Any structure and strategy to reach deep into every village throughout the nation must be designed to be able to address this variety and remoteness. For such structures and strategies to be successful, they must be responsive to local needs and aspirations, and therefore highly decentralised. For such structures and strategies to be sustainable, they must in the long run be financially viable, and therefore be designed so as to generate revenue streams that are sufficient to recover the costs of the services they provide.

A key missing link that prevents the village from rapidly developing its human and physical resources, and therefore its economy, is access to knowledge. Not just the formal knowledge normally acquired in schools and colleges but, more particularly, the knowledge its citizens need to create secure livelihoods and lives for themselves and thus contribute to building up the resources and economy of their community. Much of this information exists somewhere, in some form or other, and at some level of applicability and relevance. But to be of value to the villager, it must be accessed, adapted, interpreted, and communicated in a form that he or she can comprehend and put to practical use – at a price that is reasonable.

An example is the setting up of a local industry; say a small cold storage plant. Such an industry can be of enormous value to every farmer in the locality, vastly increasing their potential earnings and reducing their risks for every crop. A villager with entrepreneurial skills wishing to set up such a plant would need large amounts of information … on the business opportunity (a simple business plan), on the kinds of equipment needed and where, how and for how much to procure these, on where to obtain financing, including accessing grants and loans from government schemes, on how to set it up and operate it, how to get assured power and how to market its services … all of which could be obtained through a well designed information system. But even if he or she is armed with all this information, the entrepreneur will still need specialist advice on how actually to set up and operate the plant to make it profitable and successful.

Another example is the need of a farmer to buy a tractor. A well designed knowledge service should be able to help the client get all the information needed in one package, preferably at one (electronic) window. This package should provide, at a glance, the various types of tractors available and their respective advantages and shortcomings, the vendors for each make, the financing sources and their terms, the government subsidies available, the ancillaries available and the additional opportunities for generating income when the tractor is not needed for agricultural operations.

Such information packages and services are not commonly available in rural India. The latest advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) offer highly efficient and cost-effective methods for providing them on a nationwide basis. Moreover, if such services are properly designed to take advantage of the economies possible from decentralised delivery systems and multiple revenue streams, they could be provided on a sustainable, commercial footing by private entrepreneurs.

This paper attempts to identify the design criteria for setting up an organizational framework and a system of management that can effectively bring the ICT revolution into "every" Indian village within the 3 year time frame envisaged.

Such an organizational framework will have to be multilevel, decentralised and, in its essence, quick-footed and non-bureaucratic. It will have to adopt the best attributes of the public sector (e.g., attention to universal service provision and scaling up), the private sector (business-like strategies and sense of urgency), academia (innovation, experimentation and rigour of analysis) and civil society (social objectives and direct participation in people’s processes). It will, in fact, have to build active collaboration among the sectors (so-called "public-private" partnerships) to take advantage of the strengths of each and the synergies possible, which happen to be particularly strong in the field of ICT.

And it will have to deal with all the main functional requirements of making "every village a knowledge centre":

All of these requirements are critically important. Since steps are being taken to improve connectivity and infrastructure, however, developing content and creating the network of shared access points (IT Kendras) are certainly the ones that now need the most attention on the ground level, while supporting infrastructure for capacity building and access to finance require focus at the institutional level. Special attention needs also to be given to the provision of reliable electricity at affordable prices, which will probably require much greater emphasis on renewable energy sources.

To enable every village to become a knowledge centre on a sustainable basis, several basic pre-requisites have to be in place:

The most effective model available in India for achieving the goal of "Every Village a Knowledge Centre" is the "mission-oriented" independent commission such as the Atomic Energy Commission and the Space Commission. Suitably modified, an independent "National ICT Commission" with a limited time mandate, of say five years, could take us a long way towards this goal. The broad structure and functions of such a Commission are shown schematically in the two diagrams above, which also identify the kinds of partnerships and networking arrangements it will have to adopt.

Initial establishment of such a commission will need a collaborative initiative on the part of Government, Private Sector, the Research Community and NGOs. In large measure, the work of the MSSRF and others to put together a National Alliance to this end is already in place to serve this purpose.