Warana
Unwired:
We have run an
experiment replacing a PC based system for helping a rural sugarcane
cooperative with a mobile phone based system. The new mobile system replicates
almost all of the PC based functionality, and is cheaper, adds additional
functionality and is more popular.
We believe that this is the first
project of its kind in developing regions where an entire PC setup has been
replaced with mobile phones.
Presentation
summarizing the work we did in Warana.
Download the SMS tool kit that powered this
work.
Here are more details about the work.
Context:
Warana is a village
located in Rural India, in the state of Maharashtra. The sugarcane cooperative
is serving about 70,000 farmers across 75 villages. The government of India in
1998 started a pilot experiment to bridge the digital divide by setting up this
project referred to as the Warana Wired Village project. It is touted as Asia’s
first computing intervention in rural areas of this scale. The project was introduced
in 1998 jointly with government of India funding 50%, government of Maharashtra
funding 40% and 10% from the Warana Cooperative. The total amount that was
spent on this pilot project was $500,000. Under this project 54 kiosks are
established to connect 40,000 farmers across the different villages. Since it
was a pilot, the original goals of the project were understandably very
exploratory. The original goals of the project were to give internet access to
farmers, to allow farmers to check market prices so that they can sell the
produce to the market that was offering them the best price and to setup a
remote agricultural advisory system. For various reasons, these did not work
out.
The cooperative then
turned around and started using these kiosks for remote bookkeeping.
The farmers used the kiosks to check their
sugarcane output each farmers produce, track their fertilizer outputs, issuing
harvesting permits and to get their pay stubs. There is a kiosk operator, who
serves as the intermediary to give access to these farmers.
Problems with the
existing System:
It is indeed amazing that these kiosks are still running after 8
years after their original installation, it is rare you see rural computing
projects running for this long. That said, the PCs were running into many
issues due to the rugged rural conditions and the maintenance cost were
shooting up steadily. Power is a huge issue in these rural places, and they had
UPS backups that would help with it. It costs money to replace them and that
also added to the maintenance costs.
Research question:
Can we preserve the
functionality of the existing PC based system while making the entire system
cheaper and more effective?
Our solution:
Before After
We replaced the client PCs with SMS enabled phones. On the
server, we attached a smart phone through USB to their PC server. So, we
effectively have an SMS gateway
that receives incoming SMS messages and converts into database calls and the
response was also converted to an SMS message and the result sent back to the
phone that sent it. The authentication was through the SIM card (essentially
the phone number).
Results:
We found that all the
application scenarios they had could be converted using the SMS enabled phones.
The system is now available 24 hours, and we have farmers using the data on a
few occasions at odd times like 3.30 in the morning. The solution is truly
mobile and the farmers are using it in places like the tea shops, front of the
farmer fields and in the kiosks. In most cases they use the kiosk operator (who
is now the phone operator) as the intermediary to send the SMS messages. There
is a potential saving of over a million rupees($22,000, which is a big deal in
these contexts) if the cooperative completely switched from the PCs to the
mobile phones, this is primarily due to the savings from the maintenance costs
of the PCs. We are working with the Warana cooperative to see whether they want
to scale this to all of the 54 villages they are operating.
We hope this will lead
to many more SMS applications throughout the world.
People involved: Rajesh
Veeraraghavan, Vibhore Goyal, Naga Yasodhar, Sean Blagsvedt, Kentaro Toyama and
Warana Sugarcane cooperative.
Contact details: Rajesh Veeraraghavan, rajeshv (at) microsoft
(dot) com