Arun Yellamaty hits the right note helping the poor
The 12th edition of the Manthan Award South Asia and Asia Pacific Gala will be held on December 2, 2015 at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, to honour the best digital innovations and interventions that help to improve the lives of peoples and communities across 8 South Asian countries including India and 28 other countries across the Asia Pacific region. This year there are 25 winners across 13 categories out of 58 finalists from a total of 412 entries.
Over the years the Manthan Award has grown in scope and stature and today it is one of the most coveted awards for digital practitioners in this part of the world. On behalf of Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) we invite you all to this unique “unconference” – a pioneering concept that we are introducing for the first time this year. Please visit our website (http://manthanaward.org/) for more details and registration.
This year’s event will hold a few surprises for all participants.
First, is the idea of “unconference”. In line with our mission and vision with regard to our awards, we will try to make this event promote to the fullest extent the development of a knowledge network and database comprising innovations and interventions of digital practitioners, policy makers, funding organizations, technology leaders and grassroots social activists and civil society organizations. We are striving to informalise the event in a manner that will better enable attendees to connect with each other, learn from each other and forge partnerships with each other to scale-up their work and bring about greater impact.
Second, the DEF awards and communication teams have been striving hard over the last two months to give this event the look and feel of a mela or fair typical of rural India. Our effort is directed at giving both domestic and global guests an idea of the milieu that is typically experienced by nearly 80 percent of Indians who live in the over 650,000 villages in India. This is where DEF is striving to make an impact by empowering people at the edge of information with digital tools and skills on its own and also promoting all others who are trying to do the same across the entire South Asia and Asia Pacific region where the world’s most disenfranchised live in some of this planet’s most information dark areas. The Manthan Award celebrates this empowerment of the poorest of the poor, the marginalized and underserved and the fight against information poverty.
Third, this year’s award event will also include for the first time a separate award for Community Information Resource Centres (CIRCs) implemented by DEF in rural and semi-urban areas. Since 2007 onwards, DEF has implemented some 140-odd such centres across 19 states and 54 districts in India impacting over 150,000 poorest of the poor people who have been empowered with digital infrastructure, broadband connectivity and the digital skills needed to make full use of digital tools. More such centres are coming up pan-India.
The award seeks to motivate CIRCs to further take forward their work by identifying and honouring CIRCs across three categories: Community Outreach, Enterprise & Sustainability and Programme Diversity. The award has also selected a model CIRC for this year and no prizes for guessing which CIRC bagged this award. Yes, of course, the one at Chandauli, a very small rural hamlet in Rajasthan that has become India’s first fully literate digital village. So much so, that today it has become world famous thanks to the coverage it received on a Time magazine cover story (as well as many other media outlets) as a consequence of the visit of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, to the village and the CIRC on his first ever visit to India in October, 2014. Read more about the award winners from our booklet profiling winners, runner-ups and other finalists to be launched at the Manthan Award Gala on December 2, 2015. The booklet will also be uploaded to our website next month.
Finally, and we have been keeping the best surprise for you till the end, watch out for the screening of a five-minute trailer of the documentary Ocean In A Drop filmed, directed and produced by Andrew Garton, a globally reputed Australian creative producer, musician and media artist working within community and cultural development fields in Australia and the Asia Pacific region, during the Manthan Award Gala.
Ocean in a Drop is a chorus of diverse voices from rural India describing the impact broadband is having on individuals and communities there. It is a unique meditation on the transformations taking place, particularly among women and youth, as a result of access to critical and timely information within communities rich with indigenous knowledge and tradition otherwise described as “backward” or illiterate.
Ocean in a Drop overturns these perceptions by documenting the efforts of DEF to provide a billion of India’s poorest with access to broadband and the skills to use it by 2020.
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