entrepreneurs, which include developing and developed country multinational corporations and large national companies, identified opportunities, understood the contexts and searched for solutions with an open mind. The report encourages the private sector to take a more active part in human development in a way that benefits all – through increased profits and through increased incomes. Some of the examples from the study include: • Barclays Bank which worked with local money collectors in Ghana to reach the poor who were not covered by the institutional financial sector. • The Narayana Hrudayalaya hospital group in India, a cardiac health care provider to the poor , earned a 20% profit in 2004-almost 4% more than the country’s largest private hospital-thanks to high patient volume and an innovative payment and financing scheme. • In Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda more than 40% of people in the lowest economic quintile receive health care from private for-profit providers. • In the Philippines, RiteMed sells generic drugs to more than 20 million low-income clients at prices 20%–75% less than leading brands. As mentioned earlier, this thought-provoking report is the first in a series of reports that offers food for thought to all stakeholders to create practical strategies that will enable us to achieve the MDGs with active participation of the private sector. The report is available for download at http://www.growinginclusivemarkets.org/reports Subir Dey, subir@csdms.in
i4d | January 2009
What’s on Africa 27-29 May 2009 eLearning Africa 2009 Dakar, Senegal http://www.elearning-africa.com
3-7 March 2009 Green Energy Summit Bangalore, Karnataka http://www.greenenergysummit.com
Japan
21-22 April 2009 Energy Efficiency World 2009 Johannesburg South Africa
24-28 August 2009 The 3rd International Symposium on the Environmental Physiology of Ectotherms and Plants, Tsukuba
http://www.terrapinn.com/2009/eeza/
http://www.nias.affrc.go.jp/anhydrobiosis/isepep3/ index.html
Australia 23- 26 March 2009 Green House 2009 Perth Western Australia http://www.greenhouse2009.com
15-18 November 2009 2009 Asia Pacific Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect Perth Western Australia http://www.napcan.org.au
20-25 March 2010 World Congress of Internal Medicine Melbourne, VIC http://www.wcim2010.com.au/
Europe 9-11 March 2009 International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED) 2009 Valencia, Spain http://www.iated.org/inted2009
Jordan 22-24 April 2009 Interactive Mobile and Computer Aided Learning, IMCL2009 Amman, Jordan http://www.imcl-conference.org/
Malaysia 15-17 June 2009 First Global Business Summit Conference, Kuala Lumpur http://gsbms.com
6-9 July 2009 6th International Conference on IT in Asia 2009 Kuching, Sarawak http://www.cita09.org
Singapore 16-18 February 2009 Open Source Singapore-Pacific-Asia Conference & Ex5 po 2009 (OSSPAC) http://www.osspac.com
13-15 March 2009 4th Global Conference: Cybercultures - Exploring Critical Issues Salzburg, Austria http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ci/Cyber/ cybercultures/c4/cfp.htm
India 3-4 February 2009, Healthcare IT Conclave 2009 Mumbai http://www.informedia-india.com/client/index.aspx?s ub=program&id=conference&ConfID=160 January 2009 | www.i4donline.net
30 March–3 April 2009 12th Annual Asia Power & Energy Congress Raffles City Convention Centre http://www.terrapinn.com/2009/asiapower/
Thailand 5-7 March 2009 Education and Development Conference 2008, Bangkok http://www.tomorrowpeople.org/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Item id=93
20-23 May 2009 World Renewable Energy Congress 2009 - Asia Region (WREC) Bankok http://www.thai-exhibition.com/entech
United Arab Emirates 17-19 April 2009 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on ICTD2009 Doha, Qatar http://www.ictd2009.org
United States 22-27 March 2009 Prevention of HIV/AIDS Keystone, Colorado http://www.keystonesymposia.org/9x3
28-30 October 2009 International Conference on Information Technology (ICIT 2009) Chicago http://www.waset.org/wcset09/chicago/icit/
United Kingdom 25-27 March 2009 Gender and Education Association International Conference London http://www.ioe.ac.uk/fps/genderconference09
knowledge for change
29-31 March 2009 Governance of New Technologies: The Transformation of Medicine, IT and IP University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/conference.asp
4-6 August 2009 Greater Noida Uttar Pradesh, India http://www.eindia.net.in/2009
29 April 2009-1 May 2009 SEB’09 International Conference on Sustainability in Energy and Buildings Brighton http://seb09.sustainedenergy.org
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IN-FACT
Mapping rural BPOs in India • •
Drishtee also runs rural BPOs in the following states; Assam, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Chattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Meghalaya and Mizoram Comat runs rural BPOs in the following states; Karnataka, Haryana, Tripura, Sikkim, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat Drishtee, Golaghat Drishtee, Saurath, Madhubani
Drishtee, Panipat District Tata Chemicals, Babrala SourcePilani, Pilani
Tata Chemicals, Mithapur, Dwarka GramIT, Ranga Reddy District GramIT, East Godavari District JSoft, Toranagallu
GramIT, Krishna District GramIT, West Godavari District GramIT, Guntur District SAI SEVA, Puttaparthi
HDFC Bank, Nellore
HDFC Bank, Tirupati Fostera, Hosur, Krishnagiri District DesiCrew, Coimbatore District
DesiCrew, Nagappattinam District
Kerala
DesiCrew, Erode District
DesiCrew, Salem District
Fostera, Thanjavur
DesiCrew, Perambalur District
Disclaimer: 1. The Rural BPO initiatives in the map shown above are indicative of a few initiatives. Readers are invited to bring to the notice of i4d team, other initiatives not mentioned here. 2. This is not an official map of India
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i4d | January 2009