Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Integrated Communication and IT Infrastructure (ICITI) for the Socio-Economic Development of Auroville bioregion

2011; Volume: 32; Linguagem: Inglês

10.7125/apan.32.21

2227-3026

J. V. Avadhanulu,

ICT in Developing Communities

Recent developments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) changed the way we live and work. However, humanity is facing serious issues such as global warming, conflicts, violence, terrorism.... At the core of these escalating issues is the growing divisiveness. We need new paradigms of inclusive socio-economic development to usher an era of fraternity, peace, prosperity and harmony. Auroville is the world's first and only internationally endorsed experiment in human unity. Auroville, a place of ‘unending education’, has been engaged in practical research into the future cultural, environmental, social and spiritual growth of mankind and has decades of field experience in inclusive and participatory rural development of the Kaliveli tank bioregion (referred to as bioregion in the rest of the paper). ICITI, a new proposed project, aims to set up the world’s first ‘Green’ community converged infrastructure to serve as an experimental research platform to explore the use of ICT in areas of sustainable development, consensus building, participative governance and human unity. ICITI is planned to be extended to the bioregion as an ICT for Development (ICT4D) platform and leverage it as a “soft delivery vehicle” for sustainable development of the bioregion. Such development can leap-frog the poor ‘hard- infrastructure’ and has the potential to reverse the migration to urban areas. This paper briefly presents the rationale behind ICITI, the vision, mission, goals and approach to use ICT for the social transformation of Auroville and the bioregion into a sustainable, prosperous knowledge society. It is hoped that this project would pave the way for ICT for Human Unity (ICT4HU) as a new interdisciplinary field.