Information Technology

August 17, 2006
ICT to beat back farmer suicides, says vice-president

NEW DELHI -- The vice president of India, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, says that ICT should help the farming community more than any government package, in beating back the current wave of farmer suicides.

Releasing telecom professional Dr. D. K. Ghosh’s book ‘Digital India: Rural empowerment and Transformation’, the vice president recalled his own experience during his long political career of how farming communities benefited from knowledge of current market rates for their products. Instead of selling these products at whatever rate the middleman quotes, farmer could bargain for the best rates if they could know the rates in markets far and near.

“ICT should bring all information to villages. This will have a great impact on the country.” One of the results would be to reverse the drain of talent from rural to urban areas that was happening now. By giving the people information about various farm technologies, ICT could also change their lives, he said.

Former chairman of Telecom Commission, Vinod Vaish, expressed concern at the widening of the digital divide within the country despite the growth of telecom at a fast pace. He regretted that many state governments did not show enough will to push forward with excellent role models like e-seva and Bhoomi. “Mobile phones have become part of our daily life, and ICT is promoting empowerment of the people,” said Vaish, who is now a member of the Telecom Disputes Settlement Tribunal. He found ‘Digital India’ a “useful guidance to solving problems of digital connectivity across the country.”

Digital India is a research work that goes into the experiences of several experiments in rural information centers as well as using ICT in transforming rural lives. It pleads for pushing communication and information networks to the villages, and analyses cost and benefit factors and discusses different technology options.

Shekhawat told the author that he had ‘opened a way for helping villagers and develop the country using ICT’. “You have done a great service to the country and shown us the way,” he added.

Dr. Ghosh is an executive director of Siemens Public Communications India Network Ltd. and a member of its board. Refuting the general view that ICT was an elitist tool, Dr. Ghosh said at the function “Telecom is not a luxury. Computers are not an anti-people investment.” He referred to the various programs for bringing ICT benefits such as NeGP, Village Knowledge Centres that were already demonstrating impact of ICT on villages. The current level of experiments however lacked a crucial aspect. They needed to be replicable and scalable on a countrywide scale. His book dealt with these issues and projected a reproducible model for the country.