Rajiv Internet Village — delivering IT power to villages

Rajiv Internet Village (RAJiv) is an e-governance initiative, conceptualized
and started by eGov-Services and powered by Sun Microsystems' open source
infrastructure.

Supported by government of Andhra Pradesh and leading banks such as State Bank
of India, the initiative involves identifying local entrepreneurs and giving
them complete support to set up an e-commerce kiosk. This kiosk offers a wide
spectrum of services to the local residents, thus not only benefiting the
entrepreneur to earn from transaction commissions, but also enables the entire
village to benefit with services, which this kiosk brings to their doorsteps.

Elaborating about the project Jaijit Bhattacharya, Country Director —
Government Strategy, Sun Microsystems said, “The objective of this initiative
is to enable poor families, based in Visakhapatnam, to benefit from e-commerce
applications. Star­ted in August 2004, it today connects 200 villages, directly
benefiting around 0.2 million people and total transactions on the system have
already crossed Rs 8 crore. The project also has been nominated under the 'Economic
Development' category for the revered Stockholm Challenger 2006 Awards.”

Around 73 kiosks have been set up under the project so far and already more than
2.8 lakh transactions have been implemented on the network. “Right from
project financing to the various services it offers, care has been taken to
ensure that it is not dependant on any government subsidies. New and unique
services have been introduced to ensure continuity and sustaina­bility of the
business. Using revolutionary open source infrastructure from Sun Microsystems,
we have ensured that the project is easily executable, replicable and easily
scalable,” Bhattacharya explained.

It is being estimated that in next two years, all 2,000 villages will be brought
under the ambit of this project and around two million villagers will benefit
from the e-commerce success. The AP government has already studied the project
in detail and plans to implement it throughout the state, thus benefiting around
eight million citizens.

Once implemented the project will offer:

• G2C services: Varied certificated from government departments like caste
  certificates, birth and death certificates, residence certificates and income
  certificates
• B2C services: Electricity bill payments of Andhra Pradesh Transmission Company
  Ltd; state bus tickets of Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation;
  telephone bill payments of BSNL, Reliance Info-comm and Tata Indicom; mobile
  bill payments of BSNL CellOne, Reliance Infocom, Tata Indicom and Airtel;
  railway reservations by IRCTC and courier service to transfer couriers from one
  mandal to another
• Other Services: Varied services like e-employment, information based services,
  Spandana for citizens petitions and grievances, e-education, computer aided
  learning, Azim Premji Foundation CDs, tele-health and entertainment will also be
  made available to the people

What makes this project unique?

Through this project, the AP government aims to spread the reach of e-commerce
out to the grassroots. Right now villagers residing in 200 villages in
Visakhapatnam district already have access to e-commerce benefits but in the
next two years the project targets to get in its purview around 2,000 villages
and provide the villagers with access to e-commerce applications.

Under this project, the AP government has established tele-centers in rural
areas, which are manned by local people. The owner of the tele-centers who is
usually from the local community uses eGovServices' Service Delivery
Technology Stack for all the families of the village for all e-commerce service.
For example if someone needs to book a railway ticket all they need to do is to
go to the tele-centers, pay cash and the tele-center operator will use the
eGovServices' Service Delivery Technology Stack for booking the ticket. This
is e-commerce services are making cutting down the transaction costs for the
villagers by saving traveling expenses and also the premium that they used to
pay for availing such services.

Challenges

The varied challenges that the project faces while implementation:

Technical: The slow speed of Internet connection and frequent disconnections are
some of the major challenges in rural areas at the moment. Connectivity
thro­ugh existing modes of communication is still a challenge as the
reliability and bandwidth is still not anywhere near the promised potential.
Also the distributed nature of application increases the cost of deploying
additional patches and updates to client-side application both in terms of
manpower and time. To upgrade the capacities of kiosk operators is a big
challenge though IT modules have mitigated this challenge to a great extent.

Operational: Transfer of finances through existing financial infrastructure in
rural areas, is a challenge owing to slow speed of transfer of funds from rural
banks to urban banks and high transaction charges. There is also a limitation of
readily available loans/ lease in rural areas compared to urban areas. Process
re-engineering in existing financial departments of service providers is
indispensable to support the service delivery through kiosks. However,
synchronization of vision between the strategy/ operations department and
financial department is far from reality.

Ways in which Sun is planning to support this project: Sun has a host of open-source, open-standard, supporting packages that would
enable key functionalities such as identity management etc for technical stack
to be deployed for 1,00,000 centers. As a next step, Sun is planning to support
the inclusion of these packages to evolve the technical stack that would support
1,00,000 kiosks in India.