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 In order to better understand
the complex transition from digital divide to
digital inclusion in a developing country context,
we have interviewed our Advisor Satish Jha who is
a key member of the ICT for development community
in India. Relying on his rich private sector IT
background, Satish provides an overview of how
successful business practices used to create
information architectures can be applied to
projects in the development field, and as a result
help the non-profit sector bridge the digital
divide. Satish Jha is a management consultant who
chairs James Martin & Co in India and is the
Chairman of South Asian Initiatives of Digital
Partners and Managing Trustee of Digital Partners
India. James Martin & Co was founded in India
by Satish Jha as a joint venture with James Martin
Holdings Ltd. in 1993. Satish Jha's experience in
information technology and management includes
various roles and responsibilities he held in
Hoffmann-La Roche in Switzerland including as the
head of global information systems and development
coordination for its Vitamins Division. Satish Jha
is also one of the founders of Tarahaat that has
been acknowledged as one of the pioneering models
in using ICTs for Development. Later he started
the Baramati Initiatives in 2001 with the support
of Motoo Kusakabe of The World Bank and Sharad
Pawar, a former chief minister of Maharashtra who
has turned his constituency of Baramati as a model
of development. Baramati Initiatives is an annual
event and is now jointly organized by Digital
Partners and Baramati’s Institute of Information
Technology.
To learn more about
Satish and contact him visit
his public profile on the ICT
for Development on the Development Gateway.
Q: Given your background in
corporate information management, what prompted
you to take such an interest in ICT and
Development?
A: I came to the corporate sector
from a background in non-governmental sector,
academics, research and the print media. While
working in Switzerland, I founded FREND
(Foundation for Renewable Energy Decentralized)
and DESI (Decentralized Energy Systems Integrated)
along with some other Swiss professionals with
interest in development issues. Later FREND and
DESI established DESI Power India in collaboration
with Development Alternatives and that brought me
in contact with Ashok Khosla. By this time I had
returned to India to establish James Martin &
Co, a management consulting firm with focus on
information technologies. The development of Tarahaat was
born from what information technologies can do for
making life easier for the rural poor coupled with
Development Alternative' expertise in looking for
technological solutions. In the first year, my
company gave pro-bono support to the project and I
was personally associated with creating its
strategy, as well as technical and information
architectures. Tarahaat became a symbol of the
possibilities that could be addressed with the
help of ICTs. My orientation was to use the best
practices from the corporate world to create an
elegant solution that would bring down the costs
of development and implementation as well as the
transaction costs in the rural areas. This would
lead to an overall improvement in the quality of
life in villages. It proved to be a milestone and
I have been getting more deeply engaged in ICTs
and Development related initiatives.
Q: You stated that your
organization ".. works hard to create strong
relationships through proactive engagements with
our clients and develop solutions that support our
clients in creating lasting value." What are the
commonalities you have found in developing
technology applications for the corporate
information management world and for the
international development world?
A: As of now there are few
processes followed by development communities that
conform to the best practices used by the
corporate sector. There are passionate people who
know programming and piece together small
applications that serve disparate purposes for
social projects. But to take them to any level of
efficiency known to the corporate sector requires
more than a few extraordinary people. Corporate
principles require processes, procedures,
methodologies while understanding with passion a
culture of embracing the best practices. It was
this lack of experience base in managing
information complexity by the development
community which interested me. I wanted to help
the development community understand how to create
large, complex applications which can bring order
to the culture of creativity that generally
exists, and by doing this make the task of
non-profit sector a little easier and free them up
to pursue their goals. However, in terms of what
needs to be done in practice to decrease the
digital divide by employing ICT applications,
there is a substantial commonality between the
non-profit and the profit sectors. What clearly
sets them apart is the level of resources they can
deploy- in terms of funds, skills, learning curve
etc.
Q: You have supported more than
50 consulting assignments from developing an
Information Strategy to creating a Digital
Strategy, as well as organizational restructuring
for the Digital Age. What are the key elements in
providing information and digital strategies to
organizations so they can fully utilize ICT in
their operations?
A: The most common point of
departure is generally an emphasis on integrated
architectures. Large corporations have been using
information technologies for several decades. New
corporations can also easily acquire the
experience base by recruiting the right people to
build the necessary culture of creating a digital
organization with the resources they have.
