Village
Resource Centres (VRC) – Working Paper
1.0 Introduction
The ultimate goal of any science is development of the community. With a firm belief in this principle, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) envisages to extend its expertise and achievements in the spheres of Space science and Information technology to rural development. With this prime objective ISRO has initiated the VRC concept i.e., setting up of the Village Resource Centres (VRCs) with a view to integrate its capabilities in satellite communications and satellite based earth observations to disseminate a variety of services emanating from the space systems and other IT tools to address the changing and critical needs of rural communities. The VRC is a totally interactive VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) based network. These nodes can be further extended using other technologies like Wi-Fi, Wireless and Optical Fibre. These extensions may serve as local clusters around the areas where the VRC is located.
Millennium Development Goals
The
United Nations declaration in September 2000 stated thus – “ We will
spare no efforts to free our fellow men, women & children from the
object and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty to which a more
than a billion of them are currently subjected”.
This millennium goal statement was the natural products of world
summit for social development 1995, in which a consensus was reached
“on the need to put people at the centre of development:
The Millennium Declaration was adopted by 189 world leaders who committed to – “free all men, women and children from object and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty by the year 2015. For the purpose the major goals set were promotion and achieving universal primary education, improve maternal health care, eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, combact HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and to develop a global partnership for development. These goals have given a direction for development among the countries, particularly the developing nations. Our country being a signatory for these Millennium development goals has a committed responsibility to achieve this task.
Millennium
Development Goals & VRC Concept
Technology plays a prominent role in development initiatives particularly more so in recent decades. Space technology and Information communication technology are state of art technologies of modern civilization. But unfortunately the benefit of these technologies never or rarely reach the poor. The benefits that technology brings normally reaches or pocketed by the few affordable rich, further widening the poverty gap and also limiting accessibility capabilities within the community. Information and Communication technology with space technology component can play a tremendous role in the development perspective. It can be a tool to disseminate the knowledge flow of any kind to the rural masses; acting as a catalysts to the growth process. ‘Knowledge is power’, ‘We will be free only where we know’. ISRO, has envisaged the VRC concept to enhance the knowledge of rural community of the country and thus to empower them. The vision is also to breath an air of freedom into their life which are generated through enriched knowledge. The VRCs can help on:-
·
Spontaneous
flow of information on health, education, etc., to the grass-root-level.
·
It will
empower the poor and needy as they will also have an access to these.
·
Spread
education, issues of equality and rural livelihood.
·
Promotion
campaigns – particularly health and sanitation related.
· Inter linking of development process.
·
Above
all empowerment of the people through awareness and dissemination of
knowledge as ‘Knowledge is power’.
The
remote sensing technologies and satellite support systems that are going
to be used in the VRC are part of information and communication
technologies. They can play
specific roles in fulfilling each of the Millennium Development Goals in
their own way. The
objective set or perceived for the VRC, project is much akin to these
millennium goals. The VRC project can be envisaged as tool to achieve
there millennium goals in which the space technology plays a deciding
role. Thus the vision
referred at the beginning, for the Indian Space Research Organistion is
being visualized through VRC project.
1)
The VRC’s are expected to provide wide ranging information like land
records, natural resources, suitable sites for drinking water as well as
sites for recharging to replenish ground water, water harvesting,
wastelands that can be reclaimed, rural employment creation, watershed,
environment, infrastructure, alternate cropping pattern, and so on. By
suitably blending the information derived from earth observation
satellites with ground based and weather related information,
locale-specific community advisory services can be provided. Community
based vulnerability and risk related information, provision of early
warning and dissemination of severe weather related information could
lead to reliable disaster management support at the village level.
2)
VRCs will also provide a variety of services like tele-education,
telemedicine, online decision support, interactive farmers' advisory
services, tele-fishery, e-governance services, weather services and
water management. By providing tele-education services, the VRCs act as
virtual community centric learning centres. At the same time, VRCs will
provide connectivity to speciality hospitals thus bringing the services
of expert doctors closer to the villages.
This project strives
to promote a need based single window delivery system for providing
services in the areas of education, health, nutrition, weather,
environment, agriculture and livelihoods to the rural population to
empower them to face challenges.
3)
The VRCs will also address social issues through awareness and
information dissemination. Information with respect to health,
education, nutrition, gender issues, legal services and women
empowerment. It also aims at creating a demand for services available
through government agencies. The VRCs can also provide for community assistance through
help line which can be used for social issues. It can cater to
livelihood accessibilities gender issues as
information related to this aspects also can be
disseminated. The
demand available in the
service sector can be depicted through the VRCs enabling a greater
employment opportunities. This can also disseminate the required service
in the Govt. sector and also the various development initiative projects
that are initiated by the Govt.
It
is planned to involve Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s), trusts,
private entrepreneurs, Industries, State Government departments and the
state remote sensing centers for the VRCs.
The
overall implementation of the project will be the joint responsibility
of ISRO / NGO / Partner Agency / Community.
The NGO / Associating agency at VRC level is expected to setup
the VRC with the necessary infrastructure and ISRO will provide the
equipments, hardware and software as per the required specifications.
