Workshop: Responding to the Needs of Rural India

The third workshop in the series of “Responding to the Needs of Rural India: A Partnership with the ICT Research and Training Centre” jointly conducted by IIT Bombay and CDAC Bangalore was held from March 30th to April 1st 2005 at Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, IIT Bombay,. Twenty-nine participants from 12 organisations from 4 different states attended the workshop.

The first two workshops were conducted in Bangalore, where the researchers interacted with Kiosk owners/ Farmers/ NGOs from the Southern and central India. The third was targeted for interactions with the northern Indian people.

The whole workshop was divided into five major sessions – Session for introducing the participants to basics of IT, exposing the participants to the applications developed at IIT Bombay and Information and Communication Technologies- Research & Training (ICT - R&T), hands-on experiences on selected applications, session for cross learning between participants and research teams, Invited talks by experts working in the field of ICT and finally deployment strategy session.

Participants were exposed to total of 12 applications –5 from IIT Bombay and 7 from ICT R&T. IIT, Bombay made a presentation to the participants on the various ICT products for rural areas being developed by the institution such as aAQUA, Key-Lekh keyboard, Bhav Puchiye and hardware browser. From the ICT R&T side, the participants were given hands-on training of Electronic form, Vyapar, ECKO (Empowering Communities through KnOwledge). Demonstration of the other applications developed at the centre - Vartalaap, DAAL (Document access across languages) Bharateeyaoo, Matrubhasha, was also carried out during the workshop. There was also session on ploy sensor, which helps in water quality identification. The workshop also had invited talks from experts working in the field to share their rich experience with the participants.

An experience sharing session was arranged in which issues like difficulties experienced in the field, connectivity, relevant content creation, deployment issues etc were discussed. The workshop concluded with deployment strategy session in which deployment of these applications was discussed with the participants. The workshop concluded in a very positive note with all the partners involved agreeing to the point that this is the beginning of mission of reaching out rural poor with the aim of nurturing sustainable development and at bridging the digital divide to bring about “digital unite”.