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Welfare Trust. Unlike the major science academies of the world, the
NVA is an academy of grassroots workers who have distinguished
themselves by their commitment to public good and community
welfare. The Mission of spreading the knowledge revolution cannot
succeed without the support of a very large number of such commit-
ted grassroots workers spread all over the country. The idea is to
select more than a million such Fellows, with at least one man and
one woman from each of India’s 637 000 villages.
MSSRF followed this up through a series of consultations where
they invited government leaders, bureaucrats, academics, civil soci-
eties and industry. They discussed building on the experience of
MSSRF and others by taking ICT-enabled knowledge provision to
resource-poor families. Having won support for the formation of
Mission 2007: Every Village a Knowledge Centre to facilitate the
setting up of village knowledge centres throughout rural India to
generate knowledge-based livelihoods, MSSRF formed a National
Alliance for carrying out the Mission. Currently, there are more than
160 partners in the Alliance, which is perhaps one of the largest
multi stakeholder partnerships in development. They include
ministries and departments of the government, academia, NGOs,
industry, research institutions, international organizations and finan-
cial institutions.
Initially, there was considerable diffidence about achieving such
a huge task in less than three years. But subsequent developments
on many fronts have led to greater confidence. Together with
OneWorld South Asia, MSSRF organized the first convention of
Mission 2007 in New Delhi in July 2004, where partner organiza-
tions agreed upon a common goal and a joint action framework.
The workshop highlighted the need for policy intervention, such as
de-licensing and making the highly regulatory environment more
people friendly. The Mission would be implemented on the princi-
ples of social inclusion, social relevance and gender equality, and
transaction costs would be kept low. An ICT-SHGmovement would
be fostered to give a sense of ownership to the people. The Alliance
would work with Panchayats, self-help groups, common interest
groups, and community-based organizations.
The Alliance would also promote entrepreneurship in the villages
and address the growing concern about adverse social, economic
and political implications of the expanding urban-rural divide in
knowledge, skills and technological empowerment. The National
Alliance would be a coalition of the concerned and would function
like the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
(CGIAR), without a formal structure. The Alliance would have infor-
mal organizational structures at national, state, district and local
levels to plan and implement the objectives of the Mission. Several
task forces would be constituted to deal with connectivity, content,
capacity building, coordination and management. These task forces
have since submitted detailed reports that were discussed in July
2005 at the second convention of Mission 2007.
Inaugurating the convention, the President of India, Dr Abdul
Kalam, said the connectivity of village complexes to provide
economic opportunities to all segments of people was needed to
bridge the urban-rural divide, generate employment and enhance
rural prosperity. He was immensely pleased to hand over the
Fellowships to the first batch of over 130 Fellows of the NVA. The
Finance Minister of India, Mr Palaniappan Chidambaram,
announced his readiness to allocate start-up funds to the tune of
USD1.5 billion to implement the programme. The Minister for IT,
Mr Dayanidhi Maran announced that his ministry would join the
Mission by setting up 100 000 community service centres. The
Minister for Panchayat Raj, Mr Mani Shankar Aiyer, offered the
support of his ministry and suggested that the village knowledge
centres could be set up in Panchayat office buildings throughout
the country. The union minister of state for planning, Mr
Rajasekharan, suggested that banks should provide youths funds
to establish village knowledge centres.
In addition to connectivity and access issues, the Mission will
address content. A consortium of content providers will be formed
to build a location and language-specific knowledge base. There is
also a need for capacity building for content provisioning, as well as
building a framework for learning-by-doing by practitioners. The
Mission is also focusing on gender mainstreaming of content;
assured and remunerative market-linking of producers and
purchasers; outsourcing of work from towns to villages; ICT-SHGs
at low transaction cost; organising financial, technical and infra-
structure resources; and training and capacity building.
Mission 2007 is keen to promote community radio and Internet
radio to unleash the creativity of rural people. Banks will have to
play a catalytic role to introduce new schemes through rural knowl-
edge centres. There is also a need to undertake cost-benefit analysis
and to document best practice and success stories.
The time is ripe for ushering in the knowledge revolution in rural
India. The Telecom Regulatory Authority is now building strategies
to accelerate the growth of telecom infrastructures and to cut
communication costs. Many national institutions, such as state open
universities and the National Informatics Centre, are keen to reach
out to the rural masses. State governments are interested in harness-
ing ICT for sustainable development. ISRO has launched a satellite
called Edusat that is dedicated to education as well as the knowl-
edge centers programme. The Ministry of Health is keen to use ICT
infrastructure to take healthcare to rural areas.
It is significant that the Mission talks about every village being a
knowledge centre and not a knowledge centre in every village, thus
recognizing the enormous resource of indigenous knowledge native
to village people.
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Knowledge workers at the all-women knowledge centre at Embalam