Apparently, Fair and Lovely makes you fairer in 14 days. Apparently, drinking Milo ensures that you can be good at studies, sports and other activities without any effort. Apparently, rural computerization is necessary.
Computers have a wide variety of uses. They allow fast and painless organization of data, they allow instantaneous communication across the globe, they allow you to make your life go according to a fixed schedule. Now just think about this for a moment. I am a farmer, I wake up at sunrise, go to my field, work with my buffalo all day long, eat my meals, gossip with other farmers in my village in the evening and do pretty much nothing else. Now what on earth am I going to do with a computer? I have almost no data to organize, everybody I care about communicating with lives in my village, or at the most an hour’s walk away and it would me well nigh impossible to make my life go by a simpler routine. To sum it up, the average Indian farmer who owns just about enough land to live off, has absolutely no need for a computer. This topic means just about the same as giving your five your child a private helicopter to commute to and from school, just because the school bus takes half an hour longer.
Yes, I agree, farmers aren’t the only people in rural India. There are traditional artisans, shepherds, small-time businessmen and of course there are the people who are slightly better off and may be in the village panchayats. For most of these people, it’s the farmer story with a few technical variations. Yes, it may be helpful linking the panchayats in one vast computer network, but just because its helpful doesn’t mean that it’s necessary.
Since there appears to be a lot of factual information being used here, let me use a fact of my own. Over half of the workers in rural India get daily wages amounting to about 8 rupees. That’s about the same price as bottle of Coke. Imagine going through the whole day, paying for food and transport on just Rs. 8. Imagine doing this for each and every day of your life. I wouldn’t be able to do it, I don’t think anyone else here would be able to do that. Now I ask you, which is “necessary”, rural computerization, or ensuring that every man, woman and child in India gets four square meals a day? The funds required for adequate rural computerization would run into a few crores of rupees. Now if that money were invested in irrigation projects, or establishing fair economic co-operatives in the villages, we might be able to produce enough food to feed a billion people.
On top of that villages aren’t exactly the best place for placing computers. About this time last year fifteen of us from our school went to a village and spent a day and night with a village family. I’m not sure how many of you have gone to a real village, one which is made of a few houses surrounded for miles by fields, so I’ll give you a first hand account. A village is hot, humid, dusty and dirty. Most people live in mud huts which get washed away with every flood. Phone lines are non-existent, electricity is uncommon and running water downright rare. And a place like that is where the opposition wants to put lakhs of rupees worth of computer equipment.
In all likelihood, we would have to establish proper building infrastructure first, then bring in power and telephone lines, maybe a few air-conditioners as well. Only then could we bring in the first computers. In the time that it would take us to do that, there would probably be whole range of problems ranging from natural calamities to a sticky bureaucracy which would only push us farther back.
Rural computerization may have some benefits. But those benefits are too few and far between to justify the required investment in time, money and man power. In addition to the problems I’ve talked about, such a task would require immense man power to teach the villagers how to use computers. It’s one thing to teach school students like us to use computers, it’s quite another to teach people around forty years old to use computers, especially if it’s the first time they’ve heard about computers. We all know how hard it is to teach our grandparents and even our parents how to use computers like we do. If you want to computerize something, computerize hospitals and schools. Give us laptops. At least you’ll be certain that you’re saving a generation from premature back-aches and our parents will bless you with all their hearts for lightening our school bags. But please don’t give the latest IBM ThinkPad to a person who only cares about his plot of land and his buffalo.