Decoding Harisal, India's first soon-to-be 'smart village'

On the state highway to Melghat you will not find Harisal on milestones or road signs not even when you are just 10 km away It comes up suddenly mdash a cluster of houses a prominent blue Bank of Maharashtra board and a fading green sign that says lsquoHarisalrsquo which is a ldquomediumsized villagerdquo as the 2011 census described itHarisal village which has been a nondescript adivasi settlement finds itself on the Digital India map PicsSameer MarkandeUntil a couple of months back Harisal was a nondescript adivasi settlement left to its devices Now it is all set to become the first ldquosmart villagerdquo in the country and ldquoonlinerdquo is the buzzword here a magical string of syllables on the lips of its 1479 residentsAlso read Maharashtra to get 50 smart villages by 2016endA lone bulb barely lights the readymade clothes shop The village faces around 14 hours of loadshedding every dayThe buzz started on September 14 when the village received rather unusual visitors mdash Microsoft India head Prashant Shukla district collector Kiran Gitte and the CMOrsquos IT chief Kaustubh Dhawase mdash as a rite of initiation into the mothership called Digital IndiaA mobile tower is supposed to be erected at this spotTwo weeks ago Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis who had visited the village last year announced at Microsoftrsquos Future Unleashed event that Harisal will be the firstofitskind ldquosmart villagerdquoldquoTechnology will be the means to solve problems of health education skill development and employmentrdquo as collector Gitte puts it Mobile connectivity a WiFi zone a digital centre cashless markets health cards and telemedicine are on the agenda to transform Harisal according to officialsKaustubh Dhavse officer on special duty IT in the Chief Ministerrsquos Office told midday ldquoThe idea of village smartness was the CMrsquos concept to bring villages to the mainstream The region has all core infrastructures in place but the people need to be made aware of the benefits they can derive from itrdquoHe added that Harisal was an ideal place as most of population had smart phones and television sets that connected them with the world outside But over at Harisal villagers draw our attention to a lone bulb that barely lights the readymade clothes shopThe village faces severe loadshedding mdash six hours in the night and eight hours during the day mdash and even when there is power it is just enough for a lowwattage bulb Running televisions at home and motor pumps in the field invite strict reprimands villagers say there is no water supplyJayshree Kharve an ASHA worker at one of the three aanganwadis in the village said the things the aanganwadi needs the most are a compound wall water supply and pensions for the workers mdash none of which are to do with technologyIn fact looking back at Dhavsersquos remarks it looks like Harisal will only now really get the socalled ldquocore infrastructurerdquo under the Digital India plank The sarpanch Bhau Chipu Dhikar an adivasi from the Melghatrsquos predominant Korku tribe believes ldquoonlinerdquo will be the doorway into ldquosukh suvidhardquo comfort and amenitiesThe quiet exforester does not own a mobile phone and has never seen a computer For him Digital India is ldquosomething the American sarkar has brought to Indiardquo Thanks to Digital India Dhikar is optimistic that his village will become more like a city and that his sons who are highschool passouts will get a steady employment rather than farmingAnother villager Deepak Nagle 28 is one of the 14 members in an allmale nodal committee of villagers formed under the smart village plan Nagle will be trained in computer basics and will in turn teach other villagers Nagle who stopped at high school works as a driver shunting between Harisal and Parathwada the nearest developed centre at the foothills of MelghatHe has a mobile phone number but with no way to charge his phone it is pretty pointless Nagle has other pressing concerns too The nearest undergraduate college is in Dharni 26 kms away so pursuing engineering or medicine is not an option for every Harisal student Buses do not ply frequently into Harisal eitherldquoThere are new technologies in education that we can be part of if we have Internet Microsoft has already mapped our houses using GPS and soon farmers will be able to ask their queries onlinerdquo he saysPower struggleWhile these ideas look great on paper electricity is a major issue for Harisal The town Dharni which is also the taluka under which Harisal falls has 24x7 power supplySo does the neighbouring hillstation of Chikladhara a tourist destination But in Harisal the bank fitted with an inverter and solar panels is an anomaly The most solar energy that is domestically used in Melghat is in the form of lanterns provided by the Forest DepartmentDhikar says ldquoWe have been conducting morchas and fighting the loadshedding problem for the last four years We had electricity supply before that but with decreasing ground water levels and an increase in the number of borewells we started facing this problemrdquo Another villager chimes in ldquoBut families here still get a monthly electricity bill of Rs 400rdquoAsked about this Collector Gitte said power supply will soon be directed from Nepanagar in Madhya Pradesh Sources on the ground however added that these talks have been on for over a year without any resultsGitte and Officer Dhavse