IT transforms a village BBC’s
Bangalore correspondent Habib Beary recently wrote about how an entire village, situated near India’s hi-tech capital, Bangalore, was transformed through application of information technology. It not only helped the village in drastically bringing down corruption but also in reducing red tapism to a large extent. According to the report, “Bribery, which is a common practice in official corridors across the country, has been cut down significantly.”

The village of Bellandur, located around 18 kilometres from the city, is credited with being the first ‘gram panchayat’ (village-level administration) in the country to introduce e-governance. The gram panchayat covers as many as 10,000 people, and is spread over five villages.

Bellandur is a relatively affluent agricultural village. It’s proximity to Bangalore and easy access to educational institutes has helped the village in achieving almost 90 percent literacy.

“Bellandur’s e-governance project started with a single computer that was installed in the village in 1998 to replace the old typewriter. The village office now has three computers, funded by donations from wealthy farmers as well as companies that operate in the area,” reports Beary. According to sources, this has helped them to plug revenue leakage as well. The software package used at Bellandur handles records of property details, tax collection, birth and death certificates and so on.

For further information on this project visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_2045000/2045485.stm

IT against corruption
Karnataka chief minister S M Krishna’s promise to computerise all sub-registrars’ offices in the state to eliminate corruption has got lots of media coverage recently. Says Krishna, “To begin with, we will computerise 11 such offices both in urban and rural districts of Bangalore. Computerisation of procedures will eliminate corruption by bringing in transparency.”

The chief minister raised this issue while launching Krishi Marata Vahini, the website of the regional agri-marketing department and the Karnataka agricultural marketing board. Incidentally, this new website will be linked to the existing 744 Raita Mitra Kendras. Access the Krishi Marata Vahini website at maratavahini.kar.nic.in

Phones in India
Apart from the occasional government organisations, its also NGOs, small firms and even foreign and NRI students who are doing their bit to promote the IT-for-development agenda. Aswin is a graduate student at MIT, and has been spending time in Chennai on a summer internship with the TeNet group.

Says he, “My assignment for the summer is to understand the influence that STD/PCOs have had in the Theni-Tirupur district of Tamil Nadu. I’ve come across studies in the US (social history of the telephone, when old technologies were new, etc.) that provide analyses of the role of telephones in different spaces (home, office, public spaces, etc.). Unfortunately, I haven’t found any such study in India.”

Aswin is looking for tips that point to papers, books or commentaries that attempt to explain what the telephone as a communication technology means to people in India. “What I am hoping to do is tackle some fundamental questions concerning the introduction and use of public telephones. How do people receive new communication technologies? How did they learn about this technology? What are the adaptations they made (cognitive, socio-cultural, economic) when they started using telephones?” says Aswin.

He argues that if one begins with the notion that multiple-media technologies shape the flow of information in any community (post and telegraph, radio, regional newspapers, cable TV, telephone booths, town-hall meetings, and daily face-to-face interactions), then an understanding of the relationships between these various sources becomes important.

ICT for development
The digital dividends project clearinghouse has a fully searchable database of over 600 ICT-for-development projects worldwide, “with a proportionally large number in Asia”, says John Paul research assistant, digital dividend clearinghouse of the World Resources Institute.

To access the site visit http://wriws1.digitaldividend.org/wri/app/index.jsp

Unofficial Simputer FAQ
The VLSI and embedded systems Centre at IIIT Hyderabad is in the process of setting up an embedded systems repository, which will mirror software and documentation related to embedded systems in general and “ARM related stuff”, says Shaurya Arora of IIIT Hyderabad.

Part of the repository consists of the Unofficial Simputer FAQ. The repository is currently not online but will be shortly at http://embedded.iiit.net. The FAQ is online at http://gdit.iiit.net/~arora/simpfaq.htm .

IT for your exams
Check this unusual site, which offers interesting on-line coloured notes for students. http://www.alabhya.com/vfsedu.html

Language, Knowledge....
IIT Bombay along with the UNDL Foundation at Geneva, UNESCO and the Government of Goa will organise the International Conference on Integrated Approaches to language, knowledge, culture and e-engineering at Goa from November 25-29, 2002.

