Yesterday was a very interesting day. The President of Germany, Horst Kohler, and the Indian Minister of Science and Technology, Prithviraj Chavan, inaugurated the Indo-German Max Plank Center on Computer Science at IIT Delhi. The Center has been set up with the goal of deepening a research collaboration between Indian and German computer scientists. The proposal was conceptualized and pushed strongly from the Indian side by Prof. Naveen Garg, a Professor of Computer Science at IIT Delhi, and Naveen invited me to give a short talk about Gram Vaani during the inauguration ceremony in my new capacity as a faculty at IIT Delhi. I was honestly quite nervous giving a talk in front of the German President, the IIT Delhi Director, and a lot of senior faculty, but it went well, I think! In fact, the President said that he “was very impressed“!

Given Gram Vaani’s focus on community media, I kept my talk around two challenges for scaling community media: technology and training. Technology, as in, appropriate technical tools designed keeping the rural context in mind, much like what we have done in our design for GRINS. And training, as in, the need for training the community radio staff and volunteers to make relevant programs by giving them assistance on ideas and awareness for new radio programs.

My talk led into discussions around the use of IT for education, which is especially relevant in the Indian context where we urgently need to broaden the educational base to the bottom of the pyramid. The German President remarked that he was very curious to know what efforts the Indian government and institutions like IIT are taking to do this, for example, by building new technological tools such as GRINS to take information and awareness to the bottom of the pyramid. He expressed his concerns that poverty reduction in India leaves much to be done, and many people actually argue that endemic poverty in India has in fact increased over the years than decreased.

The response from the Minister and a few others present was, speaking very honestly, somewhat cliche and therefore lacking in conviction. The Minister for example talked about the rural employment guarantee scheme, and the various funds that the government sets aside for technology development for rural areas. Somebody also mentioned statistics about the rural income growth being more than the urban income growth, and the need for persistent GDP growth rates to eradicate poverty. But all these arguments seemed to have singularly missed the point, which is that the same strategies have been followed since the last so many decades but have not brought about any radical changes. In fact, what I see in front my eyes is only increasing disparity. The GDP-measured economic growth is not reaching the poor, it is only a horizontal circulation of money that is happening at the top of the pyramid, and actually at the cost of the poor by taking away their lands to make way for factories, and paying them paltry sums of money for working in these factories (in the name of increasing employment) while the factory owners make tons of more money. Nobody talked about any evaluations behind this dismal trend, and how can it be rectified. It is all somewhat disappointing certainly. I think the Indian political system and bureaucratic system, all need visionaries at the helm to lead the country and that’s where lies the primary weakness.