FIELD POTENTIAL
Sometimes, one comes across interesting nuggets of information almost by chance. Somebody one knows only as “Besva” <besva@yahoo.com> drew one’s attention to the website dacnet.nic.in. This is a plan of the Ministry of Agriculture’s Department of Agriculture and Cooperation (DAC), to take e-governance to the directorates, attached offices and subordinate offices and field units. Users of the DACNET portal include a whole lot of agri-institutions. For instance, there’s the Agricultural Marketing Infor-mation Network; Forward Marketing Commission; Food Corporation of India; Central Warehousing Corporation; National Horticulture Board; National Cooperative Development Corporation; Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence & Statistics; Agricultural & Processed Food Products Export Development Authority; Marine Products Export Development Authority; Tribal Marketing Federation; National Agricultural Marketing Federation; Export Promotion Councils; and others. Of course, there can be questions. Government IT projects often emphasise more on spending and less on optimally using the investment. Is this the case here? Time will tell. But bringing together such synergies, there certainly could be more potential waiting to be tapped. Especially in the field of agriculture where IT has rarely been utilised.

HANDY VAID FOR HEALTH
This comes from the Jiva Institute, www.jiva.org, located outside Delhi. It notes, in its education newsletter Pragati, that in rural India, there are millions of people who are in need of medical help but don’t have access to it. Even now, many suffer or die from diseases that could have been prevented or cured if medical help had been available. Jiva (www.jiva.org) is looking to change this scenario. They have developed a program called Handy Vaid (www.jiva.org/handyvaid) that offers remote medical support through hand-held computers. In the coming year, they say they’re looking “not only to provide healthcare to 45,000 people, but to provide a sustainable, scalable model that can achieve numbers many times that.” Feel you can help? Check the site above or contact educational director of the Faridabad-based institute, the young American volunteer Steven Rudolph. Incidentally, Pragati is the periodic education and outreach newsletter from the Jiva Institute. It contains updates on Jiva’s activities in the areas of education and sustainable development. To subscribe to Pragati, send an e-mail to: pragati-subscribe@topica.com

TWO PROJECTS
Rahul Barkataky of MITRA, www.mitra.org.in, based in New Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar area recently announced “two interesting happenings” at the centre. First came India Calls, an online volunteering channel owned and managed by MITRA, which recently found mention in the UN Secretary General’s report titled ‘International Year of Volunteers: Outcomes and Future Perspectives’. Besides this, one of Mitra’s projects, the Handicrafts e-Trade Centre, became one of 10 selected to participate in this year’s Digital Partners Social Enterprise Laboratory (SEL), from a group of nearly 140 applicants across the world. See www.digitalpartners.org/sel_progress.html

VIRTUAL LAB TOOLKIT
UNESCO’s first edition of its “Virtual Laboratory Toolkit” has just been released on the World Wide Web and within UNESCO’s Public@ series of representative “open access” CD-ROMs that are giving access to information in the public domain or to information provided on a benevolent basis by rights holders. The toolkit provides an extensive set of free person-to-person (P2P) communication tools (audio and video conference, scientific text chat, whiteboard, collaborative authorship, portal and mailing list management, etc), and also basic advice on person-to-equipment (P2E) tools. It was developed for UNESCO by a team of specialists working with the Institute for Informatics of the Technical University of Freiberg in Germany, the COPINE Centre of the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria and the Shanghai Research Centre for Applied Physics in China. The toolkit is available for testing and application by scientists and other researchers, particularly in Third World countries, who are interested in creating or participating in virtual laboratories. To begin, it’s being tested by an informatics support group within the UNESCO “cross-cutting” project Virtual Laboratories for Drying Lakes (Lake Chad, the Dead Sea, and the Aral Sea). If all goes well, based on the experiences and suggestions of users, a second version could come out by 2003. See virtuallab.tu-freiberg.de for details.

ENRICHING THE POOR
21 participants, including researchers and project managers from eight sites of a UNESCO project on “Using ICTs for poverty reduction,” met in November in Chennai. Their goal: to determine the research approach and to review the beta version of special software interface called eNRICH. This software was developed to facilitate information-access based on the “life events of poor.” This project has sites in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Sri Lanka. It is trying to determine to what extent ICTs can be utilised by the poor to empower themselves. The different sites have developed their own technological and organisational approaches to put ICTs into the hands of the poor. The last two days of the workshop were devoted to review the beta version of eNRICH, a software interface jointly developed by UNESCO and the National Informatics Centre of India. This software solution will be used in all the project sites and also will be made available for other similar projects. eNRICH enables easy generation of websites that encapsulate both information and communication needs in a single homepage. Users will be able to browse and use authenticated websites relevant to their daily life events; users can vote on various community issues, use bulletin boards, e-mail, chat and voice messages to express exchange and communicate concerns and information. It also has a Learning Zone for users to follow skill-based modules on various occupations. eNRICH has the option to capture all user patterns for designated research purposes. The multilingual version of eNRICH is being developed and will be introduced at the beginning of 2003.

AKSHAYA PROJECT
Reports in the mainstream press say India’s Akshaya project plans to set up some 9,000 community information centres across Kerala as part of a campaign to bridge the digital divide. These centres are to be established through private initiative, with the objective of having one centre within two kilometres of every household. The project would commence in Malappuram and Thiruvananthapuram in January 2003 and the entire state is proposed to be covered by May 2004.

STINGING CRITIQUE
If one disagrees with the policy direction a cash-strapped government is taking on computerising schools, what does one do? Simple—draft an ‘open letter’ and splatter it all over cyberspace. That’s exactly what the members of Kochi’s Free Software User Group did, regarding the choice of software and syllabus prescribed for the IT@School project: “[W]e submit that implementation of the scheme as it is would harm the long term interests of our state, the general public and the country. There would be very serious violation of our citizens’ basic legal and constitutional rights... We wish, by this letter, to bring to your kind attention, the following issues and request you to remedy them without further delay,” they wrote. Their memo did the rounds across the globe, probably many times over. It attracted wide attention. See the details at www.symonds.net/~fsug-kochi/mass-memo.html

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