The Warana Wired Village Project was started in 1998 by a non-governmental cooperative organization. This service is currently active mostly in Maharashtra, providing service to over 70 villages. It aimed at setting up various booths with computers which would be connected via the internet. Hence the farmers could access information not only related to agriculture but also education, health etc. The Warana project was hence an initiative focusing on the overall development of the farming community, rather than being specific to agriculture. Farmers could access six web based applications from these booths which were: employment and agricultural schemes, government procedures, crop information, water supply details, medical facilities, bus and railway timetables and automated assistance in completing applications for government documents such as ration cards and birth and death certificates.
This initiative was started with good hope and dedicated objectives, but wasn’t maintained in a proper fashion. As reported later in a study conducted by researchers from University of California (UC), Berkley, Microsoft Research India (MSRI) and Cognizant Technologies, Bangalore. The booths had computers installed, but some of them were not in working conditions. The PCs were covered with dust as PC covers had been misplaced, and at various places the cables had been chewed by rats. In the year of 2005, the PCs were running Windows 95 only. The computers did have internet connectivity but it was no faster than 10 kb/s. Therefore the researchers then revamped the Warana Wired Village project by replacing the PC-based system by a mobile phone based system. Here only relevant amount of data is transferred to farmers via SMS. They reported in a publication based on the study [1] that the new system was found to be less expensive, more convenient, and more popular with farmers than the previous PC-based system.
[1] Veeraraghavan, R., Yasodhar, N., & Toyama, K., 2009. Warana Unwired: Replacing PCs with Mobile Phones in a Rural Sugarcane Cooperative. Information Technologies & International Development [online], 5(1). Available from: http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/view/327
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