ICT perspectives 4 Rural Development in Nepal

Krishna PandeyIT Consultant (MOST)Member, HPR-Nepal

kris.pandey@hotmail.com

Background

• Identified gap Digital Divide• Optimal Solution is the word

“Communication”• ICT communication refers to any kind of

medium that act as a pool between sender and receiver for exchange of information. For. Eg: Internet, Intranet, radio wave, electromagnetic wave, or medium that may be wired or wireless

Infrastructure and Institutional arrangement in Nepal

• Telecommunication Service providers (ntc, ncell, smarttel, utl, etc)

• ISPs (NITC, mercantile, ntc with adsl, wlink, subisu, websurfer, broadlink, nepal wireless, etc)

• NTA (Policy and regulatory agency)• MOIC (Broadband policy), MOST (IT policy)

Impact on Rural Development

• 5-10%

•A big Why?

• Lack of identified solution to address rural problem

• Lack of service provider to meet the rural demand

• City centric businesses and service providers

• Rural’s Need Assessment is the bigger challenge in Today’s time.

• Model that fits our topography and has been sustainable in the neighbors and third country is the development of end user application.

• That can promisingly deliver services such as G2C, B2C

• Applications are the only stuffs that user can interact with as much as he can

Possible and potential Applications

• Various e-applications for various domains:Agriculture

EducationHealth

EmploymentFinance

Others

e-Agriculture

• e-Agriculture Application with essential info:– Market price of cash crops– Demand and supply of their products in city– Transportation charges– Government plans and schemes for farmers– Banks/ FIs schemes and loan plans for farmers– Product market areas– Forums about cultivable soil, crops, diseases in

crops and interacting platform to find the solution

Education

• e-Education application oriented platforms:– e-Library/ e-Pustakalaya– e-Paati

• Programs being supported and are organized by various groups: OLE, OLPC, Help-Nepal, UNDP, Midas-edu Kit, etc

• Programs are profit and non-profit oriented.

• Programs are scattered and conducting in narrow domain and are somehow specific

• “Innovation is not just doing different things but it is also the intelligence of doing existing things differently”

• Here we find ourselves and fit ourselves• We are working on the development of e-

Library application to be hosted in desktop and in web

Where is the difference?

• Our application suits itself in desktop with one computer hosting as a server locally to all other client desktop or school PCs.

• As well as we remain in Web which can be assessed globally getting connected to the internet with our simple credentials.

• Trying to build general purpose framework that may acquire any kind of reading, learning, materials in various formats (text, audio, video, etc) and make them highly presentable format.

• We are trying to integrate sms system to our web application with an API for mobile access as well.

• We have developed prototype of our product and it is on the way of final release.

• CMS-Cell is working on contents and are integrating contents from available agencies.

Some cool snapshots of our prototype

application

Thank You