Digital Pulse - Ch 3 - Sec 2 - Chhattisgarh Online information for Citizen Empowerment (CHOiCE) Project

Development Issues: Education, Girls empowerment, Sexual and Reproductive Health

Programme Summary

Chhattisgarh is a relatively economically and socially depressed State with an essentially rural (80%) and tribal (32.5%) character. The State's financial resources are modest. Teledensity is less than half the national average. Internet subscribers are less than five per ten thousand people. The State was created a little over a year ago without basic state level infrastructure. Many schools had to be connected to electric lines before computers could be placed. At other places, extra rooms had to be constructed. Suitable instructors were not available locally in remote villages and these had to be drafted from cities.

CHIPs philosophy is that the: “Internet is a network of Computers, and Society is a network of Human Beings. ISS is about empowering an entire generation of a quarter million schoolgirls through IT, to lead the initiative for creating a Seamless Society with Global Opportunities in the essentially rural-tribal State of Chhattisgarh in India.” The plan is to introduce computer and IT training curriculum into all 1605 government high schools. The result is a large cohort of girls who have received 4 years of IT instruction on nationally approved CBSE norms. The programme will be implemented through a unique public-private partnership wherein entrepreneurs have been provided space in the schools and permitted to use the facilities outside of school hours.

Summary of ICT Initiatives

In the Chhattisgarh Online information for Citizen Empowerment (CHOiCE) Project, ISS girls would share networked hand held and desktop community computers in villages and would route information and information-enabled services of local relevance. In the process, they would emerge as technology resource persons and community leaders. The pilot phase of CHOiCE is under implementation in 246 Villages Council (Panchayat) headquarter villages and, ultimately, all 9,129 Village Councils in the State will be included. Government has earmarked US$ 4.6 million for CHOiCE. ISS volunteers will also assist in the creation of a Citizen Database and Village Resources Database for CHOiCE as part of the People's Reports initiative in association with the UNDP and the Planning Commission of India.

Programme Objectives include the:

• Seamless access to IT education for all girls in high schools is the immediate goal. The ultimate goal is empowering them to lead the initiative for a Seamless Society.
• Re-skewing of the imbalance of boys to girls in the schooling system, an area that necessitates affirmative action. This is reinforced by the identification of girls as change agents.
• The development of a knowledge society characterized by symmetric access to information and knowledge. In order to facilitate this, ISS volunteers will serve as a human network to create ‘last person connectivity.'

In CHOiCE, ISS volunteers would share networked hand-held community computers in villages and would route information and information-enabled services of local relevance. In the process, they would emerge as technology resource persons and community leaders in a society where girls have been traditionally marginalized. Leadership and empowerment will be the core incentive for them. Since maximizing monetary returns would not be the motivation, they would ensure seamless access to information for empowering the 'last person' in society.

The costs involved in taking technology seamlessly to every person on individual basis in a State where 35% are still illiterate and 40% live below the poverty line are daunting. Instead, in CHOiCE, the technological network would reach in a portable fashion to the village and the human network would provide information access on a shared community basis. This would bridge the last lap of 'last person connectivity' in a cost-effective manner.

A local language solution providing integration of legacy data with platform independent end-to-end scaleable local language capability has been identified with the assistance of the National Centre for Software Technology. This solves the problem of diversity of incompatible local language solutions. The solution, already in the beta testing stage, will be ready for the forthcoming academic session beginning July.

Observations

The level of acceptance by the community has been encouraging. Even in the first year, of 46,273 students paid for by the Government, another 9,000 odd paid their own fee. Three Local Governments (Janpada Panchayats) resolved to provide US$ 511,000 for the CHOiCE initiative to network all their 246 Village Councils headquarter villages seamlessly with ISS girls as the volunteer corps for this. Organizers hope that ISS can be replicated easily elsewhere in India and in the developing world, provided that governments share the vision and have the will to pursue the project.

Partners: Chhattisgarh State Government, AISECT, UNDP, NCST (National Centre for Software Technology), NIC (National Informatics Centre).

Source: The CHIPS website and the ISS website.

For More Information Contact:

CHiPS
204-A Mantralaya
D.K.S. Bhawan Raipur
492 001
Tel: 91 (771) 221204 / 221304
Telefax: 91 (771) 221304
Email: chips@nic.in