Indian American empowers Sunderban fishermen with IT skills

By IANS

New York : An Indian American techie who helped set up Hewlett Packard’s first overseas centres 20 years ago is now busy providing IT training to the fisher folk of Sunderban, the largest mangrove forest in the world.


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It is not a passing fad for Radha Basu who has been interested in the Sundarban and its people for a long time. She wants to improve the standard of living of residents in that part of West Bengal.

In 2005, she and her husband Dipak did a six-month study of the information and communication technology needs of the area’s fishermen. Their findings were surprising. More than money, improved technology, or policy and infrastructure change, the fishermen said they wanted to learn marketing skills.

So Basu last year stepped down from the board of SupportSoft, the company she founded, and her husband quit his job at IT major Cisco, and together they founded their own NGO, Anudip, to address the needs of the fishing families.

After exploring several vocations, including organic farming and cold storage, the couple decided to focus their efforts on an area they knew well – IT skills training.

They have opened more than 100 training centres in Sunderban in West Bengal where young people, mostly in their 20s, who have never seen a computer, are taught various computer skills, basic conversational English and business administration.

The majority of the area’s inhabitants are poor and literacy levels are low. The infrastructure in the region is poorly developed, with only 41 km of railway lines and 299 km of gravel roads covering the vast expanse, half of which become muddied and inaccessible in the monsoons, Basu told India West, an ethnic Indian weekly published from California.

Basu compares her mission of “harnessing rural computer professionals” to that of Hewlett Packard 20 years ago, when it set up its first Indian centres. “Back then, there was no multinational doing software work in India, until HP and Texas Instruments set up in Bangalore,” she said.

“At first, people were saying, ‘Are you crazy? Can we actually do high-level software stuff so far away? Some low-level stuff, maybe…,’ and look at how outsourcing exploded.

“I see this as being entrepreneurial in the same way, taking entrepreneurship out of the metros to the rural areas; taking that wealth creation to the rural areas.”

Basu now wants big Indian tech houses like TCS and Wipro to outsource some of their work to these struggling fishing communities.

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