Cost is the elephant in the tent of telecentre dreams!

Almost everyone agrees on the telecentre services that are desirable: e-Governance, improved medical access and knowledge, job information, agricultural information, educational resources, and a host of other applications that make up the 'bouquet' of services that a telecentre should provide. Likewise, there is agreement about the essential infrastructure: basic technological and material infrastructure (e.g. reliable power, telecommunication links, and physical infrstructure); motivated, trained and locally-based operators; a personal computer (PC) with broadband access to the Internet; software in the local language and useful applications; and access to locally-relevant information. Operating a telecentre entails other costly requirements: operator income; telecommunication links, equipment maintenance and software updating; training and retraining; hardware and software, etc. A basic arithmetic for these requirements yields a hefty sum for the first year of operation and even more for the total life of the project.

Few would disagree. But when it comes to paying the price, consensus fails.

Some see telecentres as new public goods, vital contributions to the community made possible today by revolutionary Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). As public goods, they are like schools, medical facilities, defence, clean water, police protection, roads and a host of other public services, which by general agreement cannot be adequately supplied by private markets. In other words, they must be provided by the government, or where government fails, by civil society. Government relies on taxes in the interest of public good projects, and civil society depends on private donations. Private enterprise often only serves the rich and privileged, or concentrates on entertainment rather than 'productive' information for the community. In any event, it is alleged, the hope that telecentres will become profit centres is largely refuted by the experience of India in the last decade.

Others, in contrast, believe that if telecentres are to succeed and be genuinely rooted in local communities, they must be based on a for-profit model, enlisting the enthusiasm and local knowledge of young operators. These operators should be drawn from the local community and motivated by idealism and entrepreneurial zeal to provide new knowledge to the communities they serve. Only 'profit' motive and local knowledge can unleash the entrepreneurial energy of a telecentre operator, making it likely that he (or, in rare cases, she) will 'sell' the telecentre to the diverse local constituencies it is meant to serve. The alternative, publicly-financed telecentres, will, instead, produce a familiar pattern of indifferent and sometimes corrupt public employees whose principal motive is doing as little as possible to draw their guaranteed salaries.

Most proposals for funding fall at or between these two polar positions. There are, though, other models where, for example, a corporation backs telecentres that are an integral part of the corporation's core business. (The best examples are ITC-IBD's thousands of e-Choupals, and similar, smaller projects like Warananagar's Wired Villages and EID Parry's IndiaAgriline (Parry's Corners). All operate telecentres as an integral part of the firm's core business, and only incidentally as a freestanding community service provider. Services not central to the corporation's main business are sometimes offered but are incidental.)

The two contributors to this debate are unusually experienced and persuasive proponents of their views, though they reach diametrically opposed conclusions. Subbiah Arunachalam's long and successful experience is largely with telecentres supported by a well-funded NGO. That experience leads him to conclude that public funds are the only reliable source of long-term support for telecentres that benefit all stakeholders. Dwight Wilson, also with many years of development work and almost ten years of ICT work, argues equally passionately, on the basis of his experience, that for-profit telecentres are not only feasible, but are the only kind of telecentres that can provide long term sustainability in the face of instability in case of government and NGO funding.

Their lively exchange should stimulate a useful debate.

Telecentres are Public Goods

Subbiah Arunachalam  is an independent writer and researcher with interests in ICT-enabled development, science studies and scholarly communication. He is on the international advisory board of International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) and on the board of trustees of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development and Voicing the Voiceless Foundation. He is on the editorial boards of half a dozen journals including Journal of Information Science and Scientometrics and on the board of the International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics.

e-mail: arun@...  

India has seen the emergence of different kinds of telecentres since the late 1990s. The community telecentre model was first adopted by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai. With financial support from International Development Research Centre (IDRC), MSSRF started setting up telecentres in the villages of Pondicherry, using the hub-and-spokes model. Today the MSSRF project consists of 17 village resource centres (VRCs) and 96 village knowledge centres (VKCs) spread over six states.

The philosophy of the community model is simple – how can we use ICTs to alleviate poverty and play a role in the holistic development of the community? If the application of the tools of modern biology could empower Indian farmers to transform their country from virtually a begging bowl to a food surplus country in the late 1960s and 1970s, surely we could use ICTs to make a difference in our fight against poverty. The trick is not in technology but in the intelligent and innovative use of technology. If individuals cannot afford technology, then the solution is in getting the community as a whole to use it collectively. ICTs are not seen as a technical solution on their own but as enablers in a process of local prioritisation and problem-solving. The success of the programme owes to embedding ICTs in a holistic approach encompassing a diverse range of development initiatives.

