A glimpse into the Manthan Awards
The recently concluded Manthan Award 2007 for India’s Best e-Content for Development brought together veritable who’s who from the ICT arena, Government, Civil Society/NGOs and Industry, and known public representatives on one platform, to discuss the role of e-content for development at the grassroots level.
Comprehensive sessions focused on how ICT-enabled content can be created, used and outreached for desirable impact and outcome in a variety of sectors ranging from governance, education and learning, agriculture and livelihood enterprise, health and environment - to culture, entertainment and community broadcasting. Anil Gupta, Professor at IIM Ahmedabad and Patron of the Award, commented in context of the Manthan Award, “Celebrating the creativity and innovation in e-Content contributes significantly to the bridging of Digital Divide among those who need information and those who can provide information.” Highlights of every session at the event were the presentations from the best of Manthan Award nominees - ICT practitioners who are pioneering work in developing, creating and disseminating digital content, both online and offline, for empowerment and development of local communities. Speaking on the role of ICTs, Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT Madras and Patron of the Manthan Award said, “ICTs can help. But let us never forget that ICT is a mere tool. It has to be used effectively to fulfill the principal felt needs of rural India: education, health care and livelihood. Plenty of innovations would be needed to get us there.” The Manthan Award showcased a number of ground-breaking efforts undertaken using ICT tools like the World Wide Web, video conferencing, community radio and other means, which have attempted a betterment of the lives and livelihoods of those living at the lower rung of the development pyramid. These efforts centred were sifted under fifteen categories including e-Government, e-Health, e-Environment, e-Youth, and e-Education. E-Agriculture
Dr. P. Krishna Reddy, from the International Institute for Information Technology, Hyderabad made a presentation on ‘e-Sagu’, an IT-based personalized agro-advisory system, which they have introduced for farmers in Andhra Pradesh, in association with Media Lab Asia. Saloni Malhotra from DesiCrew Solutions introduced the audience to their unique BPO enterprise that provides high volume data services at affordable cost , from rural areas of Tamil Nadu. Fréderic BORNE, from the French Institute of Pondicherry, spoke about their project OSCAR - Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural Areas – a web-based application that helps to botanically identify plants and can be employed on a larger scale for purposes of crop, forest and orchid identification. In the community broadcasting sector, a pioneering initiative undertaken by Alternative for India Development (AID), Ranchi, was described by Sunanda K.S. The enterprise fosters the empowerment of excluded communities of Jharkhand by training them to effectively voice their issues and concerns using the medium of community radio, and that too in their very own local dialects. Another successful application of community radio was highlighted by Sheo Shekhar Shukla, Collector from the Ujjain district of Madhya Pradesh. He shared his experiences of how the administration in Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh was able to use the medium of a radio programme, Jansamvad, to reach out directly to the local population of Sagar and successfully address their grievances. Stalin K. of DRISHTI Media, Arts and Human Rights highlighted the potential of the audio-visual medium to bring to light, pertinent issues of the society, and strengthen India's social movements and organizations to extend their reach, as also to increase the participation of marginalized communities. He also stressed on the need for a bottom-up approach in knowledge management and dissemination, which was inclusive of communities at the bottom of the pyramid. A novel initiative - Hindawi.in – the first ever complete suite of open-source programming languages based on Indian vernacular languages - was described Abhishek Choudhury. This facility - which provides equivalents for C, C++, lex, yacc, assembly, BASIC, logo, Ada and many other languages in Indic languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Assamese etc. – promises to be a boon for grassroots programmers in the country, most of whom are yet to be fluent in English. The gala evening saw the felicitation of the Fellows of Manthan Award 2007, consisting of the 39 best ICT initiatives, selected from the 400+ nominations received across 27 states and union territories. Awardees included the national portal of India: india.gov.in of NIC; the interactive website for voluntary blood donors - friends2support.org; the home portal for Naga people across the world - kuknalim.com; the College to Career cross-media program of the Science and Technology Department of Gujarat; Sahyadri: Western Ghats Biodiversity: Environmental Information System of the Indian Institute of Science; the Braille Literature Initiative of Rotary Bangalore; the India Education Digital Library of EDC; raftaar.com – the world’s first integrated search engine in Hindi; infochangeindia.org of CCDS; and an interesting model of Self-Employment through SMS Communities in Maharashtra. About the Manthan Award: The core objective of the Manthan Award process is making visible the contents that already exist and thus demonstrating the richness and diversity of content creativity to those interested in understanding and planning an Information Society. The Manthan Award wants to demonstrate to every stakeholder the existing range of creativity and excellence in the use of IT tools and communication networks. It seeks to substantiate the conviction that access to networks and ICT platforms is beneficial to the high quality and value of e-contents which are produced and available. It attempts to consider that quality contents, their production and economic sustainability are fundamental requirements which require changes to the way markets operate and governments act. For more information visit the Manthan Award Website. |
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