Rural Kiosks:Real Challenges, Potential Opportunities

Kentaro Toyama, PhDAssistant Managing Director

Microsoft Research India

eIndia ConferenceNew Delhi – August 1, 2007

Outline

Introduction

Sustaining rural kiosks is very difficult!

Some kiosk types are more likely to endure.

Focus on end-to-end service.

Outline

Introduction

Sustaining rural kiosks is very difficult!

Some kiosk types are more likely to endure.

Focus on end-to-end service.

Definitions

“Rural kiosk”– Rural center with PC as the

focus of services– Socio-economic

improvement as goal

“Sustainable”– Self-sustaining, as a

business

(for the purposes of this presentation)

Research MethodologyData sources:

• Ethnographic studies– 200+ site visits in India and Africa, over

2.5 years – ~550 hours of in-depth interviews, both

open-ended and structured • Interviews with kiosk agencies

– 20+ organizations– Small NGOs, start-up firms, MNCs,

state governments, academics• Kiosk surveys

– 300 kiosks, 2 years, once per quarter, 5 customers, 1 operator per kiosk, n-Logue and Drishtee [w/Kiri et al.]

– 1250 people, single survey, Kerala [w/Pal et al.]

• Results from software logging tool– 13 kiosks in Maharashtra

• Discussions with third-party observers• Literature in journals, books, web sites,

whitepapers

Published

• Renee Kuriyan, Isha Ray, Kentaro Toyama. Integrating Social Development and Financial Sustainability: The Challenges of Rural Kiosks in Kerala. 1st International Conference on ICT and Development, UC Berkeley, May 2006

• Kiri, K., Menon, D., Rural kiosks on profit mode. I4D, June, 2006.• Nedevschi S, Sandhu JS, Pal J, Fonseca R, Toyama K, Bayesian Networks, a Statistical Approach to

Understanding ICT Adoption. International Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Development, Berkeley, 2006.

• Rangaswamy, N. and K. Toyama. (2005) Sociology of ICTs: the Myth of the Hybernating Village. HCI International 2005 (Las Vegas), July 2005.

• Rangaswamy, N. (2006) Social Entrepreneurship as Critical Agency: A study of Rural Internet kiosks. First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (Berkeley), May 2006.

• Rangaswamy, N. (2006) Global Events Local Impacts: Rural Emerging Markets in India, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, Portland, EPIC.

• Toyama, K., K. Kiri, D. Menon, J. Pal, S. Sethi, J. Srinivasan. (2005) PC Kiosk Trends in Rural India.  Policy Options and Models for Bridging Digital Divides (Tampere, Finland), April 2005.

• Toyama, K., K. Kiri, M. Ratan, R. Vedashree, R. Fernando. (2004) Rural kiosks in India. Microsoft Research Technical Report. http://research.microsoft.com

• Veeraraghavan, R., Singh, G., Pitti, B., Smith, G., Meyers, B and Toyama, K.  Towards Accurate Measurement of Computer Usage in a Rural Kiosk. Third International Conference on Innovative applications of Information Technology for Developing World – Asian Applied Computing Conference, Nepal, December 2005.

• Veeraraghavan, R., Singh, G., Toyama, K. and Menon, D. (accepted poster, 2006). Kiosk Usage Measurement using a Software Logging Tool, IEEE/ACM Int’l Conf. on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, 2006.

In preparation…

• Renee Kuriyan. The state and rural ICT. In preparation.• Joyojeet Pal. A survey of Akshaya centres in Kerala. In preparation.• Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Balaji Parthasarathy, Ken Keniston. Computer kiosks in a sugar cane cooperative. In

preparation.• Savita Bailur. Community participation in rural ICT projects. In preparation.

Research Papers

Outline

Introduction

Sustaining rural kiosks is very difficult!

Some kiosk types are more likely to endure.

Focus on end-to-end service.

Source: various published articles

Sustaining rural kiosks is very difficult!

Dhawan, Vivek (2004)Critical Success Factors for Rural ICT Projects in India

Masters Thesis, IIT-Bombay

Sustaining rural kiosks is very difficult!

