The Hindu : South-south exchanges on ICT for development

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Nov 16, 2003

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South-south exchanges on ICT for development

By G. Venkataramani

Chennai Nov. 15. There should be an increased flow of information among the southern countries, and practically relevant information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled development concepts would further the South-South cooperation, said Rinalia Abdul Rahim, executive director, Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), headquartered at Malaysia.

Ms. Rahim was one of the 26 participants drawn from 11 countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America, who attended a travelling workshop on ICT-enabled development, organised by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Pondicherry, in collaboration with the GKP and the Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries, from October 28 to November 6. The group of experts, with rich experience in applying ICT for rural development in different countries, visited several ICT-enabled development programmes of MSSRF in Pondicherry, Kannivadi, Oddanchatram and Thonimalai, and shared their views at the workshop.

Lemalu Nele Leilua, Managing Director, Pacific Training Research and Consulting Services, Western Samoa, said the knowledge villages infused a sense of belonging and cooperation among the people. She would develop such pilot projects in three or four villages in her country next year.

"The real need of the rural communities is the meaningful and value-added information, and these programmes have shown that in real-life situations. ICT without a focussed content meant nothing to the villagers. But it can make a lot of difference when backed up by locally relevant content. This is clearly seen in the successful programmes," said Kazanka Comfort, general secretary, Fantsuam Foundation, Nigeria.

"This is a practical approach to rural development, and I am sure it can work in my country with a lot of similarities to the Indian situation. It can bring about the desired economic and social development in remote rural areas," said Prof. Faustino Jerome Babate, president, Protégé Youth Development Initiative, General Santos City in the Philippines.

Subbiah Arunachalam of MSSRF said the scientists of the foundation acted only as facilitators. The villagers led the knowledge centre programmes, and it was a successful experiment of a bottom-up approach as envisaged by Prof. M.S. Swaminathan, chairman of the foundation. Enhanced access to ICT by itself would not achieve much and it was essential to view them as an important element that needed to be integrated with several other elements. He stressed the need to take care of the context, content and language.

K. Balasubramanian of MSSRF said the ICT-enabled rural development programmes of the foundation should be viewed as a holistic educational programme aimed at comprehensive human resource development.

S. Senthilkumaran of the Informatics division of MSSRF dwelt at length on networking the knowledge villages using a hub-and-spokes model and explained how different technologies such as the hybrid wireless and wired technology, very high frequency two-way radio, spread spectrum technology and hybrid solar technology were used in the projects.

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