Facilitating India’s Knowledge Revolution Through Electronic Networks

Introduction

Realizing the need to bridge the gap between the creation of innovations in the formal and informal sectors of Indian society, a consortium of support organizations led by the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI) created an international  network to facilitate the sharing of ideas and innovations throughout the world.  The key focus of the consortium was on innovations relating to a) technologies used for survival by knowledge rich and economically poor individuals, b) collective indigenous institutions for natural resource management, and c) education at the primary level in regions that are rich in biodiversity, but high in illiteracy.  By documenting and disseminating information about grassroots innovations, SRISTI and its partners aim to help spur and cultivate creative forces at the community level, thereby enabling marginalized groups to participate in India’s social and economic development.

In the same way that honeybees thrive off of pollen from flowers, the Honey Bee Network is designed around the principle of information and knowledge sharing for the common good.  Just as taking nectar away from flowers does not make them poorer, the objective of the Honey Bee Network is meant to enrich the lives of the people who share their innovations and ideas by helping them realize the value of their knowledge.  By facilitating the cross-cultural and multi-linguistic exchange of ideas, the Honey Bee Network offers artisans, farmers, and marginalized groups an opportunity to tap into the creative component of indigenous knowledge systems. 

Background

More than fifteen years ago like-minded Indian visionaries realized that traditional methods for extracting knowledge at the grassroots level was not sufficient for fully cultivating the true human potential of Indian communities.  Thus the founders of Honey Bee set out to create a network to facilitate knowledge sharing in an effort to expedite the feedback between innovators and end users, while providing a sustainable link between the “golden triangle of creativity” (innovators, investors and entrepreneurs).  India’s Honey Bee Network seeks to bridge the gap between the information “haves” and “have nots” by tapping into and democratizing the wealth of knowledge at the community level and digitizing that knowledge in electronic networks. 

The Honey Bee Network addresses one of the major impediments to realizing the innovative potential of Indian communities: the lack of an efficient feedback system.  Unlike the more developed segments of urban society, the creativity of knowledge-rich peoples in rural and isolated areas goes largely unseen because they lack the necessary channels of sharing their ideas with the wider polity.  By providing publicly available access points (e.g. kiosks) in remote villages throughout India, the Honey Bee Network affords these geographically disadvantaged peoples an opportunity to share their creations and ideas with their peers in other parts of the country and the global community. 

The Honey Bee Network comprises a comprehensive multimedia/multilingual database of information relating to new innovations and ideas, including, inter alia, horticulture, biodiversity, and herbal medicine.  Through village meetings and grassroots mobilization, Honey Bee workers are able assess the information needs of end users at the community level, while identifying and documenting the knowledge of innovators and traditional knowledge holders throughout India.  These village meetings, which also take place during the biannual “Shodh yatras,” or journeys of exploration, enable SRISTI, National Innovation Foundation (NIF), Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network (GIAN) and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) to tailor the Network to the unique needs of users in remote areas of the country.  The goal of these village meetings is to share innovations and encourage villagers to conserve local biodiversity, trigger local creativity, and organize friendly competitions to promote knowledge and information sharing for social and economic development. 

To convey the message effectively, information and communication technologies (ICTs), specifically databases and multimedia technologies, are used to facilitate real-time linkages across social, cultural and linguistic boundaries.  To date, the Honey Bee pilot kiosks based in villages have received a positive response from the user community.  For instance, during the eighth Sohdh Yarta in the village of Rajasthan, Honey Bee workers began a demonstration of a multimedia database and abruptly stopped after 15 minutes.  In an effort to encourage the involvement of women in India’s knowledge revolution, the workers called on the men to bring the women of the village from their homes before continuing the demonstration.  This experiment worked in Rajasthan and in every other village, thus highlighting Indians’ appetite for knowledge and information sharing. 

Beyond Honey Bee

Although SRISTI continues to provide institutional support, the Honey Been Network’s strength lies in its network of volunteers from over 77 countries around the world.  Using newsletters based on local language and cultural inputs, volunteers throughout the world help to cultivate the knowledge and creativity of marginalized societies.  By 2000, the Honey Bee database contained over 12,000 entries of innovations.  Since the NIF and Honey Bee workers began organizing national competitions for innovations, the database has grown significantly and now contains over 20,000 examples of grassroots innovations and traditional knowledge in NIF and SRISTI database. 

Supported with the help of the World Bank’s Information for Development (InfoDev) programme, and other volunteers of  Honey Bee network, the Knowledge Network for Augmenting Grassroots Innovations (KnowNet-Grin) was designed to utilize the power of ICTs to expedite the feedback process throughout the Honey Bee Network, while making information more easily accessible to remote villages via the Internet.  KnowNet-Grin comprises multimedia nodes connected through a wide area network (WAN), initially encompassing the Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka regions.  Discussions are currently underway to expand the network to other regions of the country.  Intended to operationalize the electronic exchange of information among grassroots innovators, KnowNet-Grin helps to create opportunities for entrepreneurship and socio-economic advancement for marginalized communities.  It seeks to help would-be innovators overcome caste, gender and literacy barriers by democratizing knowledge among all members of society, thereby spawning grassroots innovations throughout the country.  KnowNet-Grin is still in the beta stage at the IIMA.

Goals and challenges

While the project designers, which include, inter alia, SRISTI, GIAN, NIF and IIMA, have laid out a variety of goals for KnowNet-Grin, of which the following warrant specific mention:

• The creation of an electronic network of innovators linked by village-based kiosks;

• Encourage innovators to share ideas;

• Reduce the feedback loop between users and innovators;

• Bridge the gap between formal and informal innovation;

• Provide a virtual platform for building a value chain of research and development support.

Despite its vision, the project faces many challenges.  From identifying ways to make the Network relevant to the largely illiterate rural population to the lack of incentives to participate in new knowledge creation and the inadequate number of women and other marginalized groups involved in grassroots innovation, KnowNet-Grin faces an uphill battle as it seeks to establish close contacts between innovators, investors and entrepreneurs.  However, continued research in the areas of local language standardization, universal interfaces for village kiosks and multimedia-based education promises to strengthen the sustainability of KnowNet-Grin.  In phase two, the project hopes to expand the Network to Africa and South America, eventually seeding all markets of the world with Honey Bee kiosks. 

Summary

As one of the country’s most innovative grassroots programmes, Honey Bee, and its KnowNet-Grin electronic network, promises to cultivate and nurture the creative and entrepreneurial sprit of grassroots innovation at the community level.  Moreover, the creation of an electronic knowledge network that effectively addresses the cultural, societal and linguistic issues, while providing a link to the global information network via kiosks, ensures the cross cultural exchange of innovations and traditional knowledge towards solutions for sustainable development.  By tapping into the innovative potential of society, this grassroots programme provides a sustainable mechanism for helping India become a knowledge producer in the global information society.  Additionally, “scouting” for innovative ideas at the community level allows Honey Bee workers to capture extraordinary work done by ordinary people throughout India and other parts of the world.

For additional information visit the following links:

• SRISTI’s Shodhyatras

• KnowNet-Grin

• National Innovation Foundation

• Grassroots Innovaiton Augmentation Network

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