Empowering the Poor: Information and Communications Technology for Governance and Poverty Reduction

This 179-page publication offers an analysis of a research project covering 18 of India's information technology for development projects in order to understand influences that would lead to new strategies for scaling up projects in 2007. With recognition that many projects have established technology centres to help the rural poor, researchers used surveys and interviews as well as elaboration of case studies to analyse whether projects were reaching goals of utilisation by communities to improve lives and livelihoods through better access to education, agricultural information, weather, health information, and markets.

Results indicate the following strategies:

• Prioritise attention to training staff for consumer service: skills in organising the community to continually expand use of the technology, competence in face-to-face consumer interactions, and skills for dependable maintenance of technology.
• Choose a sustainable business model. Public-private partnerships were the most sustainable model studied.
  Offer a wide range of services with the most basic technology possible.
• Offer services that closely suit community needs.
• Work towards equity and stakeholder capacity building at all levels, cultivate a social and political acceptance, and aim for social appropriation of technology and innovation by users.

A sampling of the scope and scale of the 18 projects used as case studies follows:


Anand Milk Collection Centres in Gujarat serve 578,000 cooperative farmers. Computerisation of weighing milk and measuring fat content of milk in 691 collection centres at time of delivery gives farmers immediate payment and transparency in a system that formerly left some of them feeling short changed and without recourse for query.

Bhoomi-Bangalore, Karnataka has a government land ownership record system that is computerised showing 20 million records of 6.7 million farmers who can access them from 177 kiosks in the region.

Vidyal Information Service Provider (VISP) in Tamil Nadu supports 2,000 women with six village technology projects that provide centres with services such as agricultural commodities prices, horoscopes, matrimonial services, data entry job possibilities, net-to-phone communication and basic computer education.

Following summary project descriptions, the study benchmarks projects based on responses to a survey of 2,156 users as well as stakeholder interviews. Projects were analysed and ranked by their relevance, service delivery, community participation and empowerment, equality in decision-making and benefits, sustainability, replicability and their prospects for being scaled-up.

The publication then gives an extensive background of the current state of information and communication technology development in India and its position among other Asia-Pacific nations. It reiterates the position of the rural poor against this picture of extensive tech sector development. It next discusses selection criteria of the 18 projects. Case studies are presented with a high degree of evaluative detail including lessons learned from each case.