The recently concluded Manthan Award 2007 for Indias Best e-Content for Development brought together a veritable whos 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.
E-Content stakeholders from across India including practitioners, promoters, supporters and organizations participated in this high-profile event that was spread over two days from September 21- 22 at the India Islamic Cultural Centre in New Delhi.
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.
Highlights in each of the sessions were 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.
The session titled E-content in Agriculture, Livelihood Enterprise and Community Broadcasting was chaired by Mr. Sanjeev Chopra, Principal Secretary, Horticulture & Food Processing Industry, Govt. of West Bengal; and was moderated by Mr. Naimur Rahman, Director, OneWorld South Asia.
The track focused on how ICTs and media tools like community broadcasting can be used to empower communities in rural India by bolstering the farming sector and rural enterprises. It also featured interesting presentations by the Best of Manthan Award nominees on work that was being carried out by them in different parts of the country.
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 introduced for farmers in Andhra Pradesh, in association with Media Lab Asia. Saloni Malhotra from DesiCrew Solutions spoke on their unique BPO enterprise that provides high volume data services at affordable cost, from rural areas of Tamil Nadu.
Mr. 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.
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 deeply 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 by 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.
About the Manthan Awards:
The Manthan Awards demonstrate to every stakeholder the existing range of creativity and excellence in the use of IT tools and communication networks. It substantiates 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.
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