The Hindu Business Line : Exit PC, enter Mobile

Zero Mass Foundation, an NGO, has found an innovative way to use mobile phones for payment towards social services provided by the Central government.

The Foundation, in partnership with six banks and a technology company called A Little World, has started a service that enables the Government to implement its flagship social programmes — the National Old Age Pension (NOAP) Scheme and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme across 10 districts in Andhra Pradesh.

In each district covered in the programme in AP, several Customer Service Points (CSPs) have been created by selecting women from the local Self-Help Groups (SHG) who are given a kit consisting of a special mobile phone and accessories.

These kits can process banking transactions such as deposits and withdrawals electronically, through real-time exchange of information with the bank's database at the backend. A biometric scanner to read finger prints and a printer is also connected to the mobile phone to make the transaction secure.

The system has become so successful that ZMF has now appointed nearly 6,000 CSPs serving a total of 1.5 million NREGS payees, 0.7 million pensioners and nearly 0.7 million rural citizens who have opened accounts under the financial inclusion (FI) programme.

In Himachal Pradesh, the State government has started an initiative to give information pertaining to driving licence, arms licence, and vehicle registrations on the applicant's mobile phone.

Under the scheme, applicants would be required to put their mobile numbers on applications submitted to various Departments.

The Departments then inform the applicants about the status of their application through an SMS and also send an SMS once the work is completed.

The State IT mission has further identified around 20 services from eight government departments that would be covered by this project; irrigation and public health, agriculture, horticulture, State electricity board, State transport corporations, forest and education.

Focus shift from ‘e' to ‘m'

Initiatives such as these were initially planned to be implemented through the Government's $10-billion National e-governance plan but the economic advantages of using the mobile network and the uptake of cellular services in the hinterlands is now prompting State agencies and NGOs to shift focus from e-governance to m-governance.

“Delivery of e-government services in the existing paradigm requires access to the Internet. With 5 per cent penetration of the Internet, personal access to the Net is a distant dream for those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Access to the Internet will remain inconvenient with restricted time window even after 1,00,000 citizen service centres (CSCs) are made functional in rural areas under the e-governance plan.

Only 40,000 CSCs have been opened so far and a very limited number actually deliver any government service. In comparison, there are already more than 100 million mobile users in the rural areas,” says Professor Subhash Bhatnagar of IIM, Ahmedabad, who has done a study on how mobile phones can serve as a more efficient and cost-effective mode of e-service delivery than the comparatively traditional Internet kiosk.

According to the study, it is twice as expensive to operate an Internet Kiosk in rural areas in comparison with urban areas because of the need for a power back-up, problems of maintenance of computer hardware, lack of broadband connectivity, and lack of trained manpower to operate computers.

On the other hand, demand for services in rural areas is scattered, making it difficult for CSCs to achieve economic viability.

varied Information via mobile

There are a number of ways in which mobile phones can be used to offer Government services.

According to a study by Vodafone, small farmers in India prioritised weather, plant protection (disease/pest remediation), seed information and market prices as being the most important. Traditionally, the farmers used a variety of sources for getting agricultural information, including TV, radio, newspapers, other farmers, etc. However, the perceived quality and relevance of the information provided by these sources is highly varied.

Employment exchanges can deliver timely and accurate alerts about appropriate job openings, and loans available for setting up small entrepreneurial projects through SMS in local languages to the unemployed rural poor. Sri Lanka-based think-tank on Information and Communication technology (ICT) regulation, LIRNEasia, says that mobile ownership in India has grown by 131 per cent between 2006 and 2008.

This growth has been driven by rural India, with 27 per cent of the rural Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) getting connected in 2008, compared with only 19 per cent in urban India.

Combined fixed and mobile phone ownership now surpasses that of radios. In contrast, computer ownership and Internet use is very poor. Less than 1 per cent of the Indian BOP own a computer or have ever used the Internet.

“These findings show that the potential use of mobile phones over other mediums in accessing government services is large. In addition, mobile devices are less expensive to buy and maintain than traditional computers, and require less electricity or power to run, a feature particularly beneficial to rural areas without a guaranteed source of power,” says Chanuka Wattegama, Senior Research Manager, LIRNEasia

Some hitches too

But there are financial issues that are coming in the way of large-scale deployment of mobile governance.

Unlike the e-governance platform, the m-governance solutions are not recognised as a part of the National e-Governance Plan. So while an agency that has an e-governance-related scheme can get funding from the Government, there is no such provision for m-governance projects.

For example, the Zero Mass Foundation's mobile banking project is struggling to make it a viable proposition, given that it requires close to Rs 3,000 a month to run each customer service point, compared with a revenue of Rs 2,129.

“M-governance should be made part of the NeGP, which will not only improve the funding for these projects but will also create an overall ecosystem for mobile-related applications directed at the rural users. Government needs to create conditions for economic viability of projects through a subsidy regime that is equitable across different technologies,” says Bhatnagar.

There are other issues too at the policy level. Enabling legislation would need to be created so that the law recognises mobile documents and transactions.

The money lying in the Universal Services Obligation fund could also be utilised to incentivise mobile operators who expand their network into the rural areas.

tkt@thehindu.co.in

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