The African delegation had a rare opportunity of listening to a foremost disaster management expert on Sunday, when Prof N Vinod Chandra Menon, member of India’s statutory National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) shared his views on exploiting advances in ICT for disaster communication.

ICT is the only efficient vehicle that can take the message to people in the times of disasters. During disasters, it is very important that the affected community receive the right information. This will help the local community can get into action swiftly. When a disaster strikes it is very important that people help each other, as waiting for external assistance will always lead to higher loss of human lives and property, he said. If the right message is available, many tragedies can be averted, he opined.

Prof. Menon informed that the delegation that NDMA is proposing to use CSCs, which are being set up in different provinces in the country, for spreading disaster preparedness and emergency response awareness among the communities.
Harnessing right technologies are very important, he said adding with the increasing profusion of ICT will prove to be a boon in the fight against natural disasters and reducing casualties in the decades to come, Prof. Menon said.

He said India and Africa can learn a lot from each other in disaster management.

The African delegation had a rare opportunity of listening to a foremost disaster management expert on Sunday, when Prof N Vinod Chandra Menon, member of India’s statutory National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) shared his views on exploiting advances in ICT for disaster communication.

ICT is the only efficient vehicle that can take the message to people in the times of disasters. During disasters, it is very important that the affected community receive the right information. This will help the local community can get into action swiftly. When a disaster strikes it is very important that people help each other, as waiting for external assistance will always lead to higher loss of human lives and property, he said. If the right message is available, many tragedies can be averted, he opined.

Prof. Menon informed that the delegation that NDMA is proposing to use CSCs, which are being set up in different provinces in the country, for spreading disaster preparedness and emergency response awareness among the communities.
Harnessing right technologies are very important, he said adding with the increasing profusion of ICT will prove to be a boon in the fight against natural disasters and reducing casualties in the decades to come, Prof. Menon said.

He said India and Africa can learn a lot from each other in disaster management.

The West Bengal leg of the study tour by the African delegation came to a conclusion on Saturday with an inspiring address by the state’s Panchayat and Rural Development Special Secretary Ranjit Kumar Maiti.

Maiti, who has played a key role in the CSC movement in the state, told the delegates that there are potential linkages between ICT and broad-based development in the areas of education, health and economic and social development of rural areas.

The state government’s decision to embrace ICT and set up CSCs stems from this realisation. The public private partnership (PPP) model adopted by the West Bengal government is apt for CSC because it seeks to combine three things: the government’s eagerness to connect to its people, managerial innovations of the private sector which acts as service centre agency and entrepreneurial skills of a village level entrepreneur.

While delivering government services electronically is the key objective of the CSC, a centre cannot be sustained just by this. That is where B2C and B2B services come into play. The experience has shown that an enthusiastic entrepreneur will be able to earn as much as Rs 15,000 (nearly USD 300) a month from running the CSC. The West Bengal government plans to set up 6797 CSCs in rural areas and another 700 CSCs in urban localities. Till November 30, 3,337 CSCs are operational. The rest will be added by March 31, 2010.

Some of the key challenges for the roll-out of CSCs, according to him, are rigid mindset of the decision makers, lack of physical and IT infrastructure at various levels and dearth of sustainable resources. The officials should realise “service is not a mercy but a right of people.” They should also be willing to tolerate “genuine failures” while experimenting with the model.

Usha Mishra Hayes, vice president for sustainable development and media business at SREI Sahaj e-Village, who addressed the delegates subsequently, informed them about a diagnostic kit for agricultural diseases that her firm has developed and patented. Using this, village level entrepreneurs will be able to assist farmers to identify problems afflicting the crops.

The delegates visited the data centre located at the headquarters of SREI Sahaj e-village in Kolkata after the meeting. The visit was wrapped up in the evening with a free-wheeling interaction with state government SREI Sahaj e-Village officials at Silver Spring Club in the city. The delegation later left for New Delhi, the Indian capital city which would host a two-day Africa-India Dialogue from Monday.

