Vote in the Global Water Challenge

The Global Water Challenge, a competition put on by Ashoka Changemakers, is taking votes right now on their selected finalists. Titled “Tapping Local Innovation: Unclogging the Water and Sanitation Crisis,” voting for the projects is open until Sunday, May 11.
Ashoka’s Changemakers and Global Water Challenge have partnered to open a worldwide search for ideas and [...]

TC-I Tidbits

Your daily dose of headlines:

Health: India continues to have the world’s highest number of polio cases this year, with the disease having crippled more children till April than it did during the same period in 2007. [Source: Times of India]
Children: In a unique lobbying effort, more than 100 ex-child laborers knocked on the doors of [...]

Civil Disobedience Comes to Life in Traffic-Infested Bombay

Those of us who have lived in an urban area in India know how traumatizing (and potentially life-threatening) the pedestrian’s experience can be. Horns blaring, buses hurtling towards intersections at breakneck speed, motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic, ineffectual traffic lights (at times flashing both red and green), debris littering pedestrian pathways (if [...]

Bridging the Digital Divide: More Than Tomorrow Project

Editors Note: Guest Blogger Marshall J. Krinitz is the founder of More Than Tomorrow Project, which has successfully established two computer learning centers in the state of Himachal Pradesh. We here at TC-I were quite thrilled by their work and invited Marshall to write us a guest post.
Many developing nations are aggressively pursuing strategies [...]

Needed: An Indian Marketplace for Ideas

Saurabh Garg muses on the need to foster innovation in India and wonders if there could be a market where people with complementary skills can come together and make ideas happen. Just as markets have buyers and sellers, Garg highlights the possibility of a market where intellectual capital can be leveraged into action. In India, [...]

Cellphones and Development

Recently, the NYTimes featured an article entitled, “Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?”, in which it highlighted a new wave of “human behaviour” research funded by cellphone companies such as Nokia in order to tap into less developed markets. The author of the article centers around a series of conversations/interactions with Jan Chipchase, [...]

Midday Newsfeed

Technology: Although it is a hub for information technology, India is only #50 on the world’s most networked economies list, partly due to its poor ICT infrastructure.
Health: According to a survey, in the next decade, one in 20 female deaths in India between the ages 30 to 69 will be caused by smoking. (Source: India [...]

Pragati April 2008: Give them their freedom

In March we wrote on this magazine’s March issue on the Gujurati Model. Well, the April version of Pragati has been released with a focus on farmers in India. Click on the image below to download the issue in .pdf format.

[Source: Atanu Dey]

A Must See: For Love of Water (FLOW)

A new documentary entitled “FLOW” (For Love of Water) has recently gained critical acclaim at the Vail International Film Festival and the Flagstaff International Film Festival, and is now gaining traction within the United States. The film has been called “infuriating and incredible” for its evocative approach to the global water crisis:
FLOW: For Love [...]

Films for World Peace: Pangea Day

Can films promote peace?
2006 TED Prize winner, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, certainly believes they can. And so, on May 10, 2008, known as “Pangea Day,” several cities across the world - Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro - “will be linked via satellite for a live program of powerful films, [...]

Women Barefoot Solar Engineers

We highlighted Barefoot College in a previous post, and they are in the news again as four illiterate women from Hyderabad are now fulfilling the role of solar power engineers. An Asia Sentinel article features the unlikely group that received training from Barefoot College’s Rural Technology Park and went on to complete tasks such as [...]

Various Trainings/Workshops - CSR, Participatory Learning, and Livelihoods Promotion

We thought you might find the following trainings/workshops of particular interest. If you happen to attend any of these events, please let us know how useful you found them to be:
1. Workshop on Understanding Corporate Social Responsibility, 24-25 April, Chennai
The programme will help participants to increase their awareness of the CSR and [...]

Midday Newsfeed

Some headlines before you head off to lunch:

Technology/Connectivity:  

Mobile connectivity will be in the hands of millions of new subscribers thanks to BSNL’s $100 million contract to Nortel for supporting GSM network expansion in the southern part of India.  The plan is expected to be completed by the end of 2008.  
On a different note, IBM Research [...]

Pioneers in Microfinance, Part 2: MYRADA

Today, Microcapital.org published the second part of their “Pioneers in Microfinance” series, in which they continued their interview of a pioneer in microfinance, Aloysius P. Fernandez, Executive Director MYRADA and Chairman of the Board of Microfinance Institution Sanghamithra Rural Financial Services.   To refresh your memory on Part One of this series, read this earlier post by Vinay.
The [...]

A New Software that Keeps Politicians As Honest as Possible

Starting April 1st, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which provides at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment to every household whose adult members volunteer to work on labour-intensive public works annually, will be implemented in all 604 districts across India.  Unfortunately, though the program looks good on paper, even its most vociferous proponents will admit [...]