September 16, 2011: This is the house of Mr. Sukhdev from Karcha Village, Banda, Uttar Pradesh where I had a chance to visit during one of my work visits.
In this report we hear Sukhdev highlight the following key points: [link to report]
When the transformer at their village burns out and needs repairing, unless they pool in money to pay to the district electricity department, they do not get a replacement. Which technically seems to be a bribe.
The load on these transformers is high since many people use wire tap to the source lines to draw electricity to their homes even without a connection, which adds extra load on the transformer beyond its capacity due to which it fires and goes bad.
They have electricity for around 10 hours mostly only during the nights when the transformers are working.
Due to electricity, his kids can study during the dark for a couple of hours.
Using fans, when there is power helps them to get rid of mosquitoes & diseases caused by them during summers.
When there is no electricity during the night its scary because of threat of theft in the village.
You can view the video here with English subtitles below: [YouTube link]
Recently in conversation with a school teacher, I was told by her how she used to clear doubts and answer questions of students nights before their examination, over lengthy phone calls. Does that ring a bell? We all did that during our school days, calling up friends or teachers and clarifying doubts or maybe even getting the whole lesson explained to you on phone. Let’s keep this thought in mind for a moment and move to the next picture.
Picture#2: Women health workers in India called ASHA sakhi have a major role to play in providing health care services in Rural India. We all know, mobile phone is something which everyone has these days, especially in Rural India where they often have two phones. Usually the ASHA’s would meet and greet from time to time to be made aware about new developments and given training. If we can connect say 20 of them, on a particular day of the month over a multi party conference call with an instructor who can tell them about new things it becomes easy and a good use of existing resources.
The way it works is the instructor using a service which lets him/her create a Voice Class room with students connected over a conference call and talk to them.
Design Considerations:
Accessibility: Input Methods are key presses on the numeric keypad of the mobile phone.
Content Creation: The learning happens real-time like a classroom where the content is delivered in the instructors voice.
Ubiquity: The lessons, if recorded can be made available to everyone which can be accessed anywhere, anytime. In any case active classroom sessions can be attended from anywhere over a phone.
A basic phone is all it takes, plus the idea of sharing knowledge over voice from our own location also makes it a lot easier.
Picture #3: If I can use the similar mechanism to impart any kind of training that can be delivered over “voice” to Visually impaired or Physically Disabled person at their homes using their phones. Would this work?
In any case I agree that education or knowledge sharing is something that has higher impact only when there is a face to face or physical presence involved between the instructor and the learner. But I am sure there are some kind of knowledge trainings, vocational or life skills that can be imparted over a mobile phone using voice. Because ICT Tools in learning should be tools to help learning, not tools to learn(to be able to learn something) and who needs to learn to make/receive a phone call?
Recently I have been a part of designing team of this product for VoiceTree on the similar thoughts. Do take a look at this presentation on vSkool by VoiceTree.
Arguably the thought can be perceived in different ways. But as someone who constantly digs up various data to analyse and come to conclusions in projects, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the same. I came across this post by Patrick Meier titled “No Data is Better Than Bad Data…” Really?
Here I’d share my experiences from two projects where the kind of data that needed to be collected, didn’t really exist before. So logically in such cases one would say we can’t make a general statement “No data is better than bad data” since there is no data.
The first project I was involved in my last job, was to do a Climate Change study for IRRI in Sitamarhi, Bihar region. Some of the major objectives of the survey that we did was to find out the gradual changes in agriculture practices, availability of irrigation facilities, cropping patterns and coping mechanisms adopted in due time by the community over the years and then relate it with their opinion on the climate change aspects. Such data were not available, as things change from time to time and this had more to do with people living around the flood prone area on the banks of River Baghmati. Over the days, while being a part of the survey process from field data collection to quality check and analysis I realised that each part of the process was crucial for the quality of data we get. Right from the way you are interviewing the person and filling the forms to data entry and analysis. However, the important part of the amount of time spent in interacting with the villagers in asking them the questions. The more time you spent with them, the more information you could extract from them. Just blindly asking the questions, is not a good way to conduct interviews or get quality information. They’d just want to leave instantly.
Second example: the crowdsourced project PowerCuts.IN, where the initial idea was to collect data about frequency, duration and types of power outages(planned/unplanned) across India. Why? A normal look on the internet would tell you, there does not exist any such data for public use. But looking at the data on the powercuts.in one can clearly say that this does not represent all of India, not even a specific region from where we have some reports coming in. Why? The people who report on the website are mainly:
active Twitter users
who also are aware of the hashtag #powercutindia or the project
who care/want to tweet and report
So even if we have significant number of reports on the site from Location X, we can not make a justified conclusion about the power outage situation of that location since the larger population of that area needs to be considered too.
From the above two examples, its fair to say that:
Process of data collection, methodologies is important.
Sample size is important.
