What can ICT bring for the inhabitants of 600,000 Indian villages? How India is empowering the poor and marginalised citizens to participate in the emerging knowledge society? How will India provide voice to her millions of citizens? ‘Taking ICT to every Indian village: Opportunities and challenges', attempts at answering such questions and exploring the complex interactions between ICT and society.

Book available for download here:http://www.digitalopportunity.org/section/ict4d/

New Delhi-based Centre for Environment and Food Security(CEFS) has launched a Freedom from Hunger Campaign to make India a hunger-free country. The next Freedom from Hunger lecture will be delivered by Dr Devinder Sharma(Food & Trade Policy
Analyst) on 17 March 2006 at India International Centre. Dr Sharma will speak on "Globalisation and Farming Crises." The lecture will be chaired by Shri B P Singh, former Union Home Secretary and India's Ambassador at the World Bank.

The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), set up by the United Nations to review and recommend appropriate proposals on the governance of Internet by 2005, has been unable to reach to a decisive conclusion on how the Internet should be governed.

WGIG’s Final Report, released on 14 July 2005, has finally laid down four rival models of Internet governing before the governments and other stakeholders of the World Summit on the Information Society.


Since September 2004, with a consultation on the setting up of WGIG in Geneva, the independent working group met four times between November 2004 and June 2005, while consulting with various stakeholders. Under the chairmanship of Nitin Desai, Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General for WSIS, WGIG produced reports on a wide range of Internet governance issues, undertaken consultations with the governments, private sector and civil society organizations to produce its final recommendations to the WSIS Secretariat.

In a press release, WGIG has commented, “the Report identifies a vacuum within the context of existing structures and notes that there is no global multi-stakeholder forum to address Internet related public policy issues. It therefore proposes the creation of a global forum for dialogue among all stakeholders such as governments, the private sector and civil society, to address problems linked to Internet governance, including spam and cyber crime. Since it was unable to agree on a single model, the Working Group in addition sets out four possible models for the conduct of global public policy and oversight of the Internet.”

Commending the work of WGIG, Markus Kummer, the executive coordinator of WGIG, categorically underlined the success of the Group as it had succeeded in creating an aura of trust among the stakeholders. \"Internet governance is not just names and addresses,\" Kummar said, possibly to offset the unease after failing to recommend the next course of action for the global community. Kummar mentioned of other issues - multi-lingualism, data protection and interconnection costs – that are being dealt within the ambit of Internet governance.

The release of WGIG has attracted mixed political and technical responses from various governments, private sector, academia and civil society. In its response to WGIG, the Internet Governance Project, a consortium of academic experts on international Internet regulation and policy, said that, WGIG has been successful in making a call for moving beyond unilateral U.S. control of the domain name system, and recognizing that existing Internet-related treaties around intellectual property protection are controversial, and may need to be reviewed to be better balanced with values such as fair use, free expression, privacy, technical innovation and economic development.

Creation of a permanent forum to steer the process of Internet governance debate forward has been proposed. The new, open global Internet policy forum will be mandated to give equal status to citizens and governments. Supporting the forum’s ideals, IGP comments “Such a forum will not succeed unless its efforts are focused on a particular objective…the new forum focus on preparing the world\'s governments to achieve binding agreements on the basic principles and norms to guide Internet governance.”

Link: Digital Opportunity Channel

A brief update of today's meeting: As usual, today's meeting started with stocktaking of various ICT for development initiatives. And I am very pleased to learn Shaddy's views on OneWorld South Asia's involvement in youth programmes. This, I guess, will happen through various cross-sectoral issues and programmes. As Jennifer has indicated earlier, we are going to work closely with TakingITGlobal, and its allies, on several fronts.

In next few days, I will be having meetings with my colleagues in different programme areas, particularly with Grassroots Communications, Knowledge for Development and Policy Advocacy to frame working issues and directives for furthering this work.

Writing for Sachi, ISEC, Bangalore is in progress and I hope to send across this article within next few days.

Tunza's recent issue focuses on how young people can help their socities in achieving the MDGs. With insightful articles, interviews and lots of sketches, this issue of Tunza is really interesting.

Bangalore is going to host the 2005 Tunza annual comference during October.

The interactive nature of internet has opened up the possibilities of enabling public participation in global policy-making processes, hitherto confined to few selected government, private and civil society sector representatives.

