Along with providing ICT services, the CIC’s have also been offering non-ICT services. The project has been designed by WCI, the government of Andhra Pradesh and their partners in a collaborative and holistic manner to impact on the multi-dimensional aspects of rural life. The Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh asserts that the CIC initiatives will accelerate the government’s mission to reap the immense benefits of the information age.

This section analyses the developmental impact of the Kuppam CIC project against the backdrop of the framework developed in the paper.

Political freedom

The setting up of CIC’s in rural areas has significantly enhanced the democratic participation of rural citizens in Kuppam. The CIC’s are not only attempting to bridge the digital divide but are also assisting in bringing the government and people closer. As the Project Officer Sarath says “The government has played the role of a facilitator by providing a lot of information both online and offline on government schemes and programs targeting the rural populations”. The CICs have been used as windows for the government authorities to effectively disseminate information to the rural people.

Individuals having political freedoms make governments more responsive, responsible and accountable. People are made more aware of their rights and entitlements by providing them information about governmental schemes and funding.

With the filing of grievances and complaints for redressal and the freedom to raise a voice against the functioning of the government, the rural people now play a key role in the development of their communities. But the process still has some deficiencies. Government offices in the region are not yet linked to ICT based systems and this is highly necessary to increase the level of e-readiness of the region.

Economic facilities

The CIC’s in Kuppam have been very beneficial to the rural people for generation of economic facilities. First and foremost, it has changed the vision of the youth selected. It has provided them income generating self-employment opportunities and helped them to enhance their entrepreneurial skills by building, owning, operating and managing the CICs. The CICs have spurred employment in the region as 35 other youth have been employed in the current CICs to catalyse the entrepreneurs in their ever-increasing 6 am – 10 pm work.

Financing for the setting up of the CIC’s comes from trainees as well as partners and local funds. Loans are also given by government, participant contributions, and grants. In the second phase, the government has also agreed to help start 1000 new businesses for the people selected by investing $1 million through training grants and capital loans.

In rural areas, new technologies alone are unable to sustain a business. Poor people have a very low potential expenditure on ICTs. So, along with money gained form providing ICT services, revenue has also been generated for the trainees through non-IT services like selling costume jewellery, obtaining government contracts for collecting electricity bills etc. Such a diversified portfolio is a must.

Telecenters facilitate the flow of information in rural areas and can help reduce transaction costs in the rural economy (Thamizoli and Balasubramanian) . Earlier people in the Kuppam community would have to travel individually to the nearest government center in the district headquarters to gather information. But now since the GLO interacts with the government departments and informs the rest of the community about the new schemes, the transaction costs are drastically reduced.

Economic facilities must be also analysed from the perspective of the rural people who are not involved in the running of the CIC’s, but now have the freedom to use the services provided there. It also affords them a market where they can buy subsidized agriculture seeds and get rid of middlemen by interacting with companies directly. The services offered have been readily accessible, affordable with attractive price-performance ratio. It has also provided services to local businesses like poultry farming which in turn will regenerate the local economy.

Economic facilities are also enhanced through timely and useful information that the GLO obtains from the government like what crops to plant during which season. The prospects of developing the business through the CIC’s further by offering new services based on the emerging needs of the people and demand patterns will accelerate economic growth in the region further.

In the Gudipalle CIC, total average incomes per month have ranged between Rs. 17000-20000, with profits between Rs. 6000-7000 (Subramani 2003) . Jewellery sales during festivals, stationery sales during opening of schools and colleges are seasonal services that generate relatively high incomes.

ICT services in rural areas are not a huge income turnover business. In the Kuppam CIC, for example, on an average 10 people per day visit for ICT services and 25 people to access other services (Umarani 2003) . The economic results have been slow to pick up. The entrepreneurs running the CICs have to identify upfront income generating activities, newer technologies, fresh markets and new initiatives which can enlarge employment opportunities, diversify livelihood systems and strengthen the value adding networks. The project has not been financially robust because of debt burden and it requires the support of WCI and building up of markets through new services like electricity meter reading, sale of insurance instruments and marketing of local produce, digital photography etc.

Education and Knowledge

Education and skill building is the key to development. It allows an individual to capture economic opportunities by developing his knowledge and skills. It is important that the individual has the necessary training and expertise to acquire information. The WCI program focuses on training the selected individuals in business and community development skills. The trainees also take classes in English and computer skills. On the basis of the training program further opportunities to develop the business and hone up skills exist for the entrepreneurs.

Students have been using the computers for downloading exam results from the Internet. Computer literacy among the rural people is being spread through training classes after charging a fee of hundred rupees. At the Gudipalle CIC, such an exercise was carried out where 250 people attended. They are drawn from different age groups, public and private agencies, women, children, students, business and farming. Around 50 women and 70 people aged over 40 attended the training program and benefited.

The CICs are not directly involved in conducting other educational initiatives on basic literacy. They contribute indirectly by promoting its cause at community level meetings that are regularly organized by government agencies and NGOs.

Skills

Educated people are quicker to learn new skills. Computer training programs for the rural masses at the CIC’s have started. People are also involved in learning new skills that will be useful in developing their business. Skills are being developed in a host of areas in Kuppam. Learning how to select cows, feeding and treat poultry, making incense sticks are all skills that can be enhanced and made use of for daily sustenance. Data entry skills are being developed by college students.

Empowerment

It is important for individuals to take control of their own destiny. Empowerment has been defined as the “people’s ability to gain understanding and control over personal, social, economic, and political factors in order to take action to improve their life situations”.

Education empowers the individuals. The CIC project has served as a medium for empowerment and access to the government departments. By giving training to the people selected for the program, WCI and their partners empowers them to act as catalysts for their development. By offering ICT access through CIC’s for the rural people, they have opportunities to participate in the increasing information and digital society.

