Obama meets farmers ‘virtually’ for peek at rural tech revolution

MUMBAI - US President Barack Obama Sunday interacted with farmers from Ajmer through a video-conference link from here to understand how India was seeking to bridge the digital divide by reaching technology and services to the grassroots level.

Moderating the discussion at the St. Xavier’s College here was the Chicago-based tech evangelist Sam Pitroda, while the young Minister of State for Communications and IT Sachin Pilot was with the farmers in Kanpura village in Ajmer, Rajasthan.

Obama said he wanted to have a glimpse of the information technology revolution in rural India, how citizens were interacting virtually with local government bodies using internet and accessing information and services such as tele-medicine and e-education.

“Many of these innovations are because of public and private collaborations between the US and India,” the US president said, giving the example of the green revolution in India in the 1970s where scientists of the two sides worked together for better seeds and irrigation.

Large screens were installed both at the college here and at Kanpura, some 25 km from Ajmer - a town famous for the shrine of Sufi saint Hazrat Khwaja Muinuddin Chisty - for those two sides to “meet and interact” with each other virtually.

Obama was visibly pleased when the village local body secretary Shiv Shankar said how his complaint about a faulty handpump over internet was rectified almost immediately - in a departure from the weeks that it would have otherwise taken in the past.

Similarly, healthcare worker Sunita Rathore explained how she could access digitised medical records of the villagers, especially children, to plan their vaccination schedules.

These apart, a student of management, Vipul Johar, told the US president how he was pursuing further studies via internet by downloading course material, sparing him the need to travel 25 km to Ajmer for the direct-contact classes.

Incidentally, both the moderators here and in Ajmer have been educated in the US.

Presently an advisor to the Indian prime minister on public information, infrastructure and innovations, has studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology, while Pilot is an alumnus of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Kanpura was chosen not just because it falls in the constituency of Pilot, but also because a pilot project there has connected it with optic fibre network for online access to land records and birth certificates.

The village chief Jagdish Bairwa, 26, holds a degree in mechanical engineering.