Wiring India's Villages

In 1997, satellite TV came to the Warana sugarcane-growing region of Maharashtra state, some 250 miles southeast of Bombay, and the ground started moving under the farming village of Pokhale. "Even one-year-olds started shaking their hips like those MTV girls," says farmer Shantappa Ghewari. More than a year later, another magical box was installed in the village, and Pokhale became one of 70 villages in the region to take part in the "Wired Village Warana," a $600,000 information-technology project initiated by the federal government. All the villages in the area have computer kiosks that are linked to a central network, and training centers have been opened in six villages to impart computer education to rural youth and provide access to the Internet.

Connectivity promises to transform a way of life that could be mistaken for timeless. Warana's project is providing farmers with access to essential information. The network keeps detailed records of all transactions with local sugar and milk cooperatives; it lists prices of farm produce in the region's agricultural markets (to help farmers decide what to plant or where to sell their produce); and it offers a daily weather forecast.

The network also helps reduce a major anxiety plaguing local farmers. Once a sugarcane crop is ready to harvest, each day's delay reduces its sugar content and the money the farmer can get from a cooperative for his crop. The Pokhale cooperative owns only one harvester, which is usually monopolized by bigger, more influential farmers. But now the harvesting dates for every village and farm are available on the network, and farmers can complain to the cooperative chief if the harvester fails to arrive at the appointed hour. Ghewari, 63, who grows cane in a five-acre field, was quick to see the phosphorescent writing on the wall. He made his only son, Bhalchandra, give up a tire-company job to become Pokhale's first computer operator. Said the farmer as he sat near a computer kiosk: "The sky and the earth are changing."

India is attempting to duplicate the Warana experiment in other parts of the country, if its notoriously inefficient bureaucracy allows this. Nearly two years after the project was launched at Warana, for example, the state government has yet to make digital copies of the region's land records, an essential step for simplifying land transactions and revenue collection.