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Malappuram drops the purdah to climb up the e-learning
curve, says M SARITA VARMA
Muthu Fathima, mother of eight, is drawing an
Alladin lamp e-greeting card for her husband in Saudi Arabia. Twenty
years after dropping out of high school, she is clicking on the
mouse at an Akshaya community Internet kiosk in Malappuram district.
Muslim-dominated Malappuram is high on population and low on literacy.
Half of it seems to live on Gulf remittances, the other half in
poverty. Its BSNL landline connectivity is so poor that according
to a study by Escotel, the number of phones (mainly mobiles) exceeds
the number of people.
It is this district that has lifted the purdah
to take its first steps up the e-learning curve. About 560 e-centres
dot the hills, with 4,000 PCs and scanners. Malappuram lays claim
to being the world’s first rural district to achieve 100 percent
household e-literacy (one computer-literate person per family).
The state has spent only Rs 3.5 crore on this project, according
to Aruna Sundarajan, IT secretary, Kerala. Local entrepreneurs invested
about Rs 1.5 lakh each. After training 6.5 lakh people (10 computer
class capsules at Rs 60 each, sponsored by panchayats), the entrepreneurs
have recouped their capital.
Surprisingly, many of these are women, brought
up on stiff taboos against ‘usury’. Now, having got a
taste of cyberspace profits, a woman entrepreneur confessed to keeping
her e-centre open till 11 pm for giving classes to autorickshaw
drivers returning from work.
“Downloading computer designs fetches embroidery
better prices,” says a tailor, as little Ashraff, sitting on
his mother’s lap, sees his expatriate father on the webcam.
The project has hopped its way from the policymakers’
tables to a completely market-driven mode, responding to demands
for water resource surveys and linking women’s self-help groups.
“It’s a business model I have never
seen anywhere before,” says Prof Kenneth Keniston, founder-director,
Massachussetts Institute of Technology’s India Programme. The
second phase will bring services like e-banking, e-kisan, cancernet,
online police station complaint redressal, rural e-commerce and
online ticketing. But this e-success may stay confined to rural
Malappuram, as other districts have raised a cynical brow about
fancy e-literacy programmes. That would be their loss.
—The Financial Express
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