India's Digital News Monitor
@ Digital Summit: Government's Kiosk Project; Does An Indian Farmer Need Facebook?.  By the end of this month, every state in India would have selected the private sector operator for delivering these services via the Common Services Centres Scheme (CSCs), some details of which were given by Aruna Sundararajan, CEO of the project. The project has a three pillar architecture with state data centres, which are coming up in every state in the country, connected to state Wide Area Networks. Around 100,000 kiosks will be rolled out during 2008-09, with large scale rollouts in the coming few months: the rollout should be completed by march next year. Each CSC will cater to a cluster of 6 villages. BSNL has plans to provide broadband to 30,000 such places by June this year - and the deployment already in progress...though there's a roadblock with spectrum allocation. The CSCs initiative is on a public-private-partnership, with the government is doing the viability gap funding. Large companies like Reliance, Wipro, ICICI Infratrech have won the bids for deployment of infrastructure. CSCs partners include the Central govt, 28 state governments, 240,00 village panchayats, 50 service centre agencies, over 500 serivce providers, 400 community service organizations, technology prividers, agriculture universities as content providers.
During the Q&A, Harish Bahl, CEO of Smile Interactive said that not many people are addressing the content situation: how many people are creating applications for Rural India? Does an Indian farmer need a Facebook? Should everything be in English? Things also need to be culturally sensitive - the way a Punjabi audience uses a matrimony site differs from how a Gujarati audience does. Access, Sundararajan agreed, is at the heart of this debate, but the real problem is that there's a very very thin layer of services available. Murugavel Janajiraman, CEO of the Bharatmatrimony group, however, pointed out that one first needs to target the low hanging fruit - those who know how to use computers, and can speak English. There are three issues here: access cost, device cost and content cost.
By (Nikhil Pahwa). [contentSutra.com]
10:19:04 AM 
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