HP to increase its focus on I-Community

I-Community, the Hewlett-Packard’s bid to bridge the digital divide in
Kuppam is all set to have more user focussed services in the coming months.
"We are about to complete two years of our operations and as we move into
the next year, we are going to add some end-user focussed services to this
project," informed Balaji V, Operations Manager (India I-Community), HP.

Within a period of one-month time, the company is going to add farming
information system feature in the project, wherein a farmer would actually be
able to see how best can he utilize the soil for a particular crop.

The project is also going to incorporate information about various state
government schemes. "The primary objective of this is to create awareness
and disseminate information on various schemes of agriculture, medical and
health offered by the state government of Andhra Pradesh," he added. The
project is running for close to two years now and the company has adopted to go
for a franchisee-based model involving a set up of Community Information Centers
(CICs) within Kuppam.

"We are charging a transaction based fee to our users and these CICs are
being run independently by our ‘channel partners’ on a revenue sharing
model. As of now we have eight CICs running the project and we are planning to
increase this figure to about 15 within three month’s time," he
explained.

The company also plans to replicate the project for other states as well.
"At present about 2,500 families in the Kuppam constituency have utilized
the I-community services, so it has been a big success for us. There have been
quite a lot of inquiries about this project and different states are showing
interest in this project. We would like to replicate the same project in other
states as well and help in bridging the digital divide," he added.

Recently, the company has introduced a mobile lab facility in the same
project to take the information, online services and facilities to far flung
areas of the region.

Within this service, the community centers are linked by a 2 mbps line to
STPI in Tirupati and provide seamless flow of information.

"This project is driven by sheer necessity, so we innovate according to
the conditions of the region and that’s why the mobile van was introduced.
These vans are connected to the CICs by 802.11 WLAN technology and provide soil
testing and water testing facilities to farmers, information repositories,
literacy testing tools among other services," he explained.

Zia Askari

New Delhi