Centre Launches Portal To Connect Rural Poor

For the rural population of the country, all information critical to their livelihood will just be a click away now onwards. The President, Smt Pratibha Patil, recently launched the government’s multi-lingual portal in New Delhi that will provide information on strategic needs of the poor and marginalised in local languages. This new portal is titled as ‘India Development Gateway (InDG)’ and will help rural communities to access information in five important sectors namely, agriculture, rural energy, education, health and e-governance. The languages in which services are available are Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and English. The centre plans to add more sectors and more languages to this service offering in the days to come.

This portal has been executed by the Hyderabad-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) with support from the e-Governance division of the Department of Information Technology of the Government of India. A distinct strength of the India Development Gateway is collaboration and partnership among the government, NGOs, community-based organisations and private, academic and research institutions.

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Launching the portal, the President said that it will link panchayats across the country, empower village people and open a window of opportunity for rural development. She further added, “Information and Communications Technology (ICT) must help bring about a second green revolution in agriculture. The government wants the benefits of this technology to reach remote and far-flung areas. The Gateway should help us achieve universalisation of primary education, energy conservation and energy efficiency and health objectives in the villages. It will also inform the rural population about benefits from government schemes and income generation options”.

In his address, Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Thiru A Raja said that the Gateway portal is part of the national e-governance vision to make all government services accessible to the common man in his locality.

Professor M S Swaminathan, chairman, India Development Gateway Initiative said, “The portal marks a new architecture of growth based on social inclusion, knowledge revolution and national development”. He further said that the Gateway portal will provide dynamic information in areas like weather reporting and market status to support agriculture and other sectors in the villages.

As part of the launch of the above portal, various stakeholders held a workshop on knowledge sharing for rural development and livelihood enhancement. An exhibition was also held highlighting various ICT initiatives for rural areas.