NEW DELHI: The man who helped mastermind Indias “green revolution” in agriculture in the 1960s is now hoping to do a similar thing for information technology in the country, BBC online reports Friday.
MS Swaminathan was one of the key figures in the plan to make India nearly self-sufficient in food through technology which allowed for intensive farming techniques.
And he is now behind efforts to get Indias rural poor online as quickly possible – through mobile phones, information kiosks and even resource centres, connected through the satellites of the Indian Space Research organisation.
He told BBC World Services Digital Planet programme how he is now pioneering efforts to connect as many of the countrys population as possible to the internet so that they can be part of a new “knowledge revolution.”
– I always said the green revolution helped increase the productivity of wheat and rice and so on – but the knowledge revolution which we have launched increases productivity in all its dimensions, he said.
Cutting bureaucracy
Mr Swaminathan said that the information-centred approach is Indias “evergreen revolution” – a perpetual increase in productivity without ecological harm.
He said there is currently a very big gap between “scientific know-how” and “free-level do-how”; one that can only be bridged by IT techniques.
He explained that crucially, Indias typically tight bureaucracy had in fact been comparatively untroubling. – Fortunately, in our own work, bureaucracy is not involved, he said.
– In the whole IT sector in India, the reason there was explosive growth was because bureaucracy had very little role. The same thing happened in the green revolution – the farmers who did the trick in the 60s – we just gave them the seeds and the technology and they went on.