Information Empowerment

Empowering people through access to appropriate information at the right time can make a difference in the life of the rural poor. The CIC’s empower the rural people with information related to agriculture, health, education and government programs. Since the personnel at the telecenter pro-actively gather and disseminate information obtained from government departments to the community, development is on the right track. Also HP’s software solution called ‘Yojanalu’ (Schemes) has been developed with the objective of creating awareness and disseminating information on various government schemes that are applicable to the citizens of Kuppam constituency, spanning the sectors of agriculture, medical & health, self help groups (SHG) and welfare and development.

Most of the information services that have been offered at the CICs are G2C (government to citizen). There must be plans to explore B2C services linking companies selling t-shirts, stationery items and other add on services.

Gender Empowerment

Women in Kuppam have also been empowered and have been direct beneficiaries of the project. Umarani at the Kuppam CIC is a woman who has been running the CIC successfully. Two of the ten CICs that are being set up at the gram panchayat level will be owned and operated by women as partners.

In addition indirect benefits result in the form of increased participation of women in other self-employment generation programs, empowerment of women in accessing need based information and in utilizing the resources and services that are available at the CICs for their socio-economic development. Women are also interested and involved in undergoing computer training classes. During such a training program, out of the 250 people that attended, 50 were women. The trend is most likely to improve.

Social Opportunities

Governments, funding agencies, donors, and civil society actors including NGO’s and multi-lateral agencies like the World Bank and the IMF have all arrived at a near consensus that development can be effective only when people’s participation is made central to the development process (Kumar 2002) . Community participation ensures that the local people have a say in their requirements and they take responsibility for various activities.

The CIC project has enhanced the social opportunities available to the rural people in Kuppam. Opportunities to build the capabilities of its rural people to enable them to become architects of their development exist. Kuppam is not a very literate region with a literacy rate of only 50.56%. The lack of education can hinder economic and political participation of people in the region, but facilities are provided in the CIC for training people who do not know how to use the computer and the Internet.

The entrepreneurs in the CIC’s create awareness on education, health and political issues to the rural people. They take pride in the fact that they are now ‘social entrepreneurs’ and have expanded on their capabilities after undergoing the training program. Services are being provided for people facing common problems and by pursuing action through joint efforts they are responsible for providing social support to their community. Services and operations have been demand driven and only when the CIC’s were set up did the staff know what the felt needs of the people were. A gradual shift from total ignorance to cognizance among the people has been one of the transforming features in Kuppam.

The CIC training program also provided the youth the opportunity to interact with international citizens from countries like Mexico, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil and Philippines providing expanding frontiers of association and collaboration.

There have been instances where partnerships between members running a CIC have failed. WCI had forced members to work as partners and that has not all yielded positive results. Other than in Shantipuram, teams have broken up due to incompatibility issues. This has been rectified in the 2nd phase with WCI emphasizing that people apply for the program as partners beforehand.

Life and Physical health

One of the basic goals of development should be the empowerment of citizens with information that enables them to realize an enhanced quality of life. The CICs provide off-line information services regarding the availability of various hospitals in and around Kuppam to people who are in need of such information. The ‘Yojanalu’ software developed by HP that is running on the CIC computers helps in this regard.

CICs have also been used to provide information to the rural people regarding any special programs by the health department. For example, programs for the physically handicapped and free family planning programs have been advertised through the CICs.

Leisure activities

Computer games, listening to music and watching movies, on the computer and Internet chatting are leisure activities that are being indulged in after the CIC’s have been set up. At the Shantipuram CIC, the author noticed a group of three children in the age group 10-12 totally engrossed playing “Road Rash”, a computer bike racing game. Though the children were not working on something “educative”, the CIC provided them the opportunity to interact with the computer. By playing games, they are able to demystify their computer phobia by learning about computers through games. The perception that using a computer required one to be highly educated and skilled is disappearing.

Since the CIC in Shantipuram is the only place where computers are accessible to the rural public, it has come as an innovation to the community and afforded them the opportunity to indulge in activities which were unheard of among the rural populations of the region until then. Srinivas, Kedar and Shankar who run the CIC in Shantipuram told the author that the machines were used to a large extent by teachers in nearby schools and colleges for working on MS-Office products and by youngsters in the age group 10-25 for their leisure activities.

The use of ICT’s will also enhance the capability of the people to create and use information which they could use for their development.

Concluding remarks

While ICTs profess to solve the problem of easy information access and socio-economic development, access to ICTs is biased towards the richer segments of society. Telecenters have been development interventions aimed to bridge the contradictions between these two basic traits of ICTs.

Most initiatives on telecenters have been pilot-based and experimental in India. Each telecenter project has different services being offered based on local demand. Information is a critical resource and telecenters are necessary conduits of information in rural areas. The analysis of the CICs in Kuppam has shown that they have been used as rural service delivery points and enabled people in the region to plan and script their own development agenda. They have been important instruments in both citizenship and enterprise development and have had a positive effect on government services delivery. Use of WLL technology, encouragement of local enterprise, increasing use of the services by women and users in the lower economic and social categories need special attention.

Telecenters do have a role to play in socio-economic development, but it requires the supply of dynamic and customized information services suiting the local needs, motivated and committed stakeholders with government playing the role of an involved and inspired facilitator to assist the process. Telecenters are not stand-alone structures. Forward and backward linkages with concerned agencies like the government and civil society need to be strengthened.

The framework developed has been found to be suitable for the evaluation of the CIC project at Kuppam. Its replicability for other areas/regions needs to be carefully analysed.

The scalability of such projects requires backing of facilitators like WCI. The rural population may not have the necessary expertise and innovative skills to demand and design a center on their own. Connectivity and power supply quality will continue to pose huge problems in rural areas, as seen in Kuppam.