added BSNL has finished laying fibre optic cables and Indus will erect a mobile tower even as one installed by Reliance stands defunct right outside the panchayat office in a monthrsquos time Dhavse who has worked for top corporate companies before joining Team Fadnavis said the information highway would be ready for transmission anytime soonMore than just digitisationAt the Future Unleashed event in Mumbai Fadnavis ndash speaking in the presence of Microsoft boss Satya Nadella ndash said ldquoThe lack of nutrition coupled with genetic health problems and the lifestyle of people have to be changed to make it more healthy and connected with the mainstreamrdquoDistrict Health Department figures show the Dharni taluka in Melghat recorded 158 deaths under the age of one just in April and May though villagers donrsquot make much of it The deputy sarpanch Ganpat Babuji Gayan in fact claimed malnutrition figures have come down considerably in the past few yearsVandana Krishna director general for the Rajamata Jijau Mission explained Harisalrsquos attitude thus ldquoLocal people have become cynical Melghat has been so overexposed as a malnutrition centre that villagers have reached a saturation point After all Melghat is not the only hotspot Gadchiroli pockets of Nashik and Nandurbar are more backward but with fewer NGOs operating in these placesrdquoIn 199697 the area recorded more than 1000 deaths under the age of six as compared to 201314 when a little more than 400 deaths have been seen Explaining how digitization will help curb these deaths Collector Gitte said ldquoWhile child mortality rates have been on the decline with the help of anganwadis midday meals etc it is still a challenge to bring down Infant Mortality Rates IMR The challenge is to bring pregnant mothers well in time to hospitals and not lose them during transportationrdquoBaby warmers in ambulances mobileconnectivity for ambulances and telemedicine are some of the ways by which the smart village will combat IMR and Maternal Mortality Rate MMR he saidWhile Harisal gets its fair share of basics along with digitization the plan is that 51 smaller villages within a 15 km radius will benefit from this Gitte added that locals will be taught improved farming techniques using digitallyaccessed advice in weather patterns soil quality with the aiming of increasing the output of soybean and tendu leaves which is used to make beedisDr Ashish Satav heads NGO Mahan established in 1998 to improve health for adivasis in Melghat He said technology against malnutrition will work only with the right human interventionIn a report he coauthored in May Satav recommended homebased child care preventing underreporting of malnutrition cases building child development centers and nutritious kitchens Satav also said newer diseases like tuberculosis and heart attacks were on the rise in the community and that digital initiatives should look at ways to tackle these tooSimilarly Krishna said the greatest boon digitization can offer the village is to take aanganwadi reports online Currently the reports show mere numbers and have no details ldquoThe reports do not tell you what is happening to each child but show bulk figures Digitising records will help us to track the progress of each child make comparisons and minimise the underreporting that is predominant in these recordsrdquoSatav added that while it is good to focus on Harisal some of the other worseoff villages should not be forgotten ldquoHarisal with its PHC and an ambulance on call is not the worst off among villages with malnutrition in Melghatrdquo said Satav ldquoIt is on the highway and has access to health amenities Kokmar a hamlet 25 kms away from Harisal on the other hand has seen the worst of inaccessibility to basic healthcarerdquoSubstandard delivery kits which include razors and sickles diarrhearelated deaths misbeliefs regarding checkups are predominant in Kokmar The Korku tribe say experts have been a challenge to health workers since they are particularly superstitious The tribe usually resorts to witchdoctors and quacks who dispense amulets and taveezlsquoJhaadphoonkrsquo is the first option approaching the PHC is the last Women have as many as 12 children Dr Satav says ldquoMaking a hamlet like Kokmar which has 14 kms of kaccha road into a smart village will be the real success story Harisal is not the real representation of MelghatrdquoThe 30 houses in Kokmar have a monthly income of less than Rs 3000 and are mostly Korku Harisal on the other hand is not your average adivasi village since it has several migrants including Marathispeakers and Muslims ldquoPeople from Kokmar have no market facility no buses and are exposed to quacks There is absolutely no electricity Is Harisal then a replicable modelrdquo asked SatavNeeded Smart solutionsSome of the proposed technological initiatives have already been tried out with varying degrees of success Advocate Purnima Upadhyay from NGO Khoj a voluntary organization in Melghat pointed to the failure of telemedicine in the Semadoh 24 kms away from Harisal and on the highway as wellAbout eight months before the Fadnavis government came to power the villagers were given telephonic access to doctors in urban areas but with no mobile phone coverage this plan died a quiet death Moreover the medicines prescribed by the doctors were not stocked at the PHCldquoThe topdown model is not going to work and the basics need to be improved The ideal way to go about with digitization is to do is