Often people ask me about the sustainability of the model and by sustainability they mean long-term financial viability. I tell them about the enormous social benefits that accrue from sharing knowledge and building partnerships that the community telecentres facilitate. Ever since the MSSRF hub at Villianur started in 1999 to provide wave height forecasts downloaded from a US Navy website to fishermen living in coastal villages, not a single fisherman has died in the sea. As far as I know, no for-profit telecentre provides such life-saving information. Telecentres set up in predominantly Dalit villages such as Kalitheerthalkuppam and Thirukanchipet have empowered the youth and women in these villages. Owners of for-profit telecentres will hardly ever think of setting up one in such villages.

The fee-based telecentres set up by a well-meaning group of academics in southern India did not survive for long, even after it received support from academics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard. Development is far more than academic excellence and expertise in technology. The franchisees paid the setting up costs upfront to the company set up by the academics but could not carry on with the business, even after the intervention of an established civil society organisation. Even when for-profit telecentres start providing free services the tendency of the franchisee is to concentrate on services that would bring in revenue.

There is no reason why anyone should grumble about community telecentres receiving funds from outside the community. After all, virtually every educated Indian was educated with a tremendous amount of government subsidy. The fee students pay is a very small part of the overall costs of education. It is ironic that those who were educated with public subsidy should argue against public funding of telecentres that would benefit the rural poor and the marginalised. Every year the Government of India and the state governments write-off millions of rupees – waiving debts, water and electricity charges, etc. which for the most part benefit rich farmers. 
Community telecentres of the MSSRF kind do not stop with mere provision of information. They go one step further and build skills and facilitate setting up micro-enterprises. They have tied up with Microsoft to train thousands of people in the use of computers through the Unlimited Potential Programme; and with Intel to help young people become creative through the Intel Learn programme. They have helped semi-literate women to set up small businesses producing bio-pesticides such as Trichogramma, Trichoderma viride and Pseudomonas fluorescence. They have also helped a young woman volunteer to conduct a technology-aided literacy programme whereby using a touch-screen PC, a digital camera and a CD-writer and locally developed curriculum she has helped about a hundred people of all ages to become functionally literate. I do not know of a single for-profit telecentre doing such things.

The staffs of community telecentres have a range of roles from working with the village centres, to creating databases of material in local languages and providing computer training and organising other skill-building programmes. What is more, the staffs at the community telecentres work with the members of the community who are partners in development and not mere clients. This inclusiveness is a vital part of the community telecentre. In the fee-based centres, it is just carrying on with business – providing specific services and collecting money. In contrast, community telecentres are designed to reach the unreached and to give marginalised rural communities the chance to be part of the global village.

"While most telecentres that have failed to deliver are like Cadillacs in rural areas, the Swaminathan knowledge centres are like barefoot doctors and the Green Revolution, both of which have delivered and are appropriate to their contexts," wrote Alfonso Gumucio Dagron. The for-profit telecentres are just that – they are mere business operations and have very little to do with development.

After a visit to the community-based knowledge centres in Pondicherry, Bruce Alberts, Professor and former President of the National Academy of Sciences, USA wrote: "Drawing on this concept, I envision a global electronic network that connects scientists to people at all levels — farmers' organisations and village women, for example. The network will allow them to easily access the scientific and technical knowledge that they need to solve local problems and enhance the quality of their lives, as well as to communicate their own insights and needs back to scientists. As scientists, we need to study and learn from these experiments - so as to make a science out of connecting the world to knowledge resources. With technology moving so fast, it is critical to 'learn by doing' in this way, so that we learn how to make the next wave of technology even more useful for productive and sustainable economic development."

I am not saying that all other models are useless. The model you choose depends on the context and what you want to achieve. Horses for courses, as they say. If you are in the business of working with the truly poor and the marginalised and if you believe in holistic development, then you will find the community telecentre model irresistible. When Professor Swaminathan launched 'Mission 2007: Every Village a Knowledge Centre', he quoted Chairman Mao's famous statement, "Let a thousand flowers bloom".  There is a place for different models to coexist and even work together. Sharing knowledge and building partnerships among them would surely be worthy of pursuing.

