There’s a fascinating article Taking Free Software to the Farmers and Fields of India in Friday’s Linux Journal.

Thanks to work done by the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Bombay) and its partners, IT-savvy and knowledge-hungry people across rural India now can find relevant, demand-driven farming knowledge on the aAqua.org Web site.

When we were talking to the people at UBINIG, it was obvious they were engaged in a struggle for the hearts and minds of the rural poor in Bangladesh:

• on the one hand, the multinational corporations selling a vision of “science” and “progress” using all the sales techniques a generous budget could buy
• on the other hand, UBINIG using word of mouth, peer-to-peer persuasion, and demonstrations, using traditional culture to embed the message

The Linux Journal article shows how free software can be used to help level the playing field – here’s a way of using the internet to strengthen the peer-to-peer message. Imagine an articulate and persuasive individual like Rabeya who we met in Nallapara village spreading the message in a web-based forum like aAqua.

The UBINIG folks seemed a bit ambivalent towards the net – however, as William Booth put it in another hearts and minds struggle: why should the devil have all the best tunes?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 26th, 2006 at 9:23 am and is filed under Greenery, Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.