Governance2.Org

LiveMint: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), India’s biggest phone services firm, will piggyback a state-of-the-art wireless broadband network that it’s setting up for a large computer kiosk network for the Union government to offer up to 85,000 customers high-speed wireless broadband services.
A draft tender circulated by the state-owned BSNL among hardware vendors details a range of voice and value-added services to be offered. “The class of service features shall support…real-time and extended real-time voice and video traffic for voice over IP, fax, video conferencing and video on demand applications,” says the draft tender, indicating the type of services for which it plans to use the network.
The service will use the emerging Wimax (worldwide interoperability for microwave access), which is capable of data speeds of 10 megabits per second (mbps). In comparison, third generation (3G, a fast mobile phone standard) networks promise data throughput of 2mbps and data-friendly cellular networks deliver speeds of up to 512 kilobits per second.
The centres, to be run on the public call office model by village-based “entrepreneurs”, are being designed to provide government services such as issue of certificates, registration of births and deaths, along with commercial information. Read on …

LiveMint: Goa is set to become the first state in India to be fully connected through a high-bandwidth broadband network.
By March, the network will be rolled out together by the state government and Bangalore-based tech solutions company United Telecom Ltd in a so-called public-private partnership model.
Optic fibre cables and wireless technologies will be used across the state and will also link some 200 computer kiosks that deliver government services to the state’s residents.
United Telecom is also providing connectivity for 450 common service centres in Jharkhand. Read on …

Livemint: In a bid to supply manpower to India’s booming organized retail sector institutes, government agencies and even non-profit groups are stepping in. Huge investment plans by home-grown and foreign retailers are fuelling a great demand for people with basic skills in organized retailing. Consultancy firm Technopak Advisors Pvt. Ltd says the country’s modern retailers will create more than two million direct jobs in the next five years. Reliance Industries Ltd said it will need more than a million direct and indirect people by 2010 to staff its stores and its allied logistics operations.
Currently, only 50,000-100,000 people possess skills in modern retail trade. Read on …

Livemint: Instead of setting up Indian institutes of management in backward areas, the government should set up institutes of rural management and agri-business whose primary objective would be to create rural entrepreneurs. Such institutes will not only
disseminate knowledge but also help in creating an interface between entrepreneurs, financial institutions and national-level scientific institutes.
Where politicians and bureaucrats have failed, these institutes in the area of rural management, cooperatives and agri-business can step in and take the challenge of elevating the “other” India.
The Amul story is now well known. Started as a small cooperative in 1946 in the village of Anand in Gujarat, it has now evolved into a more than Rs2,200 crore enterprise, in the process changing fortunes of many petty farmers.
SKS Microfinance started by Vikram Akula is using advanced technology—smart cards—to make venture capital available to poor women.
The organization has so far given loans to about 700,000 poor women who are now involved in some kind of entrepreneurial activity.
Similarly, ITC’s e-Choupal has facilitated the access of farmers directly to the markets using the Internet. Launched in June 2000, e-Choupal services today reach out to more than 3.5 million farmers across nine states. Read on …

Hindu: An estimated one lakh broadband enabled service centres are expected to come up in the country by March 2008 at a cost of Rs. 5,400 crore if Union Minister of Communication and Information Technology A. Raja is to be believed. One centre will come up for every six villages with all e-governance services. A sum of Rs 1,600 crore will be put up by the Central government and the rest by the private sector under the Public Private Partnership (PPP).
The Minister said that for the implementation of e-governance, the government on its part is trying to provide basic infrastructure including internet, window facilitation centre and last leg connectivity for implementation of e-governance. However participation of the private sector and citizens is a key for providing totally transparent services to the public.
The application of IT to government processes, e-governance in short, could have a profound impact on the efficiency, responsiveness and accountability of government and on the quality of life and productivity of citizens, especially the poor. Read on …

Business Standard: Experts say that the benefits of such a tie-up include a lower attrition rate, besides being a part of corporate social responsibility of companies.
Sanvi Aanwar, a resident of Veeratpur village in Punjab, was able to earn Rs 6,000 a month with incentives, after she was employed by Tata group’s E2E SerWiz Solutions Limited in Mohali.
Enrolling in NGO Tarahaat’s, training programme enabled the young girl along with two friends from her village to gain employment to sustain their families. NGOs such as Tarahaat are now taking up initiatives to provide training programmes in rural areas to provide rural youth with a better chance to be employable in call centres.
Differentiating between their work and those of the rural BPOs, Rakesh Khanna, member Tarahaat, said “We train the rural youth for employment in the BPOs, we do not set up BPOs.”
In another pilot project, Delhi-based BPO, Intouch Solutions, has collaborated with NGOs like Plan and Prospect Education to train youth. Twelve youth from the resettlement colonies of Badarpur and Sangam Vihar are beneficiaries of this programme. Read on …

Economic Times: Former President A P J Abdul Kalam has said that all activities under Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA) should focus on employment generation.
Addressing a special consultation meeting on ‘PURA as a model of sustainable rural development’, he said employment generation alone could address the problem regarding upliftment of over 220 million people.
Agriculture had been growing at a rate of 1.6 per cent. “If we have to uplift poor and provide them quality life, agriculture sector should grow at least by four per cent a year,” he said. Read on …

Reuters – A nonprofit group that designs low-cost computers for poor children may start selling $350 laptops on the commercial market by Christmas, an executive said on Monday.
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, said the computer could sell initially for about $350, or twice its production cost, although the group is also considering a higher price tag.
Although the green-and-white XO was designed for elementary school children in poor countries, analysts say that some of the features make it attractive to kids in wealthier countries as well as adults.
The foundation has kept its costs down by developing its own technology, including the display, and using a relatively inexpensive microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. It also uses free Linux software, saving the cost of paying to use Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Read on …

I strongly believe that progressive governance can only be brought about by a partnership between the government, the industry, the civil society, and the academic world. Each of these stakeholders have an inherent ability to be able to form policies which would be more populist in nature. In an ideal scenario, they would all balance each other.
In this article pulished in Livemint, Jagdish Khattar talks about how the government’s inability to deliver could hamper inclusive growth, and proposes Mission Forward as a possible solution:

“The role of the government in economic activity has come down substantially in the past two decades. Yet, critical areas of the economy, entirely or in part, remain the responsibility of the state. The Indian state’s inadequacies with regard to execution and implementation could, therefore, hobble the nation in its onward journey.
There is plenty of evidence, both anecdotal and structured, about schools without teachers, huge village clusters devoid of power, primary health centres ailing without medicines and trained doctors, roads that end before they reach anywhere and fair price shops diverting more grain than they dispense. Unfinished irrigation projects, too, make for a sad commentary. The state’s inability to deliver, despite its propensity to spend on these heads, means that inclusive growth will continue to elude us.
How is the corporate sector able to deliver on large and world-class projects? Companies begin any initiative with detailed assessment of feasibility. There is a clear sense of what is sought to be achieved, and what systems, structures and resources are required to fulfil those objectives.
When the mission concentrates on individual projects, it will find many where the project is better farmed out to the private sector. The latter already plays a major role in developing infrastructure. Private-public partnership here could do wonders. We now have a transparent system of inviting bids, even providing a viability gap. We can encourage foreign investment as well.”

Read on …