Only For-profit Telecentres can be Sustainable

DWIGHT  WILSON is the CEO, OneRoof, Inc. San Francisco, USA.  He has spent twenty-five years in the field of international development: in the public, NGO, and private sectors. Dwight holds a graduate degree in History from Yale University. In 1993, Dwight founded Earth Corps, a youth service and environmental restoration programme headquartered in Seattle that has provided long-term training for hundreds of environmental leaders from over sixty countries. It was through Earth Corps that Dwight became colleagues with several men and women from developing countries who co-founded World Corps with him in 1998. World Corps provided training for young adult entrepreneurs in rural areas of India, Mexico, Kenya, and the Philippines to set up telecentres. In 2005, Dwight and other World Corps colleagues transformed the NGO into OneRoof, a San Francisco-headquartered Corporation. 

e-mail: dwight@...

For the five years between 2000 and 2005, I directed World Corps, an NGO that provided training for young adult entrepreneurs to create rural telecentres in India, Mexico, Kenya, and the Philippines. 

Three years ago, several of my colleagues and I transformed World Corps into OneRoof, a for-profit social enterprise with headquarters in San Francisco.  Through a subsidiary in India's Tamil Nadu state, OneRoof is rolling out a network of franchised rural telecentres that are using the Internet to provide an ever-growing range of services in the areas of information, communication, education, financial services, and eventually employment generation. (OneRoof did similar work over the last 2.5 years in Mexico, but just closed operations there.)

In sum, I have been on both sides of the for-profit/non-profit telecentre debate.  I can unequivocally say I support the for-profit model, primarily for two reasons: scale and impact.

Eight years ago, there were so few large-scale telecentre models that it could be argued that subsidies or philanthropic donations were needed to jumpstart the field. We are well beyond that argument today. While rural telecentres remain a challenging business, there have been enough successes. And there is a deep enough body of knowledge regarding services, infrastructure, training, selection of entrepreneurs, etc. which is why we need to focus on improving access to loans rather than focus on subsidies and donations.

Select the right entrepreneur with the right location, train and supervise him/her well, facilitate a fair loan, provide the right services and business tools – and there is a good chance that the entrepreneur will have a profitable business. A profitable business is a sustainable business. If the concept is sustainable, it's replicable. If replicable, it's scalable. If scalable, real impact can be seen. And I trust that my colleagues in the telecentre world are in this for the same reason as I am: to see real impact in the lives of the world's poor.  

The for-profit route is the only way. I can see telecentres getting quickly to a large percentage, if not all of India's 600,000 plus villages, to take one example.

When I started in this field, I thought entrepreneurs would be driven primarily by the need for a good return on investment and secondarily by a desire to do good. What has surprised me has been the appeal to their reputation that a telecentre business offers.  Entrepreneurs are often the first people to bring computers and Internet to their towns, and their fellow citizens inherently understand the potential importance of IT on their lives and their children's.  Many entrepreneurs—especially younger ones in their 20s— have told us they feel very proud to be doing this work, that they are respected in a way they never anticipated.  This is a powerful motivator for entrepreneurs in addition to the need to see sufficient income to provide for their families. 

I moved from the NGO world to the for-profit world in part, because I was tired of pathologies in the NGO (and public) sector.  Here is an example that hastened my move. At World Corps, we had selected and trained the first few entrepreneurs about to open their own telecentres in India.  We gathered for an opening ceremony with top regional government officials. And there was a long delay. I went into a back room to find two officials from different agencies arguing over which agency should provide the loans to our entrepreneurs. Worse, they then told me they'd forgive the loans and turn them into grants.  We refused – and to this day we still have entrepreneurs repaying those loans.

The needs of the world's rural poor are so significant and the opportunity to alleviate suffering via a sustainable business model so appealing, that we really owe it to ourselves to banish the subsidies and donations, and then do the hard work both at the village level and in the lenders' boardrooms. If we do, we will see various private telecentre models become so sustainable that they will scale up quickly and effectively – and thus help to improve the lives of more and more millions of people every day.

REMEMBERANCE

The Editorial team of the telecentre magazine and telecentre.org community fondly remembers Late Prof V K Samaranayake, 'Father of Information Technology' in Sri Lanka. Born to Mr and Mrs V W Samaranayake on May 22, 1939, Samaranayeke went on to serve the University of Colombo for the next 43 years after completing his graduation.

In 2004, Prof Samaranayake became the chairman of the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA), the government agency governing the ICT in Sri Lanka; he held the post till his death in 2007.

Prof Samaranayake died in Stockholm, Sweden on the 6th June, 2007. At the time of his death he was involved in introducing ICT to rural communities and was engaged in developing Multipurpose Community Telecentres. He was a pioneer of the Sri Lankan Telecentre Movement.