MIRROR, MIRROR... WHAT'S THE SUM I OWE YOU TODAY? By Frederick Noronha
He's a young researcher still in his twenties of Indian origin. Parikh has been spending time in India even as we start seeing signs of a reverse brain-drain with skills and talent showing up from among expatriates keen not just to understand their roots, and work to improve things here. Micro-finance, one attempt to get the poor to help themselves by collecting small sums of money and loaning it between themselves, is to get a leg-up from IT if Parikh and his team have their way. Their new software is getting finalised to make it easy for simple villagers to undertake more complex financial transactions. It's called Hisaab (meaning, 'accounts'). Interestingly, what it does is not just to make the account-keeping process simpler, but also to make sure that people with low-literacy skills can use this new package. "This software has a different kind of user-interface. It has been designed with low-literacy groups in mind," explains Parikh. Instead of names and text, it has more numbers involved. It's obvious, but we often forget that it's easier for the poor to read numbers. "Users could replace someone's name with a code-number. Numbers are also easier to remember," says Parikh. It's easier to type in a number too. Behind micro-credit, the idea is to ensure that money goes round the village, and that it gets productively used. This simple idea could help the poor, if given that vital IT-edge, feels Parikh. How the software works seems simple enough, at least in theory: Each month, the group of women meets and puts together Rs 50, 70 or 100 or some other predetermined figure. Over time, this generates into a collection of money that can be used for income generation, tackling sickness, or the loss of a job. Because the group works collectively in saving and loaning out their resources, repayments tend to be high due to peer pressure against defaulting. "Money is put back, and over time, it grows. This allows larger loans to be taken. The core-goal is to rotate money as much as possible, so it supports productive activity. So, a one rupee (a little over two cents, but not pittance in a rural Indian setting) put in gets used not two or three times in a year, but revolves around 10-11 times if possible," says Parikh. He says such groups expect to link up with banks, NGOs who are working on micro-finance, and NABARD (the Indian bank for agriculture and rural development) also offers loans to such self-help groups. "Due to their collective liability, they have shown better repayment rates. Because if one person doesn't pay, everyone would be less likely to get a loan. Peer pressure being high, repayment rates are as high as 90-95% while individual repayments elsewhere could be 40%," argues Parikh. "This is not just theory. It works in practise too. It depends on how strong the groups are, and how well managed. You need to build capacity in accounting, management and discipline," says he. To make the software user-friendly to the poor, it's being built up textually-light, with a greater number of images and graphics. Currently, it is being built up by teams of the Media Lab Asia and the Human Factors International. HFI is a Fairfield-Iowa headquartered group which says "we make software usable". It has its India office in Andheri in the Indian commercial capital of Mumbai. Recently, the team putting together this software went and gave a demo to potential users in Tamil Nadu. Feedback was positive. Its demo version has been done in Flash, while actual development would be done in Java -- meaning that the software could be run on either the popular Windows platform, or the stable GNU/Linux operating system. "We want this to be an empowering tool (for the villager and micro-credit groups). By being able to manage their own finances in a more sophisticated way, they will now be able to undertake more complex transactions," says Parikh. For instance, withdrawals and deposits could be more 'arbitrary' and need-based than would otherwise be possible in a more traditional form of account-keeping. You don't have to save fixed sums of money just because it makes account-keeping easier. "More complex financial transactions are possible without accounting hassles," says Parikh. "We want it to become part of a very local system: locally managed, locally mobilised and locally distributed. We want to minimise external interventions, and plan to have a lot of partnerships with NGOs," says Parikh. Bangladesh's Grameen Bank is about the best known model of micro-finance in the Third World. That has come in for some criticism though. "Perhaps over time it has got centralised and institutionalised. But we want to ensure that contact remains with the local people, and to focus on minimum external intervention," says Parikh. This demo interface design is primarily the work of Kaushik Ghosh, an Interface Designer from the prestigious National Institute of Design, who works at Media Lab Asia. "We are still working on some of the research issues in the UI design, which are developing quite nicely. But are still at an early stage," cautions Parikh. In Madurai, the team met with CCD (Covenant Centre for Development), which is led by N. Muthu Velayutham. "We intend CCD to be our primary NGO partners for the project, as we share a common goal of building self-sufficient and empowered local institutions and economic systems. It is really their project and vision of ten years, we are only the facilitators and tool-builders," says Parikh. Parikh (27) says his parents migrated from Baroda in 1972, and he was born in Queens, NY, and grew up "around New York City". After gradating in Molecular Modelling, he got his Masters' in Computer Science and is currently a student in the PhD programme at the University of Washington. Since early 2000 he has been on leave. Incidentally, Media Lab Asia (MLA) is a network of R&D institutions. Its goal is to bring the "benefits of new technologies to everyone, with a special focus on meeting the challenges in learning, health and economic development". To do this, it is trying to build partnerships with research institutions, industry and NGOs. Media Lab Asia has been set up as a not-for-profit company with seed-funding from the Government of India. It has been appointed by the United Nations as its academic and industrial body for the region in the newly created UN ICT Task Force. Headquartered in Mumbai (see www.medialabasia.org), it has research laboratories created on the campuses of the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technologies, a string of prestigious institutions set up across India) of Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Kanpur and Kharagpur. Those on the team which have been working on this project are Kaushik Ghosh and Tapan Parikh of Media Lab Asia; and Puneet Syal, Sarit Arora, Abhijeet Thosar and Apala Chavan of Human Factors International, Mumbai. Tapan Parikh can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Check out more details of Hisaab at http://hisaab.sourceforge.net. ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
