By the 60th aniversary of the country’s Independence, on August 15, 2007, each of the 600,000 villages are promised with a village knowledge centre (VKC) based on broadband internet connectivity. There will be one million knowledge workers within this year.

A national alliance of 150 partner organisations, which consists of both foreign and Indian NGOs and institutions, has launched Mission-2007 for the purpose. The alliance says that VKCs will disseminate relevant information relating to agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries, health, education, rural enterprises and disaster management. As a first step, the alliance partners have planned to connect 25,000 villages with knowledge centres (KCs).

The Union minister for communication and information technology, Dayanidhi Maran, says that the government will set up 1,00,000 common service centres (CSCs) with broadband connectivity at the remote village level by 2007 by leveraging the infrastructure at the state level. The state governments concerned, the private sector and NGOs will be partners. It will be an integrated three-tier structure—at the central, state and village levels.

At present there are about 10,000 KCs, out of which 5,000 are managed by ITC Ltd. There are, of course, a few other initiatives by government and non-governmental sectors like EID Parry’s Agri-line project, Kissan Kerala, Akshya in Kerala, Bhoomi in Karnataka, Drishti in Haryana, SEWA in Gujarat, E-Sewa in Andhra Pradesh, N-Logue of the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, Gyandoot in Madhya Pradesh, Maha-Agri in Maharashtra and Tarahaat in Delhi.

To complete the gigantic task, the national alliance has urged the government to make the VKC programme a part of the Bharat Nirman initiative. They have estimated need for Rs 65,000 million for setting up a VKC in each of the 600,000 villages.

However, the Centre has promised to fund the project. Union finance minister P Chidambaram, in his Budget speech of February 28, 2005, had promised an initial sum of Rs 1000 million, out of Nabard’s Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF) for setting up 10,000 VKCs in the current fiscal. These KVCs are planned to be set up in 9 states—Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Gujarat, Maharashtra—and in the Union territory of Pondicherry.

The finance minister says that he is prepared to offer more support, if necessary, so that the 10,000 VKCs can be set up before he makes his next Budget speech on February 28, 2006. Rural refinance bank Nabard has already asked the Union ministries of rural development and communications & information technology to contribute towards an additional corpus of Rs 500 million, he says.

But regarding the huge investment of Rs 65,000 million, Mr Chidambaram says “he needs some time to think”. He has called for further details of this project.

Justifying the investments being made, Mr Chidambaram says that VKCs can provide a host of public services like e-governance, commercial information, supply chain service and information relating to marine conditions, disease diagnostics and banking.

He, however, cautions that any project can be successful if it is financially viable and to be such it has to be participatory, demand-driven and revenue-generating. Though he does not expect the VKCs to be revenue-generating in the short-run, he says that in the long-run it has to be revenue-generating.

The President of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, however, emphasises that VKCs should be a people-controlled and owned network. He gives the instance of the success of the toll-free call by farmers to Kisan Call Centres.

The President also cautions that augumenting of employment opportunities should be given top priority in the setting up of village knowledge centres, “If not, the knowledge centres will become ineffective.”

Dr Kalam says that he has seen some successful operations of some VKCs he visited. These are : the village resource centre set up jointly by Tata Tsunami Relief Committee and MS Swaminathan Research Foundation at Akkaraipettai in Tamil Nadu, six village resource centres set up by Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetam in collaboration with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Coimbatore district, Tamil Nadu, and the RASI scheme of the Tamil Nadu government, implemented in Mellur Taluk, Madurai district.