Villagers wired up to fight babudom

MUMBAI: Faced with a sudden spurt of development through special economic zones, proposed international airport and an international information technology services centre, the villagers of Navi Mumbai have begun learning and embracing information technology.
A programme, ‘One village, one computer’, has been launched in 95 projectaffected villages in the area to bridge the digital divide.Asmita S.J., a computer technologist and activist, explained the aim was to empower the villagers and not just to provide them connectivity.
Asmita, who has studied community computer projects in various states and countries, said that in the Warna sugar belt, villages have been provided with computers largely to facilitate the growth of the sugar industry and not to empower the villagers themselves. Krishna Khopkar, a veteran leader of the Kisan Sabha, an organisation which fights for the rights of agricultural workers and has pioneered the computer network project, said the response to their training camps has been enthusiastic.
The training has helped create several youth cadres equipped with the necessary IT tools and community leadership skills. This has created a great deal of human knowledge capital at the local level. The software, which is in Marathi, was created by M.S. Sridhar of Akruti India, a multilingual agency.
Khopkar said he thought of initiating such a project when he heard how people of one village parted with 40 acres of fertile land to the City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco) for the development of Navi Mumbai, but got little compensation or benefits promised.
The villagers, who were promised 40 developed plots, had not got anything even 20 years after parting with their lands. Thousands of peasant families in surrounding villages have similar complaints. The villagers will now be able to communicate their problems with one another and take them up with officialdom and politicians.
Similarly, agricultural workers in Nandurbar have organised themselves through the computer network. The Maharashtra Rajya Shet Mazdoor Union of agricultural workers has compiled a database of 3,000 landless labourers in the district, bordering Gujarat, regarding various issues, including their wages, house ownership, inclusion of names in the ‘below poverty line’ category, loans, health problems and drinking water availability.
The work has begun yielding results. For example, armed with facts and figures available, a list of TB-affected labourers was placed before the government officials concerned and they were forced to provide them medical treatment, said Kumar Shiralkar, union leader. The inspiration for this networking for the masses has come partly from Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor in IIT, Chennai, who is using IT for creating awareness among the masses, said activist Anil Shaligram.
Computer technology is also being used to tackle the problems of workers of 170 sugar factories spread over 16 districts of Maharashtra. Nearly a million workers, involved in sugarcane cutting, now feel threatened with the import of harvesting machines in Nandurbar and Pune districts. The machines will ultimately displace workers and add to joblessness in the countryside, said Kumar Shiralkar.
Also, several workers get injured during cane cutting. Now e-mails will be used to alert officials of the health and labour departments, the hospital and sugar factory about the mishaps. So far the database of workers of 45 factories has been collected and computerised.
It includes information about age, gender, education, house ownership, ration card and others. The All-India Democratic Women’s Association is also using computer networks to take up various issues, including dowry deaths and struggles against liquor barons in rural areas.