Business vs. Social Cause

• Achieving both ends is exceedingly difficult– Difficult even for other

businesses in wealthy communities

– Sends mixed messages to entrepreneur

– Branding issues

• Analogy:– Hard to run a five-star hotel

and an orphanage in the same building

Renee Kuriyan, Isha Ray, Kentaro Toyama (2006)Integrating Social Development and Financial Sustainability: The Challenges of Rural Kiosks in KeralaICTD2006

Who Loses?

Kiosk Entrepreneur

• Potential harm– Debt, if kiosk doesn’t break even– Drain on other businesses– Loss in trust by community

• Between 1/3-2/3 of all for-profit kiosks fold each year

• Suicides from agriculture-related loans: “the survey indicated that most suicide victims had loans ranging from Rs.10,000 to Rs.1 lakh.” (http://www.hindu.com/2004/01/02/stories/2004010209620400.htm)

Source: Microsoft kiosk survey (Kiri, et al) and ethnography (Toyama, et al) [2004-2006]

100,000 villages 6 villages/day x 365 days/year 46 yrs46 yrs

Scaling is even harder!

• ITC can lay claim to the most kiosks in rural India (around 6000-7000)

• At peak, ITC set up ~6 kiosks a day.

• It required a large dedicated staff.

• Value of the PC kiosks themselves (as opposed to their modernized market hubs) is not clear.

• There are ~20 companies in India that are the size of ITC

• Even if all of them worked together, and applied the same resources as ITC, it would still take 2.3 years to set up 100,000 kiosks.

• After seven years of dedicated efforts to set up many kiosks, India currently has ~15,000 kiosks total.

Dhawan, Vivek (2004)Critical Success Factors for Rural ICT Projects in India

Masters Thesis, IIT-Bombay

Outline

Introduction

Sustaining rural kiosks is very difficult!

Some kiosk types are more likely to endure.

Focus on end-to-end service.

Enduring Model? (1/4)

E-gov’t service outlet

– But, only if…• service is frequently and

widely needed, and

• All other options for service eliminated.

• Examples– Bhoomi

– Rural E-Seva

Renee KuriyanThe State and Rural ICT

(in preparation)

Enduring Model? (2/4)

– Wealthier parents will pay for children’s education on computers

– Relatively lucrative for centre

• Examples– 1st-phase Akshaya; some 2nd-

phase Akshaya

– TARAhaat

– recent Drishtee

Computer-education centre

Joyojeet Pal, Renee Kuriyan, Kentaro ToyamaSite visits, surveys

Enduring Model? (3/4)Internet café

– Usage is similar to ordinary Internet cafés

• Browsing (exam results, jobs, news)

• E-mail• Desktop publishing

– So far, not a systematic approach by any kiosk agency

– Cf., Sify, largest Internet café operator, runs 3500 cafes in top 150 cities

(Note, Internet cafés also tough.)

Veeraraghavan, R., Singh, G., Toyama, K. and Menon, D. (2006)Kiosk Usage Measurement using a Software Logging Tool

ICTD2006

Enduring Model? (4/4)

– Primary a photo shop

– Services:• Prints• Photo touch-up• Wedding photo services

– Can be lucrative

• Examples– HP’s “photo backpacks”

– Otherwise, one-off instances of photo shops adding kiosk services

Computerized photo shops

Joyojeet Pal, Renee Kuriyan, Kentaro ToyamaSite visits, surveys

Outline

Introduction

Sustaining rural kiosks is very difficult!

Some kiosk types are more likely to endure.

Focus on end-to-end service.

Focus on End-to-End Service

– Is a human professional needed at rural site?

– Who provides the service on the other side?

– Is back-end computerized?

– What needs to be transported (other than bytes), and how is it transported?

– Etc.

Rural kiosk itself is not the challenge

Rural computing?

Summary

Introduction

Sustaining rural kiosks is very difficult!

Some kiosk types are more likely to endure.

Focus on end-to-end service.

Thank you!http://research.microsoft.com/research/tem/kiosks kentaro.toyama@microsoft.com