HP to enhance I-Community facilities

NEW DELHI: I-Community, Hewlett-Packard's (HP) bid to bridge the digital divide in Kuppam is all set to have more user-focused 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 focused services to this project," informed Operations Manager for India I-Community for HP, Balaji V. according to Balaji, within a period of one-month, 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. At present, the project is offering services like educational and vocational opportunities for students and teachers, a public grievance system and a compilation of traditional medicines with the help of a portal.

"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 months' time," Balaji 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.

(CyberMedia News Service)