Currently, we have 40 Village Internet Centers. The major services offered through these village information centres include Computer education, e-Governance, Aravind eye care application, e-Commerce, e-Post, Commodity market rates of Madurai wholesale commodity market, linkage to Agriculture and Veterinary centers for getting any information in these fields, and jobwork. The markets for these services is expanding and the incomes from these village information centres have shown a very good increase. However, there is a long way to go before they actually cover all their expenses.
Computer education retains the number one position in income generation. Around 70 percent of the incomes come from computer education. There are three levels of courses offered in our village information centres . For children up to 8th standard, packages like paintbrush, word pad are taught. A lot of children play some computer games also. For high school children the course covers general computer usage packages like MS Word, MS Excel are taught apart from introduction to computers and operating systems. For higher secondary students packages like FoxPro, Internet concepts are also taught apart from introduction to computers and Operating Systems. The other areas of income generation are e-Governance, Aravind eye care, e-Post, e-Commerce, browsing, job work, school and college results, Astrology, etc. We have hosted our e-commerce, commodity market roars and Village Internet Centers MIS on to the web recently.
The challenge of ‘How to increase the incomes of the village information centres ?’ remains the major hurdle. Several ideas were thought out and attempts were made to implement them. Attempt to provide job work from our own organization and from outside is on. A major thrust was given to particular activity at different times. New e-mail Ids were created for educated youth of the village. e-Governance and Aravind eye care were given main importance. However, it was realized that these get exhausted after some time. Thus now it is realized that computer education and e-mailing and browsing will remain the major income earners in the long run. Hence, a major thrust is being given to these two areas. The new strategy is to identify educated children from upper middle class families in the villages and create awareness among them about the benefits of browsing. We are also in the process of offering attractive packages for customers who browse regularly. Similarly we are trying to get more students for computer education.
With poverty alleviation as our main focus, we are starting two new ideas. We are starting the on-line health program of TCS soon. People can browse the web health center site and get information and consultancy by experts online. We have identified 15 to 20 poorest families in each of our Village Internet Centers villages. Edwated people from these families will be allowed to browse around 2 hours every week either for free or at very low rates. A data base will be maintained to record the sites browsed and any possible benefits they derive out of this.
We have taken up several marketing activities. We have employed 2 sales support personnel for the village information centres . They go around to any of the village information centres daily and create awareness among the people about the different services available in our village information centres .