Meeting the Needs of Rural Indian Users: TARAhaat.com

By Ambika Sharma, Development Alternatives (DA)
May 2001

TARAhaat, an initiative of Development Alternatives, provides access for the villager to a variety of information resources and to a wide range of market-based opportunities online. Initially, this was limited to the obvious issues of prime concern to the villager, such as commodity prices, health facilities, land records, local development programs, business opportunities, jobs, matrimonials, etc. Users are able to shop for farm inputs such as seeds, machinery, spare parts and household items now becoming popular in rural markets such as bicycles, scooters and refrigerators. Over time, information on other issues and goods of interest to users will be actively sought and made available through TARAhaat.

The data, analysis and communication structures of TARAhaat.com are carefully designed so that it can smoothly evolve in response to the felt needs of its users, making it a highly participatory and thus responsive network at all levels of interaction.

TARAhaat has to be mastered and used by people with wide variations in literacy, language, financial liquidity and levels of understanding. Its design, therefore, obeys the well-known Cybernetics Principle, "Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety": the system will be as complex as the conditions in Rural India warrant, but no more complex than that. Useful information and user-friendly access to TARAhaat.com is critical to the success of TARAhaat. The "look-and-feel" of this service, and the range of its content, will break new ground since rural users have expectations that are quite different from those of their town cousins.

TARAhaat is designed from the ground up to address the needs of its particular customers. To achieve this, an extensive house-to-house survey is providing detailed information on rural life and livelihood practices. The survey, conducted with support from UNDP and the Government of Madhya Pradesh, covers some 20,000 households in 131 villages in the alpha and beta test areas.

The look and feel are carefully designed to attract and retain users of all kinds: farmers, traders, housewives, senior citizens, youth and children. The primary interface is both graphic (using specially designed pictures and icons that are attractive, colourful and animated) and voice-based to ensure that everyone, whatever their level of literacy, can quickly learn to take advantage of the system. Input will be by mouse click and, for the more literate, from the keyboard. Simple voice recognition software will in due course allow ordinary commands to be given to the computer. Use of headphones will enable users to receive voice mail messages or other information with privacy never before available in village life. In the pilots, being conducted in MP, UP and Punjab, the text is available in Hindi, Punjabi and English. During the roll out, other languages will be added, according to the needs of each region.

The content must be accurate, timely and reliable from a technical as well as utility point of view. To achieve this, TARAhaat works in collaboration with the premier institutions in each field within the country. For example, the Health/Medical site results from a close cooperation with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

While net surfing has its own values and offers undeniable opportunities for serendipitous discovery, many of the users in rural areas will have quite specific information requirements and limited financial resources. For them, TARAhaat.com will facilitate the information acquisition process through simplified forms, point-and-single click procedures and voice commands. In fact, the software will use "pull technology" to bring up a screen that is individually tailored for each user, and contains the specific types of information desired by that user.

The changes that TARAhaat.com will bring into our "users" lives are more fundamental than any imagined before: the weak need no longer fear the powerful, the poor do not have to bow before the rich and the villager no longer has to travel to the city in search of a livelihood.