Notes from the Field

This paper examines the use of village-based Internet kiosks in rural India, known as e-chaupal. It describes the Indian Tobacco Company's (ITC) model of supply chain management as it wrestled with the problem of handling large numbers of farmers scattered across a wide geographical area. By providing farmers with access to both technology and information, ITC capitalized on the farmers' entrepreneurial spirit. The information helped them to run their businesses more successfully, and so ITC was able to enhance the quality of their product and the reliability of their supply chain.

The issue of providing information and communication technology to rural environments is an important one in the context of information kiosks. In the developed world, kiosks bridge the digital divide between those who have access to personal information technology and those who do not. In India, as described in this paper, the digital divide is seen as being between urban and rural communities. The contribution of this type of kiosk to bridging the digital divide is a novel application, where the underlying purpose is commercial. In most other similar applications, kiosks tend to be sponsored by governments or public sector organizations with the purpose of delivering e-government or Internet access to communities where IT penetration is limited. In this context, the farmers can see clear benefits to using the technology. Based on our observations in Europe and the U.S., however, target audiences for e-government and other public information kiosks have not necessarily grasped the benefits, and hence have not embraced the technology. This kind of e-chaupal implementation may have the potential to act as a model for kiosk use in other developing countries.

In a wider economic context, as the author suggests, the case study describes an innovation where a commercial company is proactively facilitating societal change. The business organization benefits from having privileged strategic access to rural markets, which in themselves are reshaped by organizational interaction. Importantly, the business model of the e-chaupal is centered on institutional innovation and market expansion. Helping to bridge the digital divide comes as a byproduct. The agent that brings about the transfer of new technology is the company that, in following its own business interests, creates new markets through the diffusion of information.

Although the kiosks described in this paper are not kiosks as we would define them (Rowley & Slack, 2005), they are kiosks embedded in a community, rather than part of a community created from kiosk use. Our definition, from observation of public access kiosks in Europe, America, and Asia, would describe a purpose-built housing comprising, normally, a touch screen with specially designed input and output slots, sometimes with a built-in keyboard and tracker ball, located in a concourse or arena available to the general public (Rowley & Slack, 2003). In the context of this paper, the e-chaupal is not housed as a kiosk or in a public arena, and public access depends on the farmer. It may be that, in this rural environment, locating the kiosk in a home may be more successful than placing it in the local community center, temple, or church. In more developed communities, such as those found in Europe, there are very few people who have no technological literacy. Most members of the public, even though they may not own a computer or use one in their work, are familiar with the workings of a public telephone, an ATM, or the concept of information being presented through a TV screen. Public access to information through technology is a commonplace experience (Slack & Rowley, 2004). To contrast this with the Indian environment described in Banerjee's paper, we believe that public information comes through the broadcast and printed media or by word of mouth. In such a rural community, technological literacy and confidence would be better nurtured through a local "champion," but in a less public location. However, there is still a concern that farm laborers...