• Telecentres & kiosks

Telecentres and kiosks

This paper focuses on scalability, sustainability and collaboration aspects in building infokiosks or knowledge centres in India.

It summarises viewpoints from an e- discussion, Video Conference and the Task Force Reports which emerged out of the National Policy Makers’ Workshop held in July 2004 in New Delhi. This Workshop envisaged the launch of Mission 2007, a nation-wide movement facilitating the setting up of knowledge centres/ infokiosks in each of India’s 600,000 villages by the year 2007.

The paper elaborates key determinants for achieving the sustainability, scalability and collaboration framework for establishing infokiosks in every village in India. These include:

• Scalability: reliable hardware, software and connectivity are the key success factors for scaling up infokiosks movement. Infokiosks need to be built up using latest technologies and technologies that can be customised according to local needs and environment. Feasibility of integrating community broadcasting facility into infokiosks needs to be experimented. Economic viability enhances its scalability and rollout in a large scale, so is the economic incentive from government. Information available through infokiosks shall be made available in local languages and should be retrieved from a user-friendly interface. Infokiosks can promote the use of locally relevant content aiming towards enhancing livelihood opportunities and promoting sustainable development.
• Sustainability: Government has a critical role in infrastructure development ensuring sustainability of infokiosks. Both community engagement and long term investment strategy have been recognised as key drivers for infokiosk’s sustainability. The role of civil society organisations as the facilitators for community participation and capacity building is pointed out. Academic institutions can help materialising this effort though their innovation and research, especially by harnessing the potential of distance learning techniques. The private sector can lead in financing and scalability.
• Collaboration: multi-stakeholder partnership synergising the efforts of government, private sector, civil society organisations and local communities can help the infokiosks movement harness ‘complete solutions’ for building its technology and content. By providing physical infrastructure, financial assistance to local entrepreneurs and subsidising the Rural Service Providers (RSPs), the public sector plays a significant role in scaling-up the infokiosks movement. The corporate sector can collaborate with other sectors as part of their corporate social responsibility programs. Civil society acts as making government more transparent on policy and resources issues, besides creating public awareness of the scope of ICTs in development.

Community needs assessment ensures effective design and implementation of infokiosk’s services for the service population. It is recommended that creating an appropriate human development framework has to be seen as the necessary precondition for ushering a knowledge- based economy in India. [author's abstract]

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