Communications & Awareness Workstream

Mandate - To Highlight the potential of telecom services and ICT applications for socio-economic development in rural India, and create awareness among various stakeholders, including government agencies, telecom service providers , policy makers, and most importantly, the people in the rural areas who will be the
immediate beneficiaries of the telecom services and ICT applications to be provided.

Current status - Creating awareness at the village level. For this purpose, all the project villages have been visited, a database of target audience has been created and audience specific information sessions have been prepared. The target audience include school children, youth, teachers, anganwaadi/health workers, farmers, women, marginalized groups, opinion leaders etc.
A group of community mobilizes ,selected for the purpose, have started the familiarization program , where the villagers are told about the Project objectives, telephony ,computer , Internet, and ICT services. Myths and fears associated with computer and internet are addressed. Inputs for the ICT services needed by the villagers are taken and shared with the team members. It is increasingly felt that school children learn fast and rapidly spread awareness within the family setup,hence they are the prime target recipient. Lessons learnt from familiarization sessions are shared with the team members.

Major Issues - People are skeptical about the concept of computer and internet and its use in the development of the villages.
Its challenging to draw out women from their houses and talk about the Project as in the village settings the unequal status of women becomes more pronounced.
Caste dynamics in the villages are a major challenge too. Often upper caste people or the more dominating group in the village do not want those from the disadvantaged sections to enter the Public Telecomunication Information Centers (PTICs) and avail the facilities.
More often than not, women and youth from economically better off families take initiative to run the PTICs. Our effort is to focus also on youth from the poor communities and encourage them to participate. Women, girls and members from self help groups are encouraged too.