Friends: In one of his recent interventions Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala wrote: "The income generation and setting up of micro-enterprise, agriculture support and trading, all require a lot of work, specially focused on rural areas. I think these are the areas where we should concentrate on. My feeling is that these are not short term work, but require sustained effort."
We at MSSRF have been concentrating on such a holistic approach right from the beginning of our Information Village Research Project in 1997. As I have written often, our emphasis is on people, their contexts, their needs (and wants), and the content (information/ knowledge) that can address those needs. It is in gathering and delivering the information/ knowledge that we need to use technologies, and in the past seven or eight years we have tried a number of them ranging from VHF two-way radio and spread spectrum to Internet, web conferencing and satellite communication. We also use solar energy, multimedia communication, community newspaper, public address system, and so on. Indeed we use both modern and traditional technologies as dictated by the need. Horses for courses. Also we pay attention to both content and connectivity. We have close to a hundred databases, some of them dynamic (meaning, one has to input new information very frequently). The entire programme is participatory - it is often the village volunteers who gather and input information. While much of the information needed by the rural poor is locale specific, we also need some information obtained from the Internet. For example, the wave height information our staff download from a US Navy website is rated by the fishermen as the most useful service provided by our knowledge centres in the coastal villages of Pondicherry. The information obtained from the Navy web site is transmitted through notice boards and loud speakers! Recently, we had a tele-consultation when a heart patient at Thiruvaiyaru and her physician spoke to the head of a major medical university in Chennai. Our village volunteers test eyes of their communities and transmit pictures of defective eyes to an ophthalmologist in a major eye hospital via email. Once the people have access to information, what next? What do they do with the information? The next step is to empower them to use the information to their advantage. That is where skill building, credit, microenterprises, marketing, etc. come in. We work with many self-help groups, banks and training institutions. A whole division at MSSRF - the JRD Tata Ecotechnology Centre - is constantly looking for microenterprises that can be taken up by the rural poor. For example, this centre has helped rural communities (barely literate and semilitearte women mostly) in Dindigul district of Tamil Nadu in southern India to set up small scale production units for making biopesticides and biofungicides. Another group is producing paper and board from banana waste. As Prof. Swaminathan tells often, merely putting up a computer and providing an Internet connection cannot make a knowledge centre (as we call 'telecentres'). Many other groups who have attempted to set up telecentres have come to us to know how we manage to handle the 'content' part. These include people working with MIT Media Lab Asia projects. MSSRF is certainly not the only organization to pursue such an approach. TARAHaat, for example, is helping a number of people turn into enterpreneurs. Every year about 20 development workers from Asia, Africa and Latin America visit the project villages of MSSRF for about 7 or 8 days to exchange knowledge and experience with the rurla communities in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry working closely with MSSRF. The reports by the participants invariably speak highly of the integrated approach to development and the people focus. These South-South Exchange Travelling Workshops have become popular and a similar workshop for Africa was held last year in Uganda, when the MSSRF and Ugandan workshop participants exchanged notes for more than an hour via a web conference. We are now working hard towards building such a holistic programme at the national level. Called the Mission 2007 programme, it aims to make every village in India a knowledge centre. The idea is to use ICTs intelligently and innovatively as part of a holistic development strategy that will lead to both poverty reduction and overall development in rural India. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] _______________________________________________ telecentres mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/telecentres To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
