Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19981213210306.007a7590@xlweb.com> Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 21:03:06 +0500 From: Santosh Narayanan <mailto:santosh@XLWEB.COM> Subject: Introduction - FOOD India To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
Dear members,Greetings to you from India!
We recently signed up for the DEVEL-L list and would like to introduce ourselves as a 20-year-old Non-Governmental Organization conducting research in the field of Appropriate Technology and implementing social welfare and social development programs for the welfare of the rural mass and urban poor.
We are also networking with local, national and international NGOs and are an active member of Approtech Asia, an alliance of Asian NGOs with its headquarters in Manila.
We are happy to inform you that we were the first NGO to establish a bulletin board and E-mail network in India. Our electronic network is in existence for the past 5 years. Our host server, which is online 24 hours, is situated in Madras and is connected to the Internet via a dial-up connection. We have sub-hosts spread across the country who cater to users in their region. All these sub-hosts are connected the main host system in Madras via dial-up.
At present we are offering Internet E-mail facilities to our users who wish to correspond with their counterparts in India and abroad. E-mail relayed from the sub-host systems is being transmitted to the Internet via our Internet dial-up connection in Madras. We are also encouraging our users to submit their requests for information on various topics of interest to them. Our staff at the main host center in Madras search through various local, national and international databases as well as the Internet for the information requested and then provide it to the users free of cost.
Our network caters mainly to NGOs, educational and research institutions, students, and other individuals who are working in humanitarian and research & developmental activities.
As a part of our on-going efforts to bring people in remote areas of India into the mainstream of development and to aid in dissemination of knowledge, we have initiated a project to connect remote and rural areas of India via wireless packet radio modems. Under this project we have identified remote sites which will house sub-host computers that are connected via wireless packet radio modems to the main host server. Hence users who wish to send E-mail can get connected to the nearest sub-host and use our wireless modem network to send E-mail.
We are also working on outlining a system that will enable NGOs in rural areas to upgrade their information technology skills enabling them to run Internet services and function as Internet Information Providers. This will enable the NGOs to act as a local hub for worldwide dissemination of indigenous technologies and information. Additionally this will also act as a source of revenue to enable the NGOs to be self-supportive in their development activities.
We are happy to be a part of the DEVEL-L list and hope to interact with other organizations and individuals on this list.
regards, -- Santosh
========================================================== Foundation of Occupational Development (FOOD) India C-Block, 1st floor, Bharathiar Complex, 100 feet road, Vadapalani, Madras - 600 026. INDIA Phone: 91-44-4848201, Fax: 91-44-4838826 Email: mailto:food@xlweb.com ==========================================================