Media Lab Asia – GIS Through GramChitra: Project Report
Background
Media Lab Asia project focused on the creation of ‘Digital Village’ and the transfer of ‘rurally relevant technology’ to the grassroots that can enable the societies a faster and more efficient decision making process. The focus of the project was the development of a participatory model, to analyse the water related issues of a cluster of villages using the role of information technology such as remote sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS). The project was targeted to help the community in the utilisation of maps for solving some of the village related problems. The location of the project was Faridabad in Haryana.
Research Focus
This was a unique attempt of generating village maps for planning and decision-making, developing a replicable and interactive model for an identified target area to help them understand and resolve challenges to health especially with respect to water and water related diseases. This project also aimed at developing an attitude of systematic and objective planning through innovative technology interfaces. Attempts were made to transform the traditional rural livelihoods with modern technologies such as computers, to provide ‘easy information access’ of own areas of the target beneficiaries for ‘informed decision-making’. It was a vision of making the rural masses empowered and enabled with Information Technology in the form of GramChitra. The main theme was creating a ‘Digital Village’ in rural India by incorporating GIS and Remote Sensing (RS) for disseminating information and decision-making. This was done through the development of ‘GramChitra’ software for mass applicability and its deployment through ‘Gramin hubs’ for easy information access network among the rural people. It was felt that ‘GramChitra’ (developed as pioneer open-ended simple GIS software, can be easily read and utilised by village-level stakeholders) was in the tuning phase for mass deployment.