The NGO / partner agency is also expected to collect the
necessary information by conducting Participatory Rural Appraisal, Rapid
Rural Appraisal, Focused
Group Discussions and from other sources (Recent Census) to arrive at
suitable agriculture / land / water resources issues and also to
identify health / education needs.
The VRC project aims at transferring the benefits of the space and IT directly to the communities at the grass root level to uplift the life and livelihood of rural areas. The project as envisaged is meant to serve as a resource centre to address various primary need based requirements of the local communities such as education, health, weather, agriculture and livelihoods opportunities. One of the main aims of the VRCs is to use developments in the field of IT and space technologies to empower rural communities by enabling greater capacity building and awareness. The project aims at increased productivity and sustainability of natural resources, human development and economic sustainability.
Major
objectives of the project are:
·
To generate
advisories on agriculture, land and water management to better utilize
the available resources and to mitigate the negative impacts. This aims
mainly on maximizing the economic output from the available resources.
Existing land use and land cover pattern and planning for better and
optimum land use pattern can be planned with these informations enabling
better productivity results.
·
Ensure
greater access to information on land, water, soil etc so as to educate
and empower the local communities for greater conservation and
sustainable utilization of these resources. The accessibility of
information also will improve the capability of the rural communities
for better development planning and ensure equitable bargaining power in
a skewed social system.
·
Capacity
building of the community to ensure greater awareness with respect to
the basic human development indicators like health, education, child
care, female literacy, adult education, etc. This health related and
social aspects will improve the standard of living and overall
development.
·
Providing
enhanced livelihood opportunities with wider dissemination of
information for greater economic growth. This will create greater
opportunities among the rural masses both at the entrepreneurial level
creating greater employment opportunities and opportunity for self
employment
·
Providing
information on price, market, pests, diseases, livestock, govt. schemes,
job opportunities, e-governance related information etc. The market
services can result in better economic gains to the grass-root producer
who is hitherto deprived of these opportunity costs.
The job opportunities and e-governance related information would
widen the life scope of the rural youth.
·
To provide
Tele education and tele healthcare services. Tele-education and health
care has a very wide scope to create a revolutionary change in the rural
sector. One of the reason for education and health care is the
non-accessibility of our rural interiors. This has always bogged down
our development initiative and efforts.
The tele-network in these lines through VRCs can be a remedy in
these lines.
·
Overall
empowerment of the rural community by catering to Rural Human
development through health, sanitation, child care, female literacy
adult education informal education etc
· To ensure and provide linkages with various development initiatives. To act as a catalyst for ensuring transparency in all sectors of rural development. The information and communication capabilities will breath a new life in the level of transparency in the public sector.
3.0
The Approach
3.1
Participatory
Approach
Role of community participation in any development
initiative needs no stress. Any programme or project aimed at rural
development succeeds and sustains depending on the level of peoples
participation. The project is mainly aimed at the community and hence
its involvement is very much essential for the success of the project.
The involvement of the community requires greater awareness about the
project and its utility. This calls for greater involvement with the
community and its capacity building.
The participatory approach requires involvement of the community at different levels of the project implementation like formulation, planning, implementation and also post project management and monitoring. The sustainability of any developmental initiative depends on collaborative management by the community with proper facilitation by external agency. The process of participatory implementation ensuring social sustainability requires sufficient capacitation of the user community. A successful development project should ensure a sound trade off between social acceptability with due concern for equity along with environmental sustainability. Only a reasonable participatory involvement in the project can ensure the expected results.
The strength of NGOs in social mobilisation is
strongly proved over the years. The VRC project has chosen to depend on
this proven capability of the NGOs and other similar grass root
agencies.
Rapid Rural Appraisals (RRA) and Participatory
Rural Appraisals are required for greater dissemination of information
about the project, its components and its utility to the rural
community. All this calls for greater involvement at the grass root
level, in which the NGOs have exposure and capacity. Thus, NGOs are
mainly involved in the project to further the scope of the project to
create greater awareness in the community with enhanced capacity to use
IT enabled services for its benefit.
The identification of the partner NGOs for project
implementation is based on the ground presence of the NGO in the
proposed area of VRC establishment.
4.0
Components and Potential of VRCs
Village Resource Centres will become single window delivery mechanism for tele medicine, tele education, natural resources data, agriculture advisories, land & water resources advisories; interactive farmers’ advisories; e-governance services and weather advisories. It will also be involved in capacity building of the community to enhance its awareness and knowledge levels. The VRCs will provide information on health, education, nutrition, gender issues, legal services and women empowerment.
Tele education: Focusing on building indigenous skill and imparting training and capacity building, including formal, non-formal and adult education. As a community centric learning centre, VRCs aim to bring access to knowledge at the villager’s doorstep.
