"ICT applications for Socio-economic Change"

A C-DAC conference

I attended this conference over the last three days and its been a very interesting experience, something of a mental input overload even. Let me try to capture some of the high points :

-- the crowd was very energetic, very enthusiastic, and lots of committed people. Just very motivating. Some of the speakers showed a lot of passion towards the big goals - poverty eradication, improving the lot of the farmer etc. Rare to see. This is different from my usual guarded feelings about development professionals who are more 'professional' than 'development'
--the C-DAC (and C-DOT) crowd was just great ! A bunch of eager serious smart engineers trying very seriously to work on grassroots applications. C-DAC works on a bunch of other more techie, real-world-removed stuff, but the people at the conference were the appropriate technology kind of people. I'm very happy to see that C-DAC has managed to attract such a vibrant bunch of people. There were also representatives from a productive team at IIT Bombay, lead by a nice chap called Kirthi Ramamritham. The other interesting crowd were from a somewhat funny company (set up by the government of India) called Media Lab Asia. They have a lot of good collaborations that seem to have yielded good results.
- Here are some websites :
www.aaqua.org : The IIT Bombay guys.
http://www.esagu.in/esagu/ : By an interesting professor at IIIT Hyderabad. The idea is very elegant. They get a worker to go to each farmer who is a part of the project every week and take photographs of the conditions of the plants. The photos are then looked at by the expert (graduates and post-graduates in Agriculture) and the advice given to the farmer on what to do to deal with any problems seen. This way a lot of farm territory can be covered and the expert's time is very effectively used. They have very ambitious plans of taking this program nationwide (through Media Lab Asia), but I am sceptical -- major hubris I think, despite the coolness of what they have done so far.
-- They were a couple of *serious* open source geeks giving a tutorial on open source tools, one from Servelots/Janasthu and one chap from abroad. The servlots stuff is quite nice, they do this tool called Pantoto.
- There were a couple of monks from the Ramakrishna Mission University in Howrah, one of whom was a PhD in Computational Geometry (after B.Tech and M.Tech) from IITKanpur :-).

The current big topic in IT for development is village Information centers -- kiosks with one or more computers which can serve as a base for a variety of applications and services. There was even one service that someone is using where NRSA data is used to find where the large fish schools are and this info is given to the farmers who then use a GPS to go after them. No kidding ! The Govt. is planning to set up 100000 of these kiosks in the next few years.

Vinay Deshpande who was part of the whole Simputer deal was also there. I was very impressed by his speech but checking out the stuff on the web, there doesn't seem to be much happening lately with it.

All in all a very cool experience that set my mind abuzz as I tried to absorb it all.