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children’s lives better. Independent evaluation has shown that ICT-
enabled knowledge centres can indeed make a difference to the lives
of rural communities.
It is not enough to provide useful information. It is important
to see that the people who receive the information are empowered
to use it to their advantage. Poverty will persist so long as a large
proportion of the rural population is engaged only in unskilled
work. Knowledge centres should bring about a paradigm shift
from unskilled to skilled work and from on-farm to value-added
non-farm activities. For that to happen, people may need to
acquire new skills and funds. Also, we should learn to use ICT to
bridge gender, social, economic and technological divides. The
challenge is in adopting a holistic information access-enabled
development strategy and using ICT as a cross-cutting instrument
in different aspects of the strategy.
The project is people centred and participatory, and technology
is seen as an enabler. It is holistic and ensures the timely provision
of information and enables people to take advantage of information
through capacity building, formation of self-help groups, facilitating
micro-credit and setting up micro-enterprises.
From a small beginning to a mass movement
MSSRF has embarked on extending these benefits to other regions
of the world. This is primarily through two communication initia-
tives, the annual South-South Exchange Traveling Workshop (SSE)
and the Open Knowledge Network (OKN).
So far three SSEs have been held and each had 20-25 develop-
ment activists from Asia, Africa and Latin America as participants.
Participants travel from village to village in Pondicherry and Tamil
Nadu, where MSSRF has set up knowledge centres, and engage in
a dialogue with the local people and knowledge centre volunteers.
They share their knowledge and learn from one another’s experi-
ence. After a week-long journey covering about ten villages, the
whole group analyze the lessons learnt and how they could use the
experiential learning in their own work.
In collaboration with OneWorld International, MSSRF formed
the OKN, a human network, which collects, shares and dissemi-
nates local knowledge and is supported by flexible technical
solutions.
Conceived by Peter Armstrong, OKN is a fabulous idea and one
day it will become the equivalent of the Internet for poor people in
the world. Its aim is to empower the poor through the creation and
sharing of local content. What people need is space to communi-
cate, to express their ideas and their voices. OKN helps them acquire
the skills to develop content. People in rural areas of India and Africa
are partners in this network and partners from countries such as
Sri Lanka and Nepal are joining in. Trained volunteers gather indige-
nous knowledge by talking to people and upload the information
along with metadata on to a central portal. While the main content
could be in any language, the metadata is in English. Anyone
anywhere can download the content and using the metadata tags
choose what is relevant to one’s needs.
MSSRF has now launched what is perhaps the largest ever scaling
up programme in the history of ICT-enabled development. This is
called Mission 2007: Every Village a Knowledge Centre. The idea is
to reach out to all the 637 000 villages of India by the 60th anniver-
sary of India’s Independence on August 15, 2007.
Winning support
As a first step to win support, MSSRF set up the MSSRF-Jamsetji
Tata National Virtual Academy for Food Security and Rural Prosperity
(NVA) in August 2003, with financial support from the Tata Social
People of Veerampattinam queueing up to collect relief materials