ICWSM 

Crashed harddisk

Hi, My laptop's harddisk has crashed. Yipee! If you know somebody who can help me get my data off it asap, please let me know. I can't read it off ...

Gram-Vaani is a winner in the prestigious Knight News Challenge!

Our proposal to enable media services in rural areas of India by using community-radio has been accepted for funding in the Knight News Challenge! ...

Rising inflation in India

7% inflation, riding on the back on rising food prices, is of grave concern. Not only can it lead to social instability, it is quite inhumane that ...

National rural employment guarantee act, India

Niraj gave an SJC today on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. The slides are available at: http://floatingsun.net/udai/files/SJC...

National rural employment guarantee act, India

Niraj gave an SJC today on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. The slides are available at: http://floatingsun.net/udai/files/SJC...

National rural employment guarantee act, India

Niraj gave an SJC today on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. The slides are available at: http://floatingsun.net/udai/files/SJC...

National rural employment guarantee act, India

Niraj gave an SJC today on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. The slides are available at: http://floatingsun.net/udai/files/SJC...

The limits of leapfrogging

A very insightful article from The Economist about why only a few new technologies are able to diffuse in developing countries. New technologies no...

Social stability index

I've been toying with the possibility of having a social stability index, and how it could impact economics. Let me explain.The market -- stock/ co...

Open source speech recognition

An open source speech-recognition and text-to-speech software suite was recently released. This is clearly useful for disabled people, but it can a...

Carnegie libraries

Such an amazing story, and I got to know about it only today when I was talking with Prof. Manuela Veloso, a robotics researcher from CMU! The rise...

Health and education in India

These two excellent articles point out the woes of healthcare and education in India: A healthier future for India, and Education push yield's litt...

Animal power

I made a presentation in the Udai meeting about animal power. Draught animals such as horses, camels, oxen, and donkeys have been used since many c...

Inside Dharavi

The article presents a very vivid description of daily life in Dharavi. These stark realities of individual people about poverty and hardship and t...

Rural banking

The Indian banks plan to use many innovative solutions to expand their footprint into the rural areas. Smartcard and biometric based authentication...

Adaptation to climate change

Much activity with regard to climate change is targeted towards the long term, to achieve energy efficiency, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, etc. ...

Ocean reforestation to counter global warming

Here's a very interesting project whose outcome could change the world! More than 20 tons of iron dust has been dumped into the water near the Gala...

Effective social entrepreneurship

Given the huge amount of interest in social entrepreneurship and non-profit activities these days, we still hear of only a few success stories. The...

The economic lives of the poor

I came across this paper recently. It makes some interesting points about the daily lives of the poor in a number of countries, including India. Al...

Some Ashoka Fellows from India working on ICT for development

A friend from Ashoka in India suggested the following Fellows as invitees to a conference on the use of ICT for development. I thought that I might...

World Bank to give $944 mn loan to India

"The World Bank has agreed to sanction a loan of $944 million to India for strengthening rural finance system, vocational training programs and com...

On Policies and Paradigms

I have often come out immensely frustrated after discussions about Left Vs Right, globalization Vs localization, "Small is Beautiful" Vs "Big is Us...

Role of communication technologies in development

I am sure all of us have heard of great examples of how communication technologies have spurred rural development, as what this report shows too. P...

Dam realities

Much of the dams in India seem to be heavily mis-managed. The 2006 floods in Gujarat were mostly man-made: water was not released in time, and late...

Shame the corrupt with Rs. 0

Very low-cost Internet access in rural areas using KioskNet

This is an article I wrote for Saatva:Rural areas in developing countries are deprived of access to information. This is because it is often econom...

The persistence of underdevelopment: Raghuram Rajan

Although I haven't been able to completely read or understand this paper, some parts of it sound really interesting. Raghuram Rajan is director of ...

Ngopost.org

Members from Udai at San Diego (www.udai.org) have put together a website to post about interesting social development activities around the world....

OpenFM: Open source FM radio station

Adapted Consulting has recently released an open source FM radio station for community radio in rural areas.Some very cool features:- Transmitter c...

A Proposal to Provide Media Services in Rural Areas

Media services such as television and radio are an important intervention to support and accelerate development programs in rural areas. This propo...

The Sisyphuses' of Today

Sisyphus was a Greek king who was made to push a rock up a mountain again and again, only to have it roll back down each time. But he persisted inc...

Cellphone disassembly

This is from WorldChanging. Companies like Nokia are designing cellphones that can be disassembled within 2 seconds, as compared to the manual disa...