T he Digital Divide narrows every day. Heads of households in India now do in minutes what used to take two days, thanks to the digitizing of documents and the electronic linking of rural villages.

"Digital inclusion" is what John Kish, chief executive officer of Wyse Technology (www.wyse.com), calls the transformation. His San Jose, Calif.-based company, which specializes in "thin computing," and a host of partners are changing lives.

Thin computing connects computer terminals to a centralized network using the Linux operating system. It gives access to applications and data with easier system management and reduced operating costs.

"Our goal is to provide up to 16,000 rural business centers in India," Kish said. "We (are) figuring out if it's possible to bring together partners to provide digital-inclusion devices where people will use them."

The devices are scanners and computers, which turn paper documents into electronic ones that are transmitted via satellite to major cities.

Operational partners bring experience in microcredit services, health care, insurance and educational services. Some big-name partners in the project include ICICI Bank and Comat.

Kish said one of the biggest challenges to bridging the Digital Divide is illiteracy in large parts of rural India. "There's a history of providing computers and ethernet cables, but nobody used them for anything," he said. "The reliability of PCs in remote villages was poor. The first time a hard drive crashed, nobody in the village could figure out how to reboot it. So it sat there and did nothing."

"The first thing we looked at was very simple: giving people access to government services," Kish said. "Each adult male head of a household was spending two days a month to get to offices to file information regarding their land grant leases and caste information. In order to qualify for certain programs, you must prove every month which caste you are from.

"In the nondigital world it means a monthly trip to a subdistrict office. Imagine a football field stacked 20 feet tall with stacks of paper and a guy with six stamps that have to go on everything," Kish said.

Thanks to the digitization of the documents and satellite transmission to the government offices, the monthly trip and reams of paperwork have been eliminated in villages participating in the digital inclusion project.

"This did have a significant benefit to the village by working more and producing more crops." He said the first villages in the program have fewer than 5,000 residents and are remote and disconnected from other municipal centers.

"We're focusing more on bringing together the economic ecosystem. We're addressing needs that perhaps are unique to India. Most of these villages have no infrastructure for financial transactions," he said.

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