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FREDERICK
NORONHA spoke to Akthar Badshah at the Baramati conference
recently. Some excerpts from the interview:
This must be taking a lot of your time. What motivates
you?
It
actually takes all my time. This is all I do. Digital
Partners is an organisation I co-founded. Most of my
adult educated life has been spent in architecture and
in the development field, after my education at MIT.
One thing I firmly believe is that one way to overcome
abject poverty is to promote entrepreneurship. What
I’m referring to is the little chap opening some
little stall to earn a living.
Today, IT allows us to create micro ventures in a far
more effective way then ever. That’s the belief
system that brought me into this effort. We believe
we can make a difference by using IT and creating entrepreneurship.
How do you judge the response?
This
is not an easy job. But the fact is that you can have
two such events (the annual Baramati conferences, in
a far-flung area), with an enthusiastic response.
If you ask whether we are able to raise the resources
we need, the answer is ‘No.’ Three years ago
(during the dotcom boom), if we had to raise $50 million
it would have probably been no problem. Today, you need
to educate people that this is the right thing.
In the IT-for-development debate, would you feel
that India’s ahead?
Absolutely,
there’s no question about that. You can see the
kind of expertise and the kind of dedication. India
is a bastion in terms of IT-for-development. That’s
why Digital Partners took on India as the first challenge.
All the factors are there: India has the poverty problems,
and it is badly in need of development. It also has
the IT skills, and the infrastructure by way of communication
technology. There’s the brain power too. There’s
also a tremendous (but not noticed) local entrepreneurial
energy.
Could you tell us about Digital Partners?
It’s
based in Seattle, and its primary support comes from
individuals in the hi-tech industry. This includes expat
Indians, Kellogg, Open Society Institute, the UN, World
Bank, USAID. Project-level funding is directly driven
by individuals. We have chapters in Silicon Valley,
New York, Boston, San Diego, and are going to launch
in Washington DC.
We also plan to launch Digital Partners in Ghana, to
look after West Africa. In addition, we are looking
to work out of Mexico.
What are your activities outside India?
Right
now, it’s limited. Our process is based on people
applying for mentor-ship. We have mentor-ship programmes
in Africa and Latin America.
We at Digital Partners are not coming out with projects
and saying ‘This is what you must do’. On
the contrary, we want to identify what people are doing
(at the local level) and see which projects would work.
For example, initiatives like drishtee.com (providing
rural Internet access), Gyandoot (extending e-governance
services to the villagers), SEWA (the women’s group
from Gujarat) or SKS (working in micro-credit) in Andhra.
There are obviously many others who we don’t know
about. We learn of such initiatives at conferences like
this. Our job is to showcase, assist and bring in funding
to support good ventures whenever possible.
What does Digital Partners plan for the future?
Our
competition for grants for innovative IT-for-development
projects carries on. We also have the global-classmates
initiative, which is a Web-based platform to support
class-to-class collaboration across borders and cultures.
[www.globalclassmates.org]
We’re hoping this would break down cultural barriers.
We would love to see a school child in Lahore and one
in Delhi talk to each other, and grow up without biases
of the past. We’ve pilot-tested two schools each
in India (Delhi and Baramati) and the US.
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