However, even these corporations began in a way
similar to what we notice in the small sector and
non-profit organizations. The temptation to build
an application generally run very high and most
organizations begin developing applications before
they have created a structure for their
information flows. Several others start choosing
from what is available off the shelf and could be
used with little changes. These simply add to the
complexity and manageability of transaction costs,
total cost of ownership of technology, and the
cost of fixing any problems. The result is
multiple, overlapping systems that instead of
reducing transaction costs, continue to add to it
and the net result adversely impacts the
competitiveness of businesses.
However, corporations that have
learned to manage their information resources well
emphasize integrated architectures, invest in
getting the processes and procedures right,
establish technical architectures that are not
only scalable but permit change in scope without
completely revamping the system. These
corporations keep the maintenance low and are
geared to addressing the management issues that
may arise from time to time. Imagine a sizeable
building that was started without having an
architecture?
Q: What is global information
management? Are there any lessons that you can
share from your experiences in this profession
which can be applied to the governance or
management of IT in developing countries?
A: In some ways anyone in the
field of information technology tends to be global
in terms of the knowledge-base. However, managing
information technology resources globally forces
anyone to contend with the complexity of various
approaches that have evolved. These approaches
address various issues that range from platforms,
operating systems, philosophies, methodologies,
architectures across functions and geographies. It
requires an understanding of "managing" them
rather than addressing them in a narrow technical
way. For example, anyone can create an application
system that works in one environment. But managing
across 150 countries with each of them having an
environment that has evolved out of local
practices can be a manager's nightmare. It was
much easier in the era of mainframe when one
corporate office could make the decisions and IBM
could run it for the corporation. Of course, it
had severe limitations that led to multitudes of
technologies and made the responsibilities of
managers so much more challenging.
The non-profit sector also has to
reckon with all those issues if it needs to scale
up. That is where the lessons of global
information management become useful and more
often than not, these practices improve quality,
make life of the users a little easier and
generally at a much lower cost. What is needed is
a desire to learn from that culture and have the
capability to absorb appropriate experiences. The
same can be applied to the process of government
turning digital as well. But unless orchestrated
well, it can lead to frustrations, cost over-runs,
and systems not being available for implementation
for a long time.
Q: Your initiative Tarahaat,
named after the all-purpose haat (meaning a
village bazaar), comprises a commercially viable
model for bringing relevant information, products
and services via the Internet to the underserved
rural market of India. Now that Tarahaat has been
in operation for about three year, how do you see
its evolution? Has it followed the path that you
and other founders of Tarahaat had intended? What
obstacles have you encountered in its
implementation?
A. I would call it the initiative
that coincided with my association with
Development Alternatives. Tarahaat grew out of a
desire to address two issues simultaneously: 1) to
create value by using this new technological means
that would help the villagers take a great leap
forward and 2) to generate enough value to sustain
the activities of Development Alternatives (DA)
which was thinking of moving into this space. I
have been on the Board of one of the associate
organizations of DA and I was invited by Ashok
Khosla to support him with our consulting skills
in focusing the organization, developing a new
vision, creating processes, procedures and
relevant structures etc. This process was very
educational for us in the sense that DA as an
organization needed a lot of reorientation and
preparedness to achieve goals which Khosla
envisioned. It was over a couple of years of such
dialogue that the organization became receptive to
the idea of creating "something" with the help of
ICTs that would help bridge the divide between the
cities and the villages. The goal was to overcome
the lack of physical infrastructure by means of
the new technologies and generate enough wealth
and sustainability that DA would not have to
depend on seeking grants. The idea was to create a
web-based infrastructure that would address the
issues of e-governance, e-commerce, e-learning and
e-communities. All these concepts and dreams were
visible in the initial rendition of Tarahaat that
got a lot of people thinking about it.
However, it was a very ambitious
dream and required a lot of resources. In the
beginning we brought together friends who could
offer pro-bono services and products. James Martin
& Co offered the consulting services. Shashi
Ullal, then the head of Hughs Networks in India,
offered VSAT services. IBM considered giving some
hardware away. Oracle considered offering free
licenses. Thus, a whole prototype was created.
