Mooted in the 1980s but delayed because of an alleged cash crunch, officials say the exercise will help organise and augment information on the thousands of villages in India  

In an attempt to update official information on social and economic conditions in rural areas, India has launched a massive data collection drive for each of its 500,000-plus villages. The project aims to make all current and future information available on the Internet.

Since more than two-thirds of India’s 1 billion-plus population lives in villages, this is considered a crucial development exercise.

Data collectors will gather information about the geographical features of a village, its infrastructure, schools and hospitals, number of toilets, access roads, gender data and even information on the village’s power consumption habits.

More than half-a-million villages are expected to be covered within the next six months; the data will be posted on the National Information Centre’s website to make it accessible both to the administration and the local population.

During the first phase, data will be collected from the country’s 28 most backward districts. A pilot project has already begun in a number of villages in the states of Haryana, Orissa, Karnataka and Goa.

Whilst a lot of information on villages is already available it has to be accessed from several different places. "Comprehensive information" had to be made available in a "single place," Samina Makhija, the programme’s project director, said.

Currently, governments depend on traditional forms of data collection and most villages are not connected to the Internet. This project seeks to use India’s achievements in the IT sector to map out every village on a website. Local village councils and administrative heads will be sourced for information.

Makhija revealed that although the initiative had been mooted in the 1980s, financial constraints had delayed the project. She refused to divulge the project costs but said it had been re-started at the behest of the government-run Planning Commission.

"We have invited private individuals, researchers, non-government organisations and institutes to join in the data collection," Makhija said, adding that Rs 3,000 would be paid to each village for the data collected.

Source: www.bbcnews.com, November 14, 2007