Digital Reach

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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