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right people and there were chaotic scenes, the distribution of relief
materials at Veerampattinam was orderly. Clearly people who are
used to a culture of sharing and communicating information in their
daily lives are better able to deal with disasters.
A knowledge centre managed by women
If the knowledge centre at Veerampattinam saves fishermen’s lives,
the one in the agricultural village of Embalam has helped women
acquire a certain level of gender equality. Like all knowledge centres
set up by MSSRF, the Embalam centre was also set up after detailed
negotiations with the people of the village – men and women, old
and young, landed and landless. Although a variety of technologies
are used, the focus of the Information Village Research Project,
funded by Canada’s IDRC, is people, their contexts and their needs.
As in other villages, the bottom-up programme started with a needs
assessment. About a third of the population in most of these villages
has an income of less than USD25 per month and there is a great
need for implementing poverty reduction programmes. The
Embalam knowledge centre is managed by an all-women team
selected by the women self-help groups in the village. The infor-
mation provided is wide ranging and pertains to agriculture,
education, healthcare, animal health, government entitlements,
employment opportunities, market information and livelihood
opportunities.
Thanks to a training programme offered through the knowledge
centre, volunteers at this centre check villagers’ eyesight for vision
and cataracts. They then transmit pictures taken with a web camera
along with their observations as email attachments to doctors at the
nearby Aravind Eye Hospital, who provide free treatment to those
who need it. Some women have set up small-scale business opera-
tions, such as knitting sweaters and growing mushrooms. All the
self-help groups use accounting software specially developed for the
purpose by MSSRF scientists to maintain their micro-finance
programmes. This software is loaded in computers in all knowledge
centres.
A holistic approach to development
The project is designed to provide knowledge on demand to meet
local needs, and it does so through a bottom-up process. The
process starts with volunteer teams that help poll the villagers to
find out what knowledge they want. MSSRF provides the villages
with hardware and maintenance for the communication system,
and specially designed websites in the local language that convey the
requested information.
After visiting some of these knowledge centres Professor Bruce
Alberts, former President of the National Academy of Sciences of
the US, observed: “Drawing on this concept, I envision a global
electronic network that connects scientists to people at all levels –
farmers’ organizations and village women, for example. The
network will allow them to easily access the scientific and techni-
cal knowledge that they need to solve local problems and enhance
the quality of their lives, as well as to communicate their own
insights and needs back to scientists”. Note the emphasis on two-
way communication.
In villages where they have established knowledge centres, a group
of MSSRF scientists are helping people to learn new skills. For
example, a self-help group called Rani Jhansi, consisting of women
from the historically marginalized Dalit communities, is making and
marketing hand-made paper and paper products. Other women,
with eight years of schooling or less are making biopesticides, the
production of which requires a certain degree of sophisticated skills.
While the paper unit has yet to reap big profits, the biopesticide
units are doing well. What is important is not just the money these
women have started earning but the way it helps them to make their
Farmers reading ‘today’s headlines’ at Thirupalanam in the Cauvery delta