NEWS AND REVIEWS IN ART, TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION

Bee Market

Honey Bee Multimedia Kiosks Bring a Creative Buzz to Rural India

Like a bee flitting from flower to flower pollinating buds for a new generation, a grassroots organization is buzzing to the deep jungle dangs and rural villages of India with multimedia kiosks for spreading knowledge and sparking creativity. Led by "innovators" who carry a laptop and presentation materials to remote areas, a program known as the Honey Bee Network is opening up a whole new digital world of fun and learning to villagers of all ages and castes.

"There is a tremendous amount of curiosity that drives people to us when we arrive in a village," says Professor Anil K. Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. Adita, who helped spearhead the people-to-people program, stresses the importance of providing content to villagers in their native language or dialect. Additionally, presentations are designed to be of innate interest to the needs of each culture.The innovators usually travel by truck but they often have to trek downjungle paths to get to remote dangs where villagers have never seen a computer and find the alien technology difficult to grasp. If connectivity is lacking, the Honey Bee teams try to present their educational concepts with photographs, songs and games, all in the local language.

The Honey Bee Network thrives under the auspices of an organization created by Prof. Gupta, the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions; "Sristi" for short, the Sanskrit for "creation." Most of the village-to-village mobile teamwork is done during Shodhyatra, a biannual activity that is supported by Sristi. "The idea is to go to the people with whom we are working and try to include them in this movement of honoring and augmenting grassroots creativity," says Prof. Gupta.

Honey Bee has some 10,000 local inventions and ideas in its database,4,000 relating to agriculture -- which are shared among villages. These include such things as a simple pulley that makes it easier for women to draw well water and a tough variety of ground nut that a farmer in the village of Pankhan discovered flourishing when other breeds failed. To help local innovators gain something from their discoveries, the Honeybee database is culled for the best ideas for potential marketing. The offshoot organization, GIAN -- Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network -- has already initiated dozens of pilot projects. One of their initial products is a variety of a ground nut variety developed by farmer Shri Thakarshibhai Savaliva. Savaliva, who lives in the village of Pankhan in Saurashtra, observed an odd variety in seeds purchased from a cooperative and began experimenting with it, eventually developing a variety having early maturity, higher yield, high oil content and resistance to disease and pests.

The seed, named "Morla" because its pods are shaped like a peacock, is being tested and could be commercialized. GIAN is working to protect the intellectual property rights of Savaliva and find a mechanism for the sale of the seeds, which have since been renamed "Thakarshi" after the innovative farmer who developed them. Additionally, a new institution, the National Innovation Foundation, is promoting competitions for rewards among participants in Sristi and GIAN activities across India.

Along with their mobile outreach project to teach people about their environment and innovations, Prof. Gupta says Sristi envisions establishing permanent self-sustainable information centers or kiosks in some villages. Using touch screens, these computer sites would be focused on local interests and needs. "These kiosks would actually let people utilize various community specific resources," says Prof. Gupta. "There would be information, interactive modules for interests of various groups - women, the elderly, village youth and small children." These modules would contain games, recipes, songs, folk stories, news, a community market place, and matrimonial information.

For more information and photos about the non-profit grassroots educational campaign in India, visit the the Sristi and GIAN sites.

By John M. Leighty
Photo Credits: Sristi.org