MahitiBandhu: A Solar-Powered Information Kiosk System for Rural Community Empowerment

A major portion of Karnataka's population lives in rural areas. Most of the rural people are illiterate and poor due to lack of proper services and infrastructure. There are various rural development schemes run by the government of Karnataka/India for the benefit of villagers. However, most people in the villages of Karnataka are unaware of these schemes due to lack of education, poverty, inaccessibility, and lack of technological knowledge. Hence, the government is trying to render services and information to the public using ICT tools. While there are few examples of achievements of ICT in rural development, there are many failures due to lack of connectivity, bandwidth, language problems, and power supply. Also, Gram Panchayat of the village does not have proper facilities to give widespread publicity about government services and many people do not have smartphones to access information online. Thus, this paper focuses on the development of a solar-powered interactive touch-screen based kiosk system for the rural region. This single system can provide information about all rural schemes for education, agriculture, healthcare, and employment. It also gives information on other services like banking, vaccination drives, and fertilizers for farmers. This is an end-to-end user application with a text-free user interface and interacts based on audio, video, and image display irrespective of the user's literacy level.