Manzilein aur bhi hain… There are other roads to travel...or there are other destinations to reach/travel...

The ICT4D journey at CSDMS started in an interesting way. When we started it all, we had not heard of ICT, forget about ICT4D...

Having studied Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in my masters I felt that this technology had immense potential to contribute in various aspects of human development. To take this idea forward I joined an NGO working in the area of Disaster Management where I thought GIS was a critical need in our country. I soon realized the level of unawareness and the lack of preparedness of usage of high-end technology like GIS in the various sectors in the country even among those at the highest level of decision-making. Surprisingly the biggest dampener was the fact that although a lot of investments were being made in technologies like these in several public institutions, there was a total lack of harmony and synergy in the efforts of these organizations in using the technology for public good. This is a fact that perturbs a number of like-minded and concerned individuals who see the vast potential of this technology in revolutionising several sectors of service delivery and decision-making in development.

Realising the felt need, along with a group of like-minded friends, I started to work on the awareness and advocacy aspects of GIS. I co-founded an organization that focused on raising awareness and consensus-building through a print media and face-to-face consultation. Our publication titled GIS Development and the related workshops and seminars at the national and international level raised the necessary public awareness in this sector. Through the last ten years, our endeavours have taken shape and it is with pride we can say that our efforts have played (and are still playing) a crucial role in shaping the GIS related decision-making policies at the highest level in India and beyond. We were able to make it all happen without any donor support, through a very sustainable business strategy. The fact that this initiative has now hived off as a separate company has been another point of satisfaction.

While working in GIS and related areas we started to realise the amount of impact simple technologies like email / internet can have in improving the efficiency of public institutions and the quality of services they offer to citizens. We realised the potentials of ICTs, both the old and the new media. We started exploring answers to such questions as ‘How can the civil society use the ICTs effectively to lobby with the government and make it more transparent and accountable? How can ICTs impact the poor'. During this period, we had the good fortune of working with MIT Media Lab and Department of Science and Technology, Government of India who had started thinking of introducing innovative ICTs in the rural areas. We at CSDMS got the opportunity of leading Geo-ICT based initiatives (GPS based PDAs) for rural areas for community development (participatory community mapping), decision making and education. While working on these projects we came face-to-face with the long series of challenges faced by rural and under-privileged communities and we recognised the enormous opportunities for ICTs to contribute to a considerable improvement in rural lives. Our research and activities exposed us to a whole new world of ICT for Development, and several opportunities for intervention. We also recognised that although opportunities exist, an awareness for these at large was still absent. Several persons and groups, who have had long experience in this field encouraged and inspired us to think about i4d - a knowledge sharing platform for practitioners and all those interested in ICT4D. i4d (www.i4donline.net), emerged as a monthly print magazine, an online knowledge forum and a tool for advocacy in ICT4D. Our well-wishers were aware of what we had done in the field of GIS, and had faith that we could do something meaningful in ICT4D too!

The response we received for i4d from civil society, governments, academia; was fabulous! That kept our morale high and sustained us for the long battle. We realized early that advertisement (as a tool for revenue generation for the magazine) was not to come easy. There was no market segment called ICT4D. Most of the IT companies, who spend millions of dollars on the IT media, did not even know of the ICT4D sector. Convincing them to support i4d was a Herculean task, and as many of our well wishers had expected and cautioned us, we failed to generate any support from the private sector. Almost a year after the launch of i4d, when, (inspite of the continued overwhelming response from stakeholders around the world), we were still struggling to sustain the magazine financially, we started seeing some traction of support from the development sector. SDC and UNDP India showed their interest to support, which took almost one year to come by, but definitely kept us going! Thankfully today after three years, IDRC, Hivos, IICD and others support us at various levels.

The i4d journey opened new avenues of knowledge and ideas for us. Our readers started asking for more and very fast. While there was an audience which was waiting for i4d, but there was another audience which was looking from their domain perspective. This led to the egov (www.egovonline.net) that focuses on electronic governance and Digital Learning (www.digitalLEARNING.in) that discusses ICT in education. These have taken the message of ICT4D to places where it has not gone before.

We are looking forward to opening some new doors in the ICT4D arena soon…