Note: Below is a guest post by Antonio Stefano Caria, an economist from Oxford who spent the past two weeks visiting and working with Awaaz.De. We asked Stefano to share his impressions of Awaaz.De as a company and his personal experiences living in Ahmedabad. It was great having Stefano with us. Enjoy the post!
I have just concluded a two weeks long visit to India, a good part of which was spent in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in close contact with Awaaz.De’s founder Neil Patel and his colleagues. The whole Awaaz.De team was truly welcoming. Thanks to them, I had a great time during my stay.
I am an economics PhD student focusing on development issues. Learning about Awaaz.De’s work was fascinating and thought-provoking for me as a researcher. Awaaz.De tries to harness the power of mobile technology to serve the information needs of people and communities throughout India. Its main focus so far has been on farmers, which I feel is a particularly good target group. Agriculture is a complicated and risky venture where the application of appropriate, context-specific technological solutions can make a big difference to people’s livelihoods. Information about new technologies is essential and research in developing countries has repeatedly shown that farmers are keen to acquire and share it. Yet, despite such pressing informational needs, farmer communities are often disconnected, as villages can be quite far apart from each other and government advisory services have limited reach. Mobile technology, which can transfer information at little cost and is widely diffused throughout the country, can create a platform for farmers to share experiences and be more connected with the community of agricultural scientists. Awaaz.De is to be commended for harnessing this.
Yet, there may be something deeper about information technology than the specific messages it carries. Technology can implicitly foster attitudes and behavioural patterns. Its diffusion, tacitly, is often also the diffusion of such attitudes. Mahatma Gandhi saw this when he criticised railways in India in his Hind Swaraj (“Indian Home Rule”). Trains can be used for both positive and negative ends: to distribute food to regions where food is scarce, or to move the English army from district to district and ensure a tighter control of a colony. But there is something about the velocity of movement that is an inherent trait or attitude that is conveyed and fostered by the train technology. Once we have it, once the option of fast movement is opened, we are induced to change our thinking in domains like transportation, time, and pilgrimage.
I do feel the Awaaz.De technology has the potential to foster positive attitudes of enquiry, questioning and listening. It can be empowering for communities to feel they are not only passive recipients of knowledge, but active creators. The explosion of blogging and the massive use of social media during the recent Arab Spring is a case in point of something similar happening in a very different part of the world. In developing their project further, the Awaaz.De team will face the challenge to ensure that the empowering character of communication is fully harnessed. This is in my eyes Awaaz.De’s deepest potential. I wish them good luck!