About 70 researchers from abroad and around 100 from within the country are expected to participate in this international event. The conference is unique in its scope. There will be discussions and deliberations on the problems of the language barrier, promotion of peace and harmony among nations through communication and the globalisation trend of the information media.

Eminent scholars from India and abroad will deliver keynote speeches and Professor M G K Menon will give the inaugural address. Research papers will be presented in the technical sessions. The conference will also have demos and poster presentations.

Evaluating sites
Dr T Matthew Ciolek who heads the Internet Publications Bureau of the National Institute for Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University in Canberra has comes out with an interesting evaluation of websites. Christened the Asian Studies WWW monitor, it evaluates sites related to various subjects.

For instance, recently, it mentioned the Books & Periodicals Agency of New Delhi. This is an online book-shop with books in English, Hindi and Sanskrit, offering over 1,30,000 books on 356 subjects.

The website offers search, e-shop; FAQ, wish list; special lists (Art, Afghanistan, Africa, Buddhism, Biology, Christianity, History, Indonesia, Library Science, Malaysia, Myanmar, Numismatics, Plants, South East Asia) etc and can be visited at http://www.bpagency.com

Indian MEDLARS Centre
Good news for Indian medicos. The ICMR-NIC Centre for Biomedical Information (Indian MEDLARS Centre) has designed and developed a bibliographic database from Indian biomedical literature. To start with, 75 prominent Indian journals have been selected to build up the database entitled IndMED. More journals would be added to the list as their quality improves in coming years. Journals dating from 1985 onwards will be included in this database. For more details log on to http://indmed.nic.in

Sanskrit-speak
M A S Rajan, president of the Academy of Sanskrit Research in Melkote, Karnataka, makes an interesting point. Responding to a recent write-up on IT-for-development, he pointed to the need to tackle local language computing issues.

According to him, tasks related to local language utilisation of computing need to be adequately addressed. “Some concerns now include the tasks ahead, the kind of standardisation that needs to be achieved, the agencies to be engaged and financing,” says he. Rajan is reputed to have put in excellent work on speech recognition and related technology in Sanskrit. For further details contact Rajan at masrajan@vsnl.net

ITC4D meet in Bangalore
Editor-in-chief Robert Davison informs that The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC) has put together a report on the recently convened IFIP94 conference in Bangalore. The report provides a personal reflection on the way the community has developed.

Says Davison, “We hope the report will provide an opportunity for those who attended the conference, as well as to those who are concerned about issues that are pertinent to IT in developing countries, to provide some feedback and reflection.” To get a copy of the report log on to www.ejisdc.org

Digital Review coming
The soon to be launched ‘Digital Review of Asia-Pacific’ (DRAP) will be a biannual magazine providing facts, figures, data and analysis of the latest offerings in the ICT space and Internet diffusion. It will also provide details about the adoption and application of the technology in 25 Asia Pacific countries.

The DRAP is a joint collaboration by Pan Asia Networking (PAN) of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada, the Asia- Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) of UNDP, and the UNESCO Chairs in Communication Network (Orbicom).

Its promoters say the book will provide regional overviews summarising ICT trends in the region. Furthermore, the review will be made available in three formats: Firstly as an electronic online database, secondly as an electronic publication mounted on a CD-ROM, and thirdly as a printed monograph. Two editions of the publication are currently being streamlined and finalised. The second one will be published in January 2003.

For more details about the project e-mail isa_eza@-yahoo.com or log on to http://www.apdip.net/news/digitareview/index.htm

India Computes! is presented by Frederick Noronha, the co-founder of BytesForAll, a voluntary, unfunded venture focusing on how IT and the Internet can benefit the common man, particularly in South Asia. Join the BytesForAll mailing list by sending a message to fred@bytesforall.org with “SUB B4ALL” as subject, or check out the website at www.bytesforall.org