Information Village Project - India

The Information Village Project has connected the villages by a hybrid wired and wireless network-consisting of PCs, telephones, VHF duplex radio devices and email connectivity through dial-up telephone lines - that facilitates both voice and data transfer, and have enabled the villagers to get information that they need and can use. The entire project draws its sustenance from the holistic philosophy of Swaminathan, which emphasises an integrated pro-poor, pro-women, pro-Nature orientation to development and community ownership of technological tools against personal or family ownership, and encourages collective action for spread of technology. The bottom up exercise involves local volunteers to gather information, feed it into an Intranet and provide access through nodes in different villages. Value addition to the raw information, use of the local language (Tamil) and multimedia (to facilitate illiterate users) and participation by local people right from the beginning are the noteworthy features of the project. Most of the operators and volunteers providing primary information are women, thus giving them status and influence. All centres came up because of demands made by the community.
Information provided in the village knowledge centres is locale specific and relates to prices of agricultural inputs (such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides) and outputs (rice, vegetables), market (potential for export), entitlement (the multitude of schemes of the central and state governments, banks), health care (availability of doctors and paramedics in nearby hospitals, women's diseases), cattle diseases, transport (road conditions, cancellation of bus trips), weather (appropriate time for sowing, areas of abundant fish catch, wave heights in the sea), etc. Unique to the project is the fact that most information is collected and fed in by the local community itself. The centres are operated by local volunteers.

Technology, Economic Development, Rights.

In most villages, there are no telephone lines and there are frequent power breakdowns. The project uses hybrid wired and wireless communication links using telephones at one end and Motorola VHF dupleix devices at the other, and by using solar power in conjunction with the mains.
In a caste-based society, it is not easy to spread an egaliterian ethos. The project was able to gain working space for the village information centres from a Panchayat (local government) office, a private individual's home and even a temple. They were able to overcome the temple' normal rules and allow Dalit (lowest caste) people and women in their monthly periods to enter and use the informtion centre located in the temple.

MSSRF won the Stockholm Challenge Award in 2001 for this project.