The high-level delegation from 14 African countries on Thursday visited two Common Service Centres (CSCs) in rural parts of Eastern Indian state of West Bengal.
The CSCs in West Bengal are being set up as per a tripartite agreement between the state government, a private firm which is responsible for providing software and hardware for CSCs and village level entrepreneurs who will eventually run the CSCs on the day to day basis. West Bengal plans to set up a total of 6797 CSCs in rural areas and another 700 in urban areas of the state.

The state government has mandated that there should be

at least one CSC for every 10,000 people and if the population in a local administration area (which is called Gram Panchayat in local parlance) exceeds 10,000, there should be an additional CSC. It is also warranted that if local panchayat office can accommodate, the CSC should be located there. The delegation’s first visit was to a telecentre in Nasibpur in Hooghly district, which is about 40 kilometres away from the state capital of Kolkata. The centre uses V-Sat for connectivity and offers a large number of G2C and B2C services, apart from imparting e-learning. It also offers offline services such as digital photography, desktop publishing and photocopy. The centre accepts payments towards electricity, telephone and insurance premium. The needy can also use the CSC for buying their train and air tickets.
Ms Usha Mishra Hayes, Vice President of Sustainable Development and Media Business for SREI Sahaj e-Village Limited, the private firm which is rolling out the services together with a village level entrepreneur at each CSC, briefed the delegates about operational details of the centre. According to her, what is important is that the telecentre’s power requirement has been kept to minimum by using laptops rather than desktops as the rural areas suffer unannounced power outages and more often than not need to use generator for functioning.

 The next stop for the group was Dasghara, another village in Hooghly district. The Dasghara CSC is located in a local administration office, unlike the Nasibpur CSC which is operating from a private commercial property.

Subsequently, the delegation visited the headquarters of state-owned electric utility WBSEDC in Kolkata to understand how the service provider which uses the CSCs to receive payment towards electricity bills. The WBSEDC officials said it has signed an agreement with SREI Sahaj e-Village. Under the agreement, it ahs authorised the CSCs to accept the bill payment on its behalf. Anybody who pays the electricity bill at the CSC will receive a receipt which carries the logo and stamp of the utility company. The utility company officials said they pay about 1.7 per cent of its revenue collected online are given back to the CSCs, which is shared equally between SREI and local entrepreneur.

SREI Sahaj e-Village CEO Sabahat Azim and West Bengal IT Secretary Siddarth gave a detailed account on how the CSC rollout is taking place in the state. SREI Sahaj e-Village is also setting up CSCs in five other states, apart from West Bengal.

The African delegation on study visit of India on Thursday wrapped up the second leg of the tour – to the southern Indian state of Karnataka – by visiting a citizen centric e-governance project in rural Karnataka.

The visit to a telecentre in a village located 45 kilometres from state capital city of Bangalore helped the delegates appreciate different kind of activities undertaken by the rural e-governance project, called Nemmadi (Nemmadi in local Kannada language means “peace of mind”. There are currently 769 Nemmadi telecentres in Karnataka.

"The main idea behind the project is to bring the administration closer to the common man and have a single window for all government services at the village level,” said Jayateerth Gururaj, state coordinator for CSCs.

The telecentres offer as many as 40 services, the most important one being the digitised land records. Besides, a villager does not have to travel the faraway district headquarters for getting various certificates issued normally by the district administration.

“A citizen who had to spend a whole day and a minimum of Indian Rupees 150 to get services by way of bus fares and money given to officials to get the certificates, will have to pay just Rs. 15 as service fee at the telecentre, Mr Gururaj said. The services include registration of life and death, income certificate, marriage certificate, residence certificate, etc. The telecentres have also recently started railway reservation and accepting payment towards electricity and telephone.

The delegation in the evening left for Kolkata. Next two days, the delegates will visit rural telecentres in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.