But, again, coming back to the original argument.. I’m happy that there is “some” data, instead of “no data” because “no data” gives us no direction to think/act upon. “Some data” at least gives you ideas to either validate/cross check the data and act or just re-initiate the process of data collection following a different methodology. And it would be helpful if any data that is published includes the process, methods followed and idea on the sample chosen.
This is a story about Four guys: Eer, Bir, Phatte and me. So ek rahein Eer, ek rahein Bir, ek rahein Phatte aur ek rahein hum(@ajuonline)*. Like any other day, when we get out in the night finding a spot in the city of Lucknow, we mostly end up at this spot at the bank of River Gomti where its all lit up(thanks to the excess electricity usage & beautification work done by our government).
We sit, talk about anything and everything under the moonlight (and other kinds of lights) along side the river watching the city. When we discovered this place and used to visit it late nights, we’d be approached by the security guards inside the park coming to us and asking “Having fun eh?” which actually meant that he is coming to check if we were drunk or consuming alchol or not(which btw, is illegal in India) and each time the security guard wont find anything as we are never drunk and don’t consume alcohol at all. (PS: we are nice guys!)
At the bank of River Gomti, Lucknow
Last night, same spot but without the moon we four were again there talking. On the bridge, around 50-80 meters away from us, on a straight line, we saw a “head” looking at us. It was a guy whose body was hidden by the wall and we could only see his head looking at us. We thought it would be the guard again watching us secretly to check if we are doing anything wrong or not. We decided to ignore him, but then it was always in our head as who is this man watching us constantly from a distance? Whenever we’d look at him, he’d turn away and start looking at another direction. His acts and body language added more to our suspicion. He’d keep changing his places by one step sometimes to the left or the right but will keep looking at us and ,what I thought it was, scribbling something at the wall.
Thirty minutes later, he was still there doing each and everything again and again. Look, Turn Away, Scribble etc etc. I thought we ought to find out whats going on with this man. Slowly, Eer decided to get up and walk towards him. The next moment, the man watches Eer coming towards him and hurriedly picks up his bicycle and starts running away!
His reaction was as if some thief was caught red handed and then we got all curious. Eer, Bir, Phatte and me, all at once yelled “lets go after him!”. Eer, Bir, Phatte go to the car while I decided to go running after him, barefeet with my shoes in my hands to see which direction he cycled to.
Suddenly it turned into a cat-mouse chase where we drove straight downhill the road. Bir said, we should go straight as it was downhill and the guy wouldn’t bother going left or right ,which was uphill. 2 minutes later after passing 2-3 men on cycles, we found *our* guy cycling. As soon as we reached near him, I shouted “This was the man!” and his reaction, confirmed that. We asked him to stop and we pulled over, got out of the car. I started wearing my shoes on the road, while Bir said “Oh man, don’t beat him with your shoes” and me started laughing. Eer on the other hand, said “This guy(me) is dangerous and you better tell us what were you upto back there, watching us and doing “something”.”
And we all laughed again. It wasn’t helping, as we were not coming out to be serious at all. I tried to calm down and asked the man seriously, what he was doing there, whats in his hands and his bag? He started holding his ears and apologising instantly as if he did a mistake. This added again to our suspicion.
He kept refusing and apologising, saying “If you guys want to slap me, do it, but let me go.” and he would not answer why or what he was doing. Then Bir slowly whispered to us he might be doing some black magic late in the night on us, considering some stories he heard recently. And we decided to not touch this man, and just ask him from a distance. Next moment he touches my feet and asks. I asked him his name, profession. He said “I work in the Irrigation Department, Head Quarters and..” “…name is Shivraj or Shivram”. I said “OK Fine, but what the hell were you doing there watching us from the past 30 minutes. Tell me or I call the police!”
Suddenly a big car came over and tried to find way, since we were in the middle of the road and that gave the man a chance to pick his cycle up and run. And since we were in a confused mood by now, laugh or think about black magic and worry, we let him go.
The rest of the night we kept thinking, what was the guy upto, shall we go back and question, shall we call the police or not? Um. What do you guys think? Also since I was the only person who the man touched, I asked Eer to call me in the morning to check if I am alive or not, since I live alone and what if the black magic worked?
*PS: The Eer, Bir, Phatte reference and the opening line of this story is taken from the following song. The names are fictitious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZl0DRCrdFA
ईर काटा तीन लकड़ी, बीर काटा तीन लकड़ी, फट्टे काटे तीन लकड़ी, हम काटा ….. करेली!
Visit my LinkedIN profile. I’m a technologist and development professional with interest in application of ICTs for social benefit. I believe in applying technology to help people & communities. I also like to tell stories. I travel a lot, mostly to villages in India (for work) trying to change things around. [Travel Map]+[More About Me.]
You can email me at mail@ajuonline.net or follow me on Twitter or Flickr and take a look at my projects here.
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