Address at the Indo-us Million Book Digital Library Steering Committee Meeting (Through Video Conference) Pittsburgh, Usa

Village Panchayat Knowledge centers for rural prosperity

I am delighted to know that Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, has organized its Steering Committee meeting to discuss and formulate policies, plans, directions and implementation strategies for the successful completion of the Million Book Initiative of India-US Million Book Digital Library Project on the 29th and 30th of May, 2004. My greetings to the organizers and the participants of the meeting.

You have all made significant contributions to create Digital Libraries in your own country and in your own sphere of expertise. We have many initiatives in India including the Digital Library of India Portal. I would request all of you to evolve methodologies to share all our Digital Contents with no barriers. This will truly speak of the technology as an integrator of people. I urge all of you to pledge that we will share information of value freely with those citizens in the less privileged nations across the world. I would like to talk to this audience on ?Village Panchayat Knowledge centers for rural prosperity?.

Digital library initiatives in India

The digital library initiative is expected to create a free-to-read searchable collection of one million books by 2005 in India. This library was launched in 2003. Prof. N Balakrishnan, Chief Coordinator of Digital Library of India informs me that, so far 20 centers are operational throughout the country, over 70,000 books have been digitized of which nearly 45,000 are in 9 Indian languages. In the library of Rashtrapati Bhavan, which is part of the Digital Library of India, we have so far digitized over one million pages and also we are digitizing our old official records leading to e-governance implementation. The data will be available for use by different institutions in the country and abroad, depending upon their needs. The programme is progressing in the right direction, but it needs an impetus to meet the targets of 2005.

When I visited Bulgaria, I had an opportunity to present the work on Digital Library of India. The Indology department at the Sofia University, which is doing seminal work, expressed a keen interest in our Indian Language Books which number to over 45,000 currently. In a recent follow up visit, I understand that the then Honorable Minister for Communication and Information Technology had presented them with a CD giving the Titles and contents pages of all the books that we currently have in our Digital Library Portal and had requested them to select the books that they need so that the copies of those books in Digital form can be made on a few 250 Giga Bytes disks attached to a Personal Computer can be given to them. This small PC with two disks can hold more than 20,000 books - what is needed for a reasonably sized library. This sets the trend towards making personalized and affordable Digital Libraries for specialized use, which form a sub set of the main Digital Library of India.

Seamless access:

I understand that the participating organizations in this mission of the Digital Library of India are storing the information locally and are also sending them to the Central Servers. What we need at this time is to establish concurrent measures to make very useful and highly user-friendly interfaces and ensure that the mechanism is evolved to search and access the contents stored across the distributed Digital libraries seamlessly using web services. This will make the Digital Library a friend of every one and its utility would enhance many folds. These should be integrated so that there is inter-operability across the Digital Libraries Initiatives.

The future Digital Libraries would have speech interface so that the user could interact with the Information and will be language independent. Though this technology world over is progressing, still many more things have to be done. I would urge the learned members of this meeting to work in close collaboration to ensure introduction of Natural Interfaces to the Digital Libraries world over.

Digital Libraries are not the Digital Equivalents of the present day library. They would include, besides the books, manuscripts and journals, information and our heritage in all other forms including speech, folk songs, paintings and carvings. It is important that we take on this mission of integrating all forms of knowledge and culture into our Digital Library.

Traditional System storage:

India has rich information relating to literature, music, traditional system of medicine and science embedded in palm leaves. It is necessary to search, understand and preserve this valuable information. Merely scanning the palm leaves would not be very useful. The number of people who can read the palm leaves and interpret the meanings, identify the plants and stones mentioned in the palm leaves is dwindling. Even those few who can read, cannot write very well, that too may not be fluent in entering into the computer in Digital Forms. The Optical Character Recognition of these ancient scripts is also a very tough problem, almost intractable technically. I suggest that for every palm leaf scanned, we record in audio the information read by the experts. We can then put these on the web and invite other experts to provide free and fair commentary and validate every palm leaf data. This data can also be used for creating a new generation of palm leaves reading experts - a species that has almost vanished.

