Issues: 

1. Nodes in Gujarat

2. Kiosk at IIMA

3. Multilingual/Multimedia database

4. Partnership

1) The first node in Gujarat has been put in Dharampur Village, Near Baroda. Two more nodes would be put up in the first week of April 2001. Content presented is in multimedia/ local language in audio/video/text. We have also provided multilanguage E-mail facility. Which as of now is two ways. Later in next quarter it would facilitate horizontal communication between kiosks. Putting 2 nodes in Gujarat is the part of deliverable 2 of the grant agreement. This fulfills the condition for release of second tranche of grant as per the agreement.

2) One Kiosk is put in IIMA. This Kiosk provides a good insight into the presentation of information to stakeholders other then Grassroots innovators. Other Interactive features are being worked.

3) Multimedia/Multilanguage database is being developed, it is soon to be put up on the web in two languages other then English, which already there.

4) SRISTI has gone into partnership with Drishtee.com Pvt. Ltd., Bhopal, (www.drishtee.com). Drishtee is the developer of www.gyandoot.net. Gyandoot is an rural ICT networking project. As per the agreement, Drishtee & SRISTI would put their contents on each others networks. Going by this agreement, multimedia/ multilanguage database would be put up in Hissar, Haryana in April 2001. The aim is to wider the scope of the network from the present.

1. How do you evaluate the results/achievements thus far?

The project after the planning and testing phase has come to deployment stage. Next two months are crucial for putting the applications together besides educating and testing with the communities. Partnership with Drishtee gives the project an avenue where we can cover a much larger stakeholder group.

2. What are the main lessons you have learned during this quarter?

The progress as of now is encouraging. Next quarter holds key to crucial development in software and applications and making them match with the feedback from the users. The coordination with kiosks providers has not been a smooth as we expected. There is major gap in content in local languages though on hardware front, India is moving forward. The fibre optic network (still in cable deployment stage) is not becoming accessible for the use by projects like ours but we will keep trying.

Project website: 

www.sristi.org/knownetgrin.html (the project is small part of the honey bee network which is to make connectivity among innovators possible. The link of the project page is http://www.sristi.org/infodev.html

Reports updates are available on the site. Besides 1,500 innovations have been put from Honey Bee database. The website contains an array of services for various stakeholders in the project. The website is currently in English. We are looking forward to a period of one month to make it available in two regional languages.