The Hindu : Karnataka News : ISRO planning to set up village resource centres

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jun 19, 2004

Karnataka

Karnataka

ISRO planning to set up village resource centres

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, JUNE 18. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning to set up "integrated" village resource centres (VRC) to give villagers relevant information and help through "computer and satellite-based connectivity".

G. Madhavan Nair, ISRO Chairman, said it had been planned to set up 100 such centres in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and some North-eastern States by the year-end.

Mr. Nair was talking to presspersons after presiding over the inauguration of a two-day workshop on "Drought management using Space inputs" organised by the Karnataka State Remote Sensing Applications Centre here on Friday.

He said the VRCs could include modules to help villagers participate in adult literacy programmes, monitor the weather in a way relevant to them and give village artisans a transparent way to sell their products.

In time, the centres could also take to the village level a telemedicine project which ISRO had set up by linking major hospitals in cities to some district health centres.

ISRO's centres in Bangalore and Ahmedabad and the National Remote Sensing Agency in Hyderabad were working on developing the software modules required to make the centres work in an integrated manner. "We are trying to develop some very cost-effective software," Mr. Nair said. "Much of it will be ready in three months."

He said the VRCs would be linked to a central facility with a more powerful computer. "While there are some meteorological stations in towns and cities, we really don't have information such as the soil moisture content near a particular village where crops might be grown." So the idea was to train the villagers to collect such information and use the VRCs to send that data to the central station, he added.

If the effort worked, computers at the central station could be used to gather information from the data, which might be of use to the villagers.

The Minister for Revenue and Parliamentary Affairs, M.P. Prakash, inaugurated the workshop. The Minister for Agriculture, K. Srinivasa Gowda, was present.

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