Knowledge Management Grid:

We have to create a Knowledge Management Grid with the Central Digital Library Data Center equipped with the comprehensive Virtual Digital Library and Knowledge Management System into which all the participating organizations are connected with broadband along with Internet connectivity. When we are in the process of digitizing millions of books we are also planning for the infrastructure and storage requirements across the country with disaster recovery facility.

Research Areas:

Connectivity is strength, connectivity is wealth, and connectivity is progress. For enabling knowledge connectivity in our rural areas, we need to have a comprehensive plan for developing new infrastructure for extending the digital library services in regional languages. These include ? development of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Software in all the Indian languages, language independent operating system, database servers, search engines, web servers and messaging servers. This will enable the digital library initiative to percolate to the rural masses in the form of e-governance, tele-education and tele-medicine. This has to be done in a mission mode with the active participation of Government, educational institutions, R&D Organizations along with private sector enterprises. Here lies the challenge. It is a fertile research ground for all participants and educational institutions ? a large number of Doctorates can be produced in this area alone to push the frontiers of knowledge in Language Independent Digital Library (LIDL) and the language independent infrastructure software initiatives.

Specific actions

1. Text Books: School children have been experiencing difficulty in getting textbooks in time, especially for the primary and secondary classes. It will be useful to digitize and store the textbooks in the library, which can be accessed by the students whenever required. This additional facility will enable easy availability of books to the students for instant reference and study through Internet and intranet access. In India, we have the greatest wealth of publicly funded books for schools and colleges.

2. Tele-Education: We need to integrate the tele-education system with the Digital library, so that the students can read and refer to the books suggested by the teacher from a distant location through on-line e-learning services.

3. Land Record Storage: Land records have to be digitized and verified with satellite imagery and stored, which needs to be linked with e-governance applications for issue, transfer, conversions and additions and deletions. It should be linked with the revenue collection, estate management, and municipal records. Digitization and information flow has to go parallely to get the real advantage of e-governance workflow in the land records and its management domain.

4. Establishing Village Panchayat Knowledge Centers

India has approximately 2.3 lakhs Village Panchayats. I visualize establishment of village knowledge centers in these Panchayats to empower the villagers with the knowledge and to act as a nodal center for knowledge connectivity for the villagers. Initially 100 remote Panchayats may be chosen for the Model Pilot project. Based on this experience, it will be possible to replicate Village Panchayat Knowledge Centers in other Panchayats.

This Center will be equipped with 1000 books of different subjects. In addition it will have a computer terminal, telephone connections, Modem, Printer, Photocopier, camera, Scanner, Internet connection and other support facilities for functioning as a digital library. The knowledge center will provide hard copies of relevant pages to the members of the village, if required. Also the center can have facility for reading the text with an audio output so that people who are unable to read, can benefit from the library. The knowledge center can also be used for collection, digital storage and dissemination of village specific information pertaining to agriculture, craftsmanship, arts, artisan techniques, informal judicial system practiced in village based on values, local remedies for simple ailments, village stories with moral values, village history, village folk songs, village cultural traditions, traditional medicinal practices followed in villages and village marketing information and methods. Such information presently is being transmitted through word of mouth and with changing generation, it is being lost.

It is essential to preserve and carry forward this knowledge base for the benefit of future generations. This village panchayat knowledge centers will become a helpdesk and confidence builder for the villagers. In course of time, there could be inter panchayat information transfer leading to assured information flow to the needy. This Village Panchayat knowledge center will also act as an e-governance nodal point for the villagers. The cost of establishing and running the hundred remote panchayat knowledge centers for three years is estimated to be Rs.11 crores (approx.). Let us work together to establish this Village Panchayat knowledge centers in 100-village panchayat?s in India.

Conclusion

While we are in the progressing the Million Book Digital Library project, it is essential to visualize the extended application potential of the project and its technological spin-offs. The aim should be to visualize the methods by which the impact of the digital library project can quickly reach the common man in the villages. All our research efforts should be focused to enable enhancement of the knowledge base of the village leading to the upliftment of the village life of 700 million populations living the rural sector of India. I wish you all the participants? success in your deliberations for promoting rural prosperity through this collaborative venture.