Making Waves : VILLAGE KNOWLEDGE CENTRES
Stories of Participatory Communication
for Social Change
TITLE: Village Knowledge Centres
COUNTRY: India
FOCUS: Rural development
PLACE: Chennai
BENEFICIARIES: Rural population
PARTNERS: M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, India (MSSRF)
FUNDING: IDRC
MEDIA: Information technologies, computers, Internet
In this village at the southern tip of India, the century-old temple has two doors. Through one lies tradition. People from the lowest castes and menstruating women cannot pass its threshold. Inside, the devout perform daily pujas, offering prayers. Through the second door lies the Information Age, and anyone may enter.
In a rare social experiment, the village elders have allowed one side of the temple to house two solar-powered computers that give this poor village a wealth of data, from the price of rice to the day's most auspicious hours...
Some months back, Subrayan Panjaili, a round-faced woman who cannot read or write, sat in the courtyard of her small home in the village of Kizhur, in Pondicherry, with the family's only milk cow, Jayalakshmi. For five days and nights, the cow moaned while in labor. Something had gone wrong, and she was unable to deliver her calf. Mrs. Panjaili grew ever more fearful that the cow would die.
"This is the only good income we have", she said, explaining that the four gallons of milk the cow produced each day paid the bills.
Word of Mrs. Panjaili's woebegone cow soon spread to Govindaswami, a public-spirited farmer who uses one name. The village's computer, obtained through the Swaminathan Foundation, is in the anteroom of his home. The computer is operated full-time and for no pay by his 23-year-old, college-educated daughter, Azhalarasi, who used it to call up a list of area veterinarians.
One doctor arrived that night and, by the light of a bare electric bulb, stuck his arm into Jayalakshmi, pulled out the calf's spindly leg and tied a rope to it, then dragged the calf into the world.
The Swaminathan Foundation has sought to give the four villages in its network other practical, highly local information, which is distributed through the village computer network in the local language, Tamil. Generally,that kind of information is not on the World Wide Web.
Excerpts from Connecting Rural India to the World by Celia W. Dugger.
Formerly called "information shops", the Village Knowledge Centres were established by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai to take advantage of new technologies to provide information to the rural population on agricultural issues such as: health (availability of vaccines and medicines in the nearest health centre preventive measures); relief information (issue of loans, availability of officials); inputs for agriculture (prices and availability, costs, risks and returns, local market prices for rural produce); transportation information; micro-meteorological information (relating to the local area); surface and ground water-related data, pest surveillance, and agronomic practices for all seasons and crops (based on queries from the rural families); and the maintenance and update of data on entitlements of the rural families(vis-à-vis public sector welfare and infrastructural funds).
The village information shops are operated by individuals on a semi-voluntary basis. Such individuals are identified on the basis of the following criteria: education (at least high school or 1 years of schooling); socio-economic status (marginal farmers are given preference); gender (other things being equal, women will be given preference); and age (preference is given to the 20-25 age group).
The group mobilisation and credit programme of the biovillage project is used as a channel for identifying the operators. They are invited to a brief training session, lasting two days, conducted by the staff of the ecotechnology centre of the Foundation. The training session consists of demonstrations of the wireless instruments, training in its use PC keyboard and mouse and use of conditioned power supply. Based on performance, one person per village will be selected.
The equipment is provided to the operators on the basis of legally viable non-monetary lease agreements, and the operators are trained in all the basic operations of a computer elements of word processing, spread sheets and HTML, basic operations such as e-mail and Web browsing, use of the radio modem, and general matters including basics of upkeep. The training and materials are in Tamil, the local language.
The "information shops" have been established in four villages: Kizhur, Mangalam, Embalam and Veerampattinam. The shop at Embalam is located on the premises of the village temple, which is owned by the community through an informal trust. In each shop, a Pentium PC with multimedia and a deskjet printer have been installed in a specially designed box to prevent rodent attacks on the instruments. The computer can be connected to the wireless network through a modem and a specially designed interface. The shop volunteers, at their discretion, write in more news from the locality.
The four villages are linked to the foundation's hub at Villianur through an ingenious wireless system. V.Balaji, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, who oversees the project for the foundation, dreamed it up. The value addition centre acts as an exchange point for a variety of local-specific information. Each shop has a board to display bulletins received from the value addition centre. A local area network based on Very High Frequency (VHF) radio has been established with the Villianur office serving as a hub, handling voice communication as well as data.
While the foundation's model is relatively costly and may prove difficult to replicate on a large scale, the government of Pondicherry nonetheless plans to expand the project to 50 more villages. The spread of this approach to more of India's 600,000 villages would ultimately require government money and manpower, with support from NGOs and philanthropies.