Telemedicine: Telemedicine system consists of customized medical software integrated with computer hardware, along with medical diagnostic instruments connected to the commercial VSAT at each location. Generally the medical record/history of the patients is sent to the specialist doctors, who will in turn study and provide diagnosis and treatment during videoconference with the patients end. Telemedicine helps patients in rural areas to avail timely consultations of specialist doctors without going through the ordeal of travelling long distances. The VRCs through their telemedicine network bring the services of specialty hospitals and expert doctors closer. Any VRC can be connected to any of the 75 hospitals of the ISRO Telemedicine network, of which 19 are super-specialty hospitals. VRCs will also be connected to the nearest district / specialty hospitals.
The telemedicine network will be provided at two levels.
1) Specialty Consultation – Consultation with experts and specialists from various fields of medicine like Neurology, Nephrology, Cardiology, Gynecology, Pediatrics, etc., to ensure greater and better access to health care facilities.
2) Basic Consultation – This would involve consultation for treating common and minor ailments at the village level probably at the primary health centers through paramedics in the absence of regular doctors.
The main causes for infant mortality in the rural areas are diarrhea, maternal mortality, infections, etc.. Though these are minor ailments, the absence of timely help and advice make them fatal, especially to the infants. The VRCs through its
tele-medicine and tele-education components would address these issues through awareness, sensitization and capacitation of the community on personal health and hygiene, especially during pre and post natal periods.
Land & Water Resources Advisories: with the comprehensive databases on detailed scales extracted from high resolution satellite images, VRC will not only bring access to spatial information on various themes such as land use/land cover, soil, ground water prospects but also enable the farmers to get query based decision support. GIS databases comprising all thematic layers, cadastral boundaries, road network and drainage network will be created. A simple software package will be installed for accessing and querying the natural resource information and related advisories, which will enable farmers to get online decision support at cadastral levels.
Interactive Farmers’ Advisory Services/Tele agriculture: VRC will enable online interactions between the local farmers and agriculture scientists working at Scientific Institutions. The advisory will cover a wide range of subjects starting from alternate cropping systems, optimization of agricultural inputs – seeds, water, fertilizer, insecticides, pesticides and producer oriented marketing opportunities. Community centred advisories on soil and water conservation, on adopting water efficient cropping patterns, on practices related to rainwater harvesting/ground water recharge, on participatory watershed management, information on market/price, pests & diseases etc will also be made available. Farmers/villagers of one VRC can interact with farmers/villagers of other VRCs on crops, pesticides, water harvesting etc.
VRCs would not only, thus ensure expert inputs for sustainable development but also provides for learning between communities through inter-community knowledge flow. The existence of such networks would allow for greater dissemination, adoption and replication of practices, with modifications if any. This flow of information would also bring in greater transparency and acceptance as the flow as will be established would be between the user communities.
E-governance services: Services such as governmental schemes on agriculture, poverty alleviation, rural employment, social safety nets – food for work programme and other basic entitlements, animal husbandry and livestock related services, services related to Self Help Group
(SHGs) etc, will also be made available at VRCs.
The failure or negligible use of various programmes is more so because of lack of awareness rather than non-implementation. Creating greater awareness on the available opportunities and rights of the community would bolster the demand thus ensuring greater efficiency of the ‘supply’ i.e., implementation of the
programmes. This would also help bring in greater transparency and accountability to both the programmes implemented and the implementing agency.
Weather Advisories: Short, medium and long-term weather forecasts will be converted into location and farming system specific advisories and will be made available to the community as relevant information for local consumption.
Weather advisories, like those envisaged under the VRCs, are very much in requirement to ensure agricultural success, especially in agrarian economies like ours, as the success is greatly dependent on rainfall.
Social Messaging and Rural Empowerment
Social Information related to gender, sanitation, mortality, morbidity, legal support systems, livelihood accessibility informations, etc., will be provided by the VRCs. The proper information flo0w and time bound updation has to be ensured so as to ensure better results. The utilization of these informations can be at the local level or national to international level.
Project support Systems
Any developmental project initiated in the region can use this VRC to spread messages. Awareness and sensitization programmes through the VRCs about the projects can provide a faster track for these programmes to initiate upon.
Community Based Organisation (CBO) support system
CBOs are more and more being identified as catalyst tools in the process of development. They are seen as centres of community participation. The VRCs can cater to the needs of specific organizations like Self Help groups (SHG), User groups, youth services, etc., and can ensure both institutional building and successful participation in development process.
Panchayat Raj Institutions and VRCs
With greater thrust on the democratic decentralization, the panchayat raj institutions are going to play a greater role in the national development agenda. Particularly in Karnataka, the PRIs are proposed to play a decisive role in the rural development programmes. The VRCs can be an effective and useful tool for the capacity building of these PRIs. Even Gram panchayats (GPs) can be thought as a centre for VRCs. The scope in this respect seems to be very vast and discussions with the state governments can yield very fruitful results in extending the VRCs.
5.0 Responsibilities of Partners
5.1 Role of ISRO
5.1.1 Technical Assistance
Major responsibilities of ISRO/DOS are to provide the satellite (VSAT) based communication back bone/connectivity, creation of natural resources database/advisories, providing telemedicine & tele education facilities, software for accessing, displaying, querying natural resource database/advisories.
The
proposed network will be capable of catering to three types of
requirements.