This initiative seemed feasible if we could align
with a major corporation that also had interest in
the rural markets. In parallel, however,
educational efforts to train people in the skills
that they needed in villages was also being
pursued and we had found someone willing to
dedicate himself in this area. What has happened
since is that the concept has moved towards doing
what is possible while continuing to pursue the
dream by refining the model to become viable. As
of now, education has only succeeded in larger,
semi-urban habitats and Tarahaat has faced
difficulties in addressing other areas. I look at
Tarahaat as a lap in the long relay race of
development. It fired the imagination of a lot of
people. As a result, a number of experiments, both
in the corporate and the non-profit sectors, have
begun in India and elsewhere. In India itself a
number of initiatives including large ones being
pursued by ITC and Hindustan Levers seem inspired
by Tarahaat. And that is a major contribution that
it has made.
Q: Through the Baramati
Initiative with Digital Partners, you are
achieving connectivity for the poor in India, and
showcasing initiatives which demonstrate how ICT
can be employed to provide sustainable solutions
to the needs of poor communities. How did Baramati
Initiative begin? What have you been able to
accomplish during the two annual meetings at
Baramati regarding managing ICT for development
projects and measuring success?
A: The credit for starting
Baramati Initiatives must go to Tarahaat, Motoo
Kusakabe of The World Bank and Sharad Pawar, a
former chief minister of Maharashtra state. It was
Mr. Kusakabe who decided to drop in at my house on
a Sunday evening sometime in the fall of 2000 and
spent several hours discussing the possibilities
that Tarahaat could offer and exploring ways of
connecting such efforts on a larger scale. It was
this meeting that led him to ask me to join in a
World Bank conference sponsored by him and Kemal
Dervis later that year in Nov 2000. It is here
that Mr. Kusakabe asked me to take charge of
holding the next conference and Sharad Pawar
offered Baramati as a venue. Calling it an
Initiative rather than a conference was a
conscious decision. It is becoming a symbol of
bringing together the experiences of using ICT for
development in India and now overseas as well. Its
message is reaching out beyond South Asia to
Africa and Latin America as well. Our key
accomplishment has been to create a platform where
people engaged in developing innovative solutions
can come together and learn from each other. While
maintaining the quality in terms of deliverables
expressed during the meeting at the World Bank in
Nov 2000, the organization of this initiative
remains fluid, interactive, and evolves as the
gathering progresses. Bringing together the social
entrepreneur as well as the beneficiaries has
created a hope in the community by connecting them
to each other. The use of smart cards for micro
credit management or Drishtee or Datamation or
evolution of Computer on Wheels to reach out to a
new world through Baramati Initiatives cannot be
forgotten. Its success should be seen in terms of
stimulating the imagination of "would-be" social
entrepreneurs to create new solutions on a larger
scale. At this time, the number of projects
showcased in the second year has doubled and the
success of the projects that were showcased in the
first year have contributed in some ways to our
achievement a year later.
Q: How does Digital Partners
support Baramati Initiatives and partner with
organizations to implement solutions? What are the
other roles of Digital Partners in employing ICT
in India?
A: The steps to start Baramati
began in Dec 2000. Digital Partners joined to
support the Baramati Initiatives in early March
2001 and Akhtar Badshah invited me to support and
chair the South Asia Initiative of Digital
Partners. In that sense Digital Partners has now
become the prime organizer of the process and
helps make opportunities for people who want to
become engaged in furthering the charter of
Baramati. Digital Partners in India is engaged in
pursuing a Social Entrepreneurship program and
this year we have selected five organizations from
South Asia that are trying to use ICTs for
healthcare, micro-credit, artisans, trade etc.
Other projects include the Global Classmates
program which connects school students from India
to the US and some other countries including
Africa. This program aims at using ICTs to get the
students in the 11-15 years age group to connect
with their global counterparts, share projects
that are facilitated by the respective schools,
and use emails, net-meetings, videoconferences etc
to pursue their goals through interaction. We have
also supported policy dialogues with the
government officials and bring global resources at
no cost to the government to share perspectives
and help find solutions to tricky issues of
policy.
October, 2002
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Photos from
Baramati conference
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