TARAhaat - India

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. 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.

E-mail, on-line connection and chat rooms will be the major attractions, connecting local users to each other, to their husbands in the city and to their sons on the front. TARAhaat will provide access to even the lowest income users by setting up local TARAdhabas (TARAkiosks - the rural version of cybercafes) where they can get connected to the Internet (and where necessary, help or coaching to navigate through it) for the payment of a small fee.

TARAraths (TARAvans) will solve the problem of physical delivery of goods and services where courier services do not yet exist, which is the case for most villages in India. An order placed through TARAhaat.com will be passed on to TARAvendors (suppliers, dealers or agents of TARA-approved products) and to the local TARAvan franchise, which will pickup, deliver the items ordered and collect the payment.

Economic development, Technology

A central part of the mission of TARAhaat is to create sustainable livelihoods in rural and peri-urban India. The pilot phase concentrates mainly on the villages of Madhya Pradesh and a portion of the rural belt of Uttar Pradesh.Initially, the TARAhaat resources will necessarily be limited to the obvious issues of prime concern to the villager, such as commodity prices, health facilities, land records, local development programmes, business opportunities, jobs, matrimonials, etc. Users will be 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.

Winner of the 2001 Stockholm Challenge Award for 'innovative applications of IT in the global village'.