Last month, Team Baank-e-Loom organised a community meeting in Saidanpur village of Barabanki district in Uttar Pradesh to register community members for Weaver ID card, which provides a weaver household with various social and economic benefits. The half-a-day meeting registered 40 weavers who have been promised support by the district handloom department. Further, to expand…
Last month, Nokia and DEF announced the launch of KanchiLoom, a cluster development programme to digitally empower the weaver community and connect them to technology and the marketplace in three villages within Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu. The project primarily involves the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) and other digital tools in critical aspects of cluster…
DEF in collaboration with Centre for Catalyzing Change (C3) organised a two-day residential digital literacy training for cluster coordinators to provide hands-on training of digital tools and techniques. The training was organised in Gumla, Jharkhand on November 22 and 23, 2017, with 25 cluster coordinators from various villages of Jharkhand, who actively participated in the…
There are number of heart-warming stories like this which have emerged out of relentless efforts of Indian Public Library Movement (IPLM) launched by NASSCOM Foundation with the support from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. IPLM is undertaking the digitalization process of district libraries in a number of states such as Jammu & Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh,…
What we do, what we learn always remains confined to self, group or within four walls of a classroom. Often, our learnings are not shared with the outside audiences and, hence, it goes unnoticed. To bridge these gaps, exhibitions can play an important role in sharing learning with each other. In an attempt to showcase…
Delhi Monuments is an ambitious attempt to be the one-stop app for exploring heritage sites in Delhi. This initiative aims at simplifying the exploration of cultural and architectural heritage that spans over 2,000 years. The application makes all these possible. From the ancient Lal Kotwals of the third city of Delhi to the more recent…
An Alternative Museum of Handloom Weaving in Chanderi Jane E Lynch Ph.D Wenner-Gren Foundation Grantee On October 18, 2017, I installed a temporary pop-up exhibition in the historic weaving town of Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh. This exhibition aimed to collaboratively re-envision — and present, as a catalyst for dialogue — the ways in which the…
Saidanpur village of Barabanki district in Uttar Pradesh celebrated Daan Utsav with much enthusiasm on October 4, 2017. A sewa mela was organised by social worker Jyotsna Kaur Habibullah in collaboration with DEF and Daan Utsav volunteers. It saw free dental check-ups and eye bank awareness booths with senior doctors from King George’s Medical University…
For the last two years, project DigiKala — an initiative to digitally empower handloom weavers — has been working towards ensuring all weaver families in Barpali and Nuapatna handloom clusters of Odisha have least one digitally literate person in the household. Through the efforts of the ground staff, several youth from weaver households have even…
Contemporary system of classroom education focuses merely and solely on textbook knowledge. This often eludes students from applying their knowledge in their lives or learning from their surroundings. “Education is not just going to school and getting a degree. It’s about widening your knowledge and absorbing the truth about life,” believes mathematical genius Shakuntala Devi.…