Pondicherry, which was the administrative headquarters of the French territories in India, comprises 130 villages and the Pondicherry town, and is spread over an area of 1,1000 square kilometres. Tamil is the language spoken with English and French as languages of the administration. More than 6 percent of the population of Pondicherry lives in the rural area. Dominant crops are rice and sugarcane. Approximately 20 percent of the rural families have been officially classified as living below the poverty line.
The Madras-based MSSRF was established in July 1988 as a nonprofit and nonpolitical trust committed to a mission of harnessing science and technology for environmentally sustainable and socially equitable development. MSSRF's research, training, communication, extension and networking programmes, in the fields of agriculture and rural development, seek to link ecological security to livelihood security in a mutually reinforcing manner. The Foundation projects include: Coastal Systems Research (CSR), Biodiversity and Biotechnology Ecotechnology and Sustainable Agriculture Reaching the Unreached and Education, Communication, Training and Capacity Building.
The Pondicherry project was created by the MSSRF with a$120,000 grant from the Canadian government. The foundation provides villages with free technology and information in exchange for the villages' promise to house the computers and staff their operation.
India is becoming a laboratory for small experiments that aim to link isolated rural pockets to the borderless world of knowledge. Local governments and NGOs are testing new approaches to provide villages, where no one can afford a telephone, with computers that are accessible to all. A well-placed computer, like an irrigation pump or a communal well, may become another tool for development.
The Village Knowledge Centre enables farming families not only to produce more without associated ecological harm, but helps everyone in the village to create a hunger-free area. The villagers themselves identify who are the hungry amidst them; 12 to 15 percent of the families fall under this category. They tend to be illiterate, and they are generally very poor without land, livestock, fishpond or any other productive asset.
Each day, the project's staff downloads a map from a U.S. Navy Web site that shows the wave heights and wind directions in the Bay of Bengal. In the fishing village of Veerampattinam, loudspeakers fixed to tall poles along the broad beach blare out the daily weather report. Fishermen, in loincloths mending nets or repairing homemade wooden boats in the sultry heat, listen attentively.
Though the experience of the Village Knowledge Centres is still young, it foresees affecting several social changes: Improved access to markets through the availability of prices and marketing opportunities information; improved access to health infrastructure; increased exposure of rural youth and school students to computer-based networking; an increase in general awareness among youth through multimedia training and local-specific database creation using generic information available on the Internet and other networks; increase inawareness of ecologically sound techniques in agriculture and animal husbandry, leading to enhanced production, income and livelihood opportunities.
"From my long experience in agriculture, I find that whenever poor people derive some benefit from a technology, the rich also benefit. The opposite does not happen", says Professor S.M. Swaminathan.
The goal of the Knowledge System for Sustainable Food Security is the empowerment of rural women, men and children with information relating to ecological agriculture, economic access, and biological absorption and utilisation. The Knowledge System aims to create conditions conducive to a healthy and productive life for all.
The project is based upon the understanding that value addition by professionals or trained individuals, to networked information is a key step in enabling rural families to have accessibility. A small office in a centrally located village, Villianur, serves as the value addition centre, where the project staff scans the Internet, especially the World Wide Web, for useful contacts or technologies.
Each shop varies slightly in the way it is operated and supported. In Kizhur the volunteers were chosen by the Village Development Council, which also nominated a 23-member (14 men and 9 women) group to guide the shop's operations. At the shop in Embalam all the volunteers are women in the 21-27 year age group; each of them spends half-a-day at the shop, rotating the schedule.
The vast majority of Web sites are in English, a language that more than 95 percent of Indians do not speak. Nonetheless, the project has, since its inception, challenged this by translating and producing local contents in Tamil.
Poverty itself is a huge limitation. Only 12 public telephones and 27 private telephones exist in the project area, which covers 19 villages with a population of 22,000. Routine power failures and overloaded telephone lines make connecting to the Internet a frustrating proposition. There are serious questions about whether countries like India, weighed down by high rates of illiteracy and illness, should spend heavily to provide villages, that desperately need schools and health clinics, with what most would consider a luxury.
Project overseer Balaji notes that one immediate obstacle, is that local bureaucrats are often reluctant to give up their monopoly on information, which can be a source of power used to extract bribes.
Information provided through e-mail exchanges by Raul Roman, Cornell University.
The M.S.Swaminathan Research Foundation (Chennai) Web site.
Connecting Rural India to the World, by Celia W.Dugger, The New York Times May 28,2000.
Success Stories of Rural ICTs in a Developing Country by Roger Harris,et al. PANTLEG-IDRC December 1999.
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