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This project has won the Motorola Dispatch Solution Gold Award 1999 and the Stockholm Challenge Award 2001 and DrVenkatramanBalajiwhos is main leader has won the World Technology Award

1. The  Information Village Project : Pondicherry

 

“Groups as diverse as the United nations, the G8 nations, Foundations, national, state and local governments, and private companies have seized upon the hope that the use of ICTs could enable even the poorest of developing nations to ‘leapfrog’ traditional problems of development like poverty, illiteracy, disease, unemployment, hunger, corruption, social inequalities so as to move rapidly into the modern Information Age,” says Kenneth Keniston,2 Director of the MIT-India programme.

Abstract

  • Often funding agencies and donor governments face the question should they support ICT activities in their development projects.

  • Should the money be invested in computers and communication devices or will it be better spent on food, shelter, health, and education?

  • The choice need not be 'either or'. If used intelligently and innovatively, ICTs can form an integral component of development projects, as is shown by the award-winning Information Village project of M S Swaminathan Research Foundation. The important point to remember is that one does not have to use technology because it is there, but one uses it if there is a genuine advantage.

  • In any development programed, people and their contexts should decide how one goes about implementing development interventions. The needs of the people and the best means to satisfy them should determine the whole programme.

  • The widespread availability and convergence of information and communication technologies - computers, digital networks, telecommunication, television, etc. - have led to unprecedented capacity for dissemination of knowledge and information.

  • The impact of this fourth information revolution is felt in education, research, medicine, government, business and entertainment in many parts of the world.

  • But  the benefits have reached only about 5% of the world's population.

 

History

  • The Information Village Research project(IVRP) started in 1998 in Villianpur village of Pondicherry.

  • Pondicherry is a union territory with an area of around 11000sq. km and it consists of about 130 villages.

  • An accessible government and reasonable telecommunication infrastructure made Pondicherry project successful.

  • There was high incidence of poverty in the rural areas.

  • Ten villages were chosen for the IVRP project and they were connected by a hybrid wired and wireless network.

  • The electronic knowledge delivery to the poor, The foundation have set up knowledge centers  -- consisting of PCs, telephones, VHF duplex radio devices, spread spectrum and email connectivity through dial-up telephone lines -- that facilitates both voice and data transfer, and have enabled the villagers to get information they need and can use to improve their lot.

  • The M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) was established in 1988 as a non-profit trust.

  • MSSRF was envisioned and founded by Professor M. S. Swaminathan with proceeds from the First World Food Prize that he received in 1987. The Foundation aims to accelerate use of modern science for agricultural and rural development for development and dissemination of technology to improve lives and livelihoods of tribal and rural communities.

  • MSSRF follows a pro-poor, pro-women and pro-nature approach and applies appropriate science and technology options to address practical problems faced by rural populations in agriculture, food and nutrition

  • Detailed surveys were conducted in the region for incidence of poverty, status of literacy and education, and the state of telecom infrastructure to examine the gaps and the local availability of skills to bridge them. A separate survey was carried out to identify existing communication habits and channels of information flow. The surveys also generated a rating pattern of various information sources by the rural families.

  • Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) was conducted in the villages to identify the local information needs of the people . It also helped in assessing the willingness of the community to partner and co-operate in the venture. Participation of women was also encouraged by the MSSRF staff. The PRAs also enabled identification of enthusiastic group of individuals who were ready to support the project whole-heartedly.

The main objectives of Project:

 

  • Emphasizes on integrated pro-poor, pro-women, pro-Nature orientation to development and community ownership of technological tools against personal or family ownership, and encourages collective action for spread of information and technology.

  • Provide easy access to the information and help increasing the information exchange and sharing

  • The bottom up exercise involves local volunteers to gather information, feed it into an intranet-type network and provide access through nodes in different villages.

  • Value addition to the raw information, use of the local language (Tamil) and multimedia (to facilitate illiterate users)

  • All the knowledge centers are open to all, irrespective of age, sex, religion, caste, and level of literacy and education.

  • Promote active usage of computers and improve IT skills through training at the information center.

  • Promote effective healthcare by making them aware of health hazards and measures to prevent it.

 

Project Highlights:

  • Community ownership–

The local community has to contribute in terms of providing volunteers to run the center without any remuneration. The volunteers are young men and women chosen by the community. They manage the village center on a voluntary basis. The community also provides the space required for the knowledge centers and makes arrangements for power supply. The project provides all the needed equipment, training and data. AnMoU is signed to this effect and is renewed whenever necessary.

 

  • Bottom-up approach–

Since the whole process begins with a participatory rural appraisal, the needs of the local population is addresses in the design of the programme. Hence it is a bottom up approach where there is grass root level participation. The different villages have evolved their own ways of managing the knowledge centers. The project has been gender sensitive right from the time of its inception.

