In Pondicherry, women script quiet revolution

It is a different story today. ‘‘I come here often and find out the market prices. Our village women here keep track of the auction prices in the commune markets and alert us when the prices of products are highest,’’ Arumugam pointed out.

While he is a bit wary of surfing the computer, his teenage sons, Mahadevan and Keerti, trained by the women, surf http://www.pondicherryagri.org, to update their father on the latest prices and farm-related schemes and subsidies. They also go to http://www.cnn.com for the latest weather forecasts.

At 10.30 a.m., the women are already at the computer kiosk, when they should have been home, busy preparing the family meal. There’s hardly any space in the one-room centre. Women and children crowd around four computers. While the children take a break from their education CDs with a ‘Harry Potter’ game, some women are busy surfing for information on weather and farming developments.

Yet another group of women is preparing the content for the forthcoming issue of Namma Ooru Seidhi (Our Village News), for which they are the reporters, editors and publishers. About 5,000 copies are printed in Pondicherry town and circulated amon villagers. Farmers cannot afford to buy Tamil newspapers on a daily basis and Namma Ooru Seidhi wraps all farm-related news in one package.

The 10 women volunteers, especially D Usha Rani, are the knowledge centre’s pivot. ‘‘In 1998, I was among the only four women who volunteered to get trained at the Centre. It took two years for the others to join us and for the villagers to make use of the facilities,’’ pointed out Usha. B Kasturi’s husband was adamant that she should not go to the kiosk, ‘‘waste her time and neglect her family.’’ Today, he proudly shows off to everyone the MSSRF’s Virtual Academy Fellowship award she received along with Usha and two other women from President APJ Abdul Kalam on Teacher’s Day.

The Virtual Academy Fellowship is given to women who master high-tech communication methods and use them to disseminate information to farmers.

Usha’s methods, persuading small and marginal farmers including her own husband and family members, proved so successful that in 2003, she was one of a four-member MSSRF delegation to Geneva to take part in a rural knowledge convention. Usha was given the task of heading a MSSRF stall and explaining the highpoints of the experiment to VVIPS from across the globe. So impressed were the dignitaries that they requested her to present awards to other women achievers there.

For a woman, who had never left her village, nor travelled in a train, leave alone an aircraft, the run-up to her Geneva trip proved rather eventful — and traumatising. ‘‘When MSSRF told me I had been selected to go to Geneva, my family was upset. My parents would cry every time the topic came up. They were terrified about me flying,’’ she recalled.

P. Bhagyalakshmi, the technical assistant from a neighbouring village, who trained the women, said rather proudly: ‘‘When they sat before the computer for the first time, their hands trembled over the keyboard with fear. Today, they know more than I do — MS Office, Excel, Power Point, Page Maker and Photoshop.’’ For the dynamic Embalam women motivators, the knowledge centre has not only lent a new purpose to their lives, but also made them path-breakers in rural knowledge revolution.