Digital Reach

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ITRODA

TELECOM

pioneer and chairman of India’s

Knowledge Commission, said: “True knowledge can empower

people at all levels. It can make our people aware of their rights

and responsibilities. It can also provide them tools and techniques

to be productive and meaningful in the information age. To achieve

this, the best brains in the country will have to focus urgently on

solving problems of the poor and the underprivileged at the bottom

of the pyramid.”

India is home to a number of development initiatives. We will

see how one of them, which uses access to knowledge as a key to

holistic development, has led to perhaps the largest ever scaling up

operation in the history of the telecentres movement.

ICT makes a difference to a fishing village

Veerampattinam is a fairly large village ten km south of Pondicherry

on the eastern coast of southern India. A clean village with rectan-

gular roads and a wide beach, it has a population of about 6 200

people, most of whom belong to fishing families. At the centre of the

village is a reputed temple, a clean square-shaped water tank paved

with granite stones on all sides, the village school, a few shops, the

marketplace, and the office of the local Panchayat (the traditional

village government).

Seven years ago the villagers requested the M S Swaminathan

Research Foundation (MSSRF) to set up a knowledge centre similar

to the ones it had set up in nearby villages with financial support

from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in

Canada. The villagers provided space for the knowledge centre in

one half of a rectangular room that serves as the Veerampattinam

Panchayat office. Within months of its inauguration, the knowledge

centre started providing, among other information, forecasts of wave

heights and wave current directions in the Bay of Bengal 48 hours

in advance. These forecasts, based on information downloaded from

a US Navy website, proved to be a boon. Ever since this service was

started, not one person from the village has died while fishing at

sea. Before then, up to half a dozen lives were lost every year when

fishermen were caught in rough weather while fishing far away from

the shore.

In the case of the fishermen of Veerampattianm, lives could not

have been saved without the intelligent use of a combination of old

and new technologies. The US Navy gathers the information on

weather conditions in the Bay of Bengal through its own satellites

and puts out the information on its website. MSSRF has set up, in

cooperation with local communities, about a dozen knowledge

centres in villages within 30 km of each other, all of which are

connected to a hub at a central village through a hybrid wired and

wireless local area network. Each knowledge centre, managed by

local volunteers trained by MSSRF, is provided with a few personal

computers with a solar powered battery backup to ensure an unin-

terrupted power supply, a printer, and a web camera.

One computer in each centre is connected to the server at the

hub through telephone-and-modem or spread spectrum technol-

ogy or a Motorola very high frequency two-way radio to enable them

to receive and transmit data, text, audio and video files. The staff at

the hub download wave height forecasts from the US Navy site once

a day and transmit them as a multimedia file to Veerampattinam.

The transferred message consists of a weather chart in colour indi-

cating wave heights as a function of the distance from the shore and

current ocean directions, a written statement and a voice announce-

ment. At Veerampattinam a local volunteer downloads the message,

puts up the weather chart and the written statement on the notice

board and broadcasts the voice announcement several times a day

over the public address system so everyone in the village can hear

it through strategically located loudspeakers.

All the knowledge centres, including the one at Veerampattinam,

distribute the twice-monthly local language community newspa-

per called

Our Village News

, edited and produced by a consortium

of knowledge centre volunteers and provides news on employ-

ment opportunities. A number of able-bodied village youths from

Veerampattinam have been selected as firemen and a couple of

them have joined the security forces. Many school kids visit the

knowledge centre to learn to use computers. The centre has helped

a woman’s self-help group to make and market ready-to-wear

clothing.

During and after the tsunami

The knowledge centre at Veerampattinam played a key role in saving

lives on 26 December 2004, when rumblings of the earth off the

coast of Aceh in Indonesia sent the deadly tsunami waves to its

shores. On the day of the tsunami, Mani, one of the Panchayat

members, was on the shore mending his net when he saw some-

thing unusual – the sea receding hundreds of feet. He thought that

something awful was going to happen and rushed to the knowl-

edge centre along with a few others, broke open the door and started

warning over the public address system using everyone in the village

to vacate their homes and rush to safety.

By the time the giant waves struck the village and dragged boats

from the shore half a kilometre into the village, everyone – includ-

ing women, children, the old and infirm – were already in safe

areas. The villagers lost some of their homes, boats, nets and other

valuables, but there was hardly any loss of life. And when the relief

supplies came, knowledge centre volunteer Mr Elumalai used the

public address system to request people to come street by street

and collect rice, cooking oil, kerosene and other supplies. Whereas

in most other tsunami-affected areas the supplies did not reach the

From pilot projects to a mammoth national

programme: the story of Mission 2007

Subbiah Arunachalam

, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation