Mission 2007 is a nation-wide initiative launched in New Delhi in July 2004 with an aim to facilitate the setting up of knowledge centres in each of India’s 600,000 villages by 2007, the 60th anniversary of the country’s Independence.

The Mission’s objective is to facilitate and accelerate, through multi-stakeholder collaborations, the provision of knowledge centres in each village. Each of these centres would be a centre for knowledge-based livelihoods and income-generation opportunities for poor peolple, farming communities and all disadvantaged people.

The Mission envisages broadband connectivity for rural homes at low and affordable costs with integrated tech-nological applications that are relevant to the day-to-day lives of people. Such a bouquet of applications could well turn the info kiosk of tomorrow into a multi-purpose knowledge centre acting as a communi-cation hub. It could also be a support centre for rural entrepreneurship, a trading outlet and social empowerment outfit, a support centre for providing health, education and livelihoods information services.

Such a knowledge centre can be put together on a sustainable platform through partnerships, bringing together the private sector and the government for infrastructure development, civil society organisations for community participation and capacity building, academia for innovation and research and the private sector for leading on the financing and scalability.

The march towards Mission 2007

Highlights of online discussion on info kiosks An online discussion on setting up information kiosks in every village by 2007 was carried out during May – June 2004. This was as a joint initiative of OWSA and MSSRF. The main sub-themes for the discussion were Scalability, Sustainability and Collaboration. The following emerged as major concerns and solutions: Connectivity is critical for enabling scalability A reality check of hardware and software components is required in order to propose a menu of software applications Scalability would depend upon the availability of information in local languages Technology should be customised to the needs of the local population. Telecom regulatory issues caused by the reluctance of the telecom players to allow WLL in rural areas need to be resolved urgently Sustainability requires a reliable power supply, either through conventional or renewable energy sources Need to explore options for proposing simpler info-kiosk models and developing alternative revenue based info-kiosk models. Also it is important to conduct cost-benefit analysis before info-kiosks are installed in a region/locality, where both social and private costs and benefits must be estimated Resource availability is crucial in ensuring the sustainability of info-kiosks in every village Build collaboration and alliances in providing complete solutions to the farmers – both in terms of technology and content State to be a major player. Public agencies such as the post offices may be used for increasing the pace of info-kiosk movement in India Need for a national movement to accelerate the knowledge revolution, and take IT to the masses. Improve literacy levels in rural areas An increased emphasis on comparative studies. Build an empirical information base of the successes and failures of various info-kiosk interventions in India so far. Assess the needs and perceptions of target groups and beneficiaries. This would be important in ‘humanising the technology’ — a critical sufficiency condition for the success of info-kiosk movement in India Formulating policy for affirmative action and a coordinated set of mechanisms for channelling market forces towards delivering the empowerment of socially and economically disadvantaged groups Using multi-media offline methods to attract people to info-kiosks Build capacities of local facilitators/ambassadors to sustain the movement Log on to www.dgroups.org/groups/infokiosks/ for viewing the complete discussions.

Interested? Read the complete article here.