  • Use of local language–

 One of the striking features of the network content in this project has been that all the information was developed in the local language Tamil. This made maximum number of people benefit from it. The Tamil fonts and keyboards for the computers were developed by C-DAC, a civil society organization based in Pune.

  • Value added information

–The volunteers collect local information and feed it into the intranet in their respective villages. The data collected by the volunteers are scanned by the MSSRF staff. These are compiled and collated at the Villianur hub and transmitted to all the village knowledge centers. Since most of the villages are in coastal areas, information pertaining to weather conditions, wave heights etc are common requirement of most of the villages. About 100 databases carrying value-added useful information, have been developed and maintained at the hub. 
 

 

 

 

Impact/Results

First and foremost, the visionary leader, his able technocrat implementer and his small team of half a dozen dedicated staff understood the people and their context and got accepted by them. The local communities have trust in us.

  • People readily offered space to set up the knowledge centers – in

    • panchayat (local level government) offices,

    •  temples,

    • government-owned buildings,

    • one village in a private individual’s home!

    • In two villages the people collected money to construct new buildings to house the knowledge centre. In some villages the communities pay the telephone bills and Internet charges.

  • Second, our relationship with the local community is not of the “donor-recipient” type but one of “partnership in progress”. Right from the beginning the people of the villages were involved at every stage. Every month village volunteers and the Foundation’s staff meet and review what has been accomplished and discuss new initiatives.

  • They understood the need to develop ‘content’ – the information needed to satisfy the communities’ needs - and developed much of the content in collaboration with the local people.

  •  They have created close to a hundred databases, including rural yellow pages, which are updated as often as needed. Incidentally, the entitlements database, which serves as a single-window for the entire gamut of government programmes, has created so much awareness among the rural poor that there is greater transparency in government now.

  • Farmers get the right price for their farm produce and wage- labourers get the right wages from their employers, thanks to the knowledge centers.

  • They are not averse to borrowing ‘content’ from elsewhere if it is found useful to the local community. For example, they have collected much useful information from Government departments, the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Aravind Eye Hospital, and the US Navy’s website. We have held a few health camps in the villages in cooperation with well-known hospitals as part of gathering information about local health care needs.

  • The Value Addition Centre at Villianur delivers daily images obtained from a web site run by the US Navy of the predicted wave conditions in the Bay of Bengal to the centers at Veerampattinam and Nallavadu.

  • The villagers there are fisherfolk, and the sea conditions are of crucial interest for their safety.

  •  The information is so critical that the voice report from Villianur is transmitted at the coastal villages over a public address system to the fishermen as they prepare their boats in the early morning.

  •  Information provided in the village knowledge centers is locale specific and relates

    • to prices of agricultural inputs (such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides)

    • outputs (rice, vegetables, sugarcane),

    •  market, entitlement (the multitude of schemes of the Pondicherry government),

    • health care (availability of doctors and paramedics in nearby hospitals, women’s diseases), cattle diseases,

    • transport (road conditions, cancellation of bus trips),

    • weather (appropriate time for sowing, areas of abundant fish catch, wave heights in the sea), etc.

 

  • Most of the transactions are in Tamil, the local language. Our village volunteers are trained to input material in Tamil using the standard QWERTY English keyboard.

  • Some of them have learnt to code in html and design web pages. As our chairman Prof. Swaminathan says, these villagers take to technology as fish to water. It is a question of getting the opportunity.

  • They use multimedia and loud speakers to reach out to illiterate

  • These landless labourers  get correct wages

  • They have a fortnightly Tamil newspaper called  NammaOoruSeithi (‘Our Village News’). The newspaper has become so popular that Government departments such as District Rural Development Agency, Social Welfare Board, Small Scale Industries Centre use our newspaper to publicize their schemes.

  • They  use technology when it provides a distinct advantage.

  • They have so far used hybrid wired and wireless technology for communication (including telephone and modem, VHF two-way radio and spread spectrum), hybrid grid-solar energy, Intranet and Internet.

  • Currently  they are testing the possibility of using World Space radio to network the rural poor of the world.

  • This experiment forms the basis of a proposal to the G8 DOT Force and the UN ICT Task Force. Importantly, in this project the technologies and the knowledge centres are collectively owned by the community and not by an individual or a family. As people are indeed poor, it will not be possible for individual families to afford any of these technologies for a long time to come. 

  • The knowledge centres are operated by local volunteers, mostly women, selected by the community. We are looking at possibilities for revenue generation (from those who can afford) and Accenture has shown interest in developing a revenue model for our knowledge centres.

  • People need to build skills and capacities they could convert into additional income.

  • We take an integrated view of development and are working closely with the biovillage and ecotechnology groups.

  • These groups are working closely with farm families in Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu and have developed many income-generating low-cost technologies, such as

    • mushroom growing,

    • ornamental fish,

    • production of biopesticides,

    •  production of high yielding varieties of seeds, converting banana waste into paper and boards, and

    • production of green fodder for cattle.

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