-The Indian Express A technological intervention must have a governance framework in which protection of rights must be fundamental and which provides more choices to the marginalised. Remember the early days of the internet, when it took several minutes to connect to the web through a dial-in modem? Or when you had to wait in line at an STD booth to make an outstation call? Since then, we have made massive strides...
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Years of Poor Urban Planning Contributed to the Hyderabad Flash Floods -Gali Nagaraja
-TheWire.in Parties across the spectrum seem unwilling to take the issue seriously, experts and civil society experts say. Hyderabad: While Telangana chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) has touted Hyderabad as a ‘global city’, the capital was hit by flash floods earlier this week and has remained cut off from the rest of the world after major roads were washed away. Experts have attributed this turn of events to poor urban planning,...
More »Why farm reform will fail without tech -Harshit Kohli
-Livemint.com * Market participation is meaningless without information. Should every Indian farmer get a smartphone? * Without Internet connectivity and market intelligence, the transaction cost associated with selling in places outside the local market are higher than the value of the produce FATEHPUR: Kamlakant is a smallholder farmer in Daulatiyapur village of Fatehpur district in Uttar Pradesh. He is an enthusiastic vegetable cultivator and every season, he searches for answers to three basic...
More »A Reality Check on India’s Search for Digital Utopia -Preeti Mudliar
-The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the persistent digital divide afflicting rural India owing to poor and insufficient Internet connectivity. With the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech acknowledging the need ‘to complete’ Internet connectivity to villages, there is a renewed vigour and interest in the National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN)/BharatNet project. An important question to pose when translating policy to project is: when should...
More »No Internet, school comes home in rural Sikkim -Esha Roy
-The Indian Express While the Sikkim government has launched the Sikkim Edutech App to help students from Class 9-12 cope with the learning loss, it's the junior students and those in far flung areas who were left with little support. Sometime in April, with Covid forcing schools shut, Indra Mukhi Chhetri, a maths and science teacher in a rural area of South Sikkim district, began worrying about her students. While schools were...
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