There is a buzz of excitement among Pashtun women in Pakistan. Corridors in Peshawar filled with news of extremism, for some extent at least, has been taken over by a teenage blogger. She writes her blog for the New York Times. It is a story of Sher Bano’s incredible courage that has brought the issue…
The Telecom Commission plans to use Rs.3,000 crore from the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) to provide mobile connectivity to 56,000 villages identified as mobile and telecom shadow areas. While USOF does that, we should not ignore the fact that out of the 867.02 million mobile subscribers (as of April) in the country, not more than…
Various examples show the role mobile phones can play to trigger social and behavioural changes in India Not many of us are aware of the role that mobile phones can play to trigger social and behavioural changes in India. Let us look at a few examples. Mobile Kunji has been implemented in eight districts under…
If you have no electricity, you can survive despite inconvenience; if you have no pucca house, you still survive on thatched shelters; if you have bad roads, you can still communicate on the patched roads. But if you don’t have sound health, you simply lose your life. That’s what happens in villages of India. The fundamentals of…
Innovations in empowerment of minorities have both political and governance gains
Given that information is a right in the modern age, remote communities need access
There is a large segment of population looking for sweeping societal and political transformations by being engaged in civic and political actions
Information can make or break you. Information can enable or disable you. You can have information and feel empowered or you can be deprived of information and opportunities, rights and freedom. In the disaster in Uttarakhand, information was the biggest casualty. How? Although stories of devastation and horror are flowing out of Uttarakhand, we have…
From time immemorial, humans have communicated orally and, more recently, through the written word. In the past few decades, messaging has transformed from being time and space dependent to real time, with distance being no longer a barrier. However, while written communication is dependent on literacy, the oral medium, which includes listening, speaking and watching,…
Rakhi Paliwal, 23, vice-president of Upli-Oden panchayat in Rajsamand district in Rajasthan, is the only elected woman panchayat member who rides a motorbike, gets up at 4am in the morning to counsel women against open defecation, attends law school during the day and updates her Facebook page regularly using her smartphone. In March this year,…