simultaneously in five villages with different indicators and then analyse different success ratesrdquo she said Her colleague Adv Bandu Sane added ldquoInstead of waiting for so long to bring in cellphone towers to enable calling ambulances why werenrsquot landline facilities made available years agordquoOn paper telemedicine is a zerocost solution according to Sam Pitroda who launched the Centre for the Development of Telematics as part of a similar initiative by the Rajiv Gandhi government in the 1980s to take telecommunication to the countryrsquos farthest cornersldquoAll you need is access to a qualified doctor Khatamrdquo he said What Pitroda is wary of however in this ldquoreasonably sound planrdquo is a tight handshake between the Maharashtra government and Microsoft ldquoWe donrsquot want proprietary software It should be open source which people can further developInstead of just hardware and software getting pumped into a village we need NGOs activists women social scientists anthropologists and psychologists to be part of this model There has to be a balance between customization and standardizationrdquo he saysPitroda said connecting panchayats is the building block of digitization but it then has to be planned well both topdown and bottomup He uses the term interoperability mdash a way of making sure that various institutions are linked togetherldquoThe old ways of doing things have become obsolete especially with the rise of social media What do you think will happen if you put a whole village on Facebookrdquo he asked Admittedly Harisal is just a pilot project based on the successes of which 11 more clusters will be digitized in the areaAnd pilot projects and experiments are great says Pitroda as long as there is a ldquotough understandingrdquo of the needs of rural Maharashtra ldquoA tribal may not know the possibilities of digitization but he knows what he wants If you spend Rs 2 crore then what do people getrdquo asked the telecom engineerState speakKaustabh Dhavse officer on special duty IT in the CMO and the nodal officer for the Harisal project tells Dharmendra Jore how the government will transform the villageQ Why Harisal A Harisal has the dubious distinction of being the malnutrition capital of Maharashtra It has very peculiar demographics Its social indexes are highly negative and despite being blessed with ample natural resources the area suffers from a plethora of issues The issues are solvable and only require intent and government will When we met the people of Harisal their steely resolve to work to fix the issues inspired us and made it the right choice The CM believes that when an effort becomes peoples movement its success is guaranteed Our strategy is similar to what we did in Jalayukt Shivar rural water conservation programmeQ What changes can Harisal expect in the coming months A 1 Selfsufficient and Sustainable Village economy with enough resource creation 2 Bringing Harisal people to the mainstream by providing them access to the Information Superhighway 3 To bring the entire village on the banking system with 100 compliance to PM Jan Dhan Yojana 4 PDS Education PHC TribalEBC other backward class benefits ecosystem will be created 5 Village GDP and Socio Economic Growth Quotient will be measured and monitored on periodic basis Efforts to drive it up will be taken Focus is to drive economic growth and 6 Skill Development initiatives with mahakaushalyacomQ How will the Digital India programme help put an end to malnutrition in Harisal A Malnutrition is a byproduct of a system that does not organise itself well to solve the issue Policies earlier were like bandaid It never looked at the problem in detail to see what causes this menace We were able to dwell deeper and basis data corelate factors affecting health to impoverishment and ignorance It is like a vicious cycle Malnutrition problem is similar to the farmers suicide issue The problem is systemic Our design philosophy which primarily rests on driving up economic activity empowering villagers and giving them clarity literacy and access to govt services will kill this menace once and for all Several thousands of crores have been spent to drive away malnutrition without understanding the problem in detail The issue when understood completely now is in the process of resolutionAlso read Microsoft to develop smart villages in MaharashtraQ What kind of support is Microsoft receiving from the Maharashtra Government A State and Microsoft are in a partnership to make Harisal the first Digital Village in the country MS will invest capital and GoM will provide all support The day this is ready it will become a national example What technology can do to common lives and how it can solve complicated issues our implementation will showQ Harisal does not have continuous power supply How does the government think Microsoft is going to deal with thatA Power will be continuous through renewable sources There might be a shortterm issue till we get our act together once our core conventional and nonconventional power sources are in place the village will shine like never before Villagers deserve to be part of the economic growth story We are committed to deliver this to them1479Population of Harisal village in Melghat in Amravati district158Malnutrition deaths in Harisal in April and May1000Number of children below six who died in Harisal in 199697 This has come down to 400 in 201314Rs 3000The monthly average income of Kokmar village which is just 25 km from Harisal