Various local, regional and international policy consultations, preceded by online discussions through out the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), demonstrate that even a global policy dialogue such as this can be inclusive and participatory in nature. Since the early stages, civil society organisations organised thematic and regional online consultations to elicit local and regional views for formulating their inputs for the Summit.

More: Digital Opportunity Channel.

Yesterday, I was reading Dennis L Meadows’ ‘Is it too late for sustainable development?’, a lecture published in the Volkswagen Foundation’s 2000 Annual Symposium book in Hannover.

In this paper, Meadows elaborates further the concept of sustainable development modelled in the book Limits to the Growth. Simply put, in this paper, it is argued that the notions of poverty eradication and ensuring food security as being advocated by international policy-makers and politicians will be challenged by current demographic trends worldwide and diminishing contributions of natural resources, energy and technology. Partha Dasgupta, an economist, favoured that actions taken locally can have positive implications in sustainable development.

Global policy directives are imperative when it comes to certain problems that are global in nature. Club of Rome’s mapping of such areas is very useful in this regard.

My one year in OneWorld was extremely exiciting and eventful. During this year, I focused on working on connectivity, free and open source software and WSIS issues. Of the two projects - rural connectivity in India and interlikages between information Society and sustainable development discourses (with IISD), the first one is going to be completed soon.

Ankur, CSDMS has sent me an invitation to attend the launch of their research outcome of the project on FOSS "Mapping the Role of Free/Libre Open Source Software Solutions in South and South East Asia’.

I am yet to reply Jennifer's email and am not sure whether OW will fund my trip.

Within next few days, I am thinking of contributing to Open Access issue, which is being debated at WSIS-CS and Karen is drafting the draft proposal paper on this issue for the upcoming WGIG meeting.

Four grassroots women representing local NGOs went to Geneva to lobby for their own space in the World Summit on the Information Society. OneWorld South Asia, a Delhi based NGO, which uses ICTs in poverty alleviation and sustainable development, has promoted the concept of creating a Grassroots Caucus for the Summit.

Arunabahen Parmer travels extensively in rural India to capture the travails and hopes of women in India using a heavy umatic camera. At the Self-employed Women's Association (SEWA), India’s largest women’s trade union network, Arunabahen works as the video producer. “Opportunities for all” was her key message to the PrepCom, as she feels that all citizens can use ICTs and not just the educated.
To read the full story, click here.

This project I started with visiting the Information Village Research Project in Pondicherry. After communicating with many project managers running rural telecentres in India and elsewhere, I have felt that raising awareness within the rural communities about the services is the key to the success of such telecentres. Numerous research studies by UN agencies, and international agencies like IDRC, have critically pointed out the need to raise public awareness about the services and opportunities telecentres provide - but seemingly project designs somewhat lack to integrate this component. Budgetary allocation for communication has often been missing in the project document.

This project has once again reminded me that telecentres or any ICT-enabled development intervention in rural areas is more to do with the people and content, rather than technology. In today's market, better connecting technologies are available at lower costs, but the human effort of content generation for benefiting the grassroots people remains the same.

The online discussion forum "Free and Open Source Software: Policy and Development Implications" (FOSS-PDI)is launched at http://lists.apdip.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/foss-pdi

General information about the mailing list is here.

Knowledge and information are critical for accelerating agricultural production and improving marketing and distribution. Unfortunately the telephone is currently the only information and communications technology (if any) used by the majority of African farmers.
From: Digital Opportunity Channel

Using efficient trawlers and satellite tracking system, fishermen in the coastal villages of Tamil Nadu in India can catch more fish in the Bay of Bengal than ever, resulting into a drastic drop of regeneration of this resource and increasing the vulnerability of marine ecosystem. To ensure a sustainable fishing culture, Tamil Nadu government enforced an annual ban on fishing for a period of 45 days. Two Dutch biology students, Eline van Haastrecht and Marjanka Schaap recently conducted an assessment on the efficacy of this system of ban and it is found that it has been effective in restoring this rapidly depleting resources.

More: World Bank
MSSRF' ICT for Development Project with Fishing Community: IICD

The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.
James Joyce, , A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I read Portrait as part of my undergraduate studies in English Literature. And today it reminds me the image of my memory of the Dublin boy.

With support from Microsoft, the global information technology giant, Junior Achievement of Nigeria (JAN)leaded by 'Gbenga Sesan will manage the Lagos Digital Village project commissioned recently. This project is expected to offer a comprehensive range of ICT services to the society.
Click here for more.