School Health Annual Report Programme the largest School Health Network

SHARP, the acronym for school health annual report programme, an NGO registered in 1999 has been working on using ICTs to manage the records of school children across schools in 40 centres in India. Headquartered in New Delhi, the group relies on the school volunteers (students and teachers) who get trained to monitor nutritional and health status of school children in urban and rural schools, across government run schools and private schools. Keeping in mind the privacy of the needs, the programme allows access of health records to the students and their parents through a username and password, to the teachers who are data input persons of the records, and to the local Public Health practitioner in the area.

The project is one of the partners of the Intel's World Ahead Programme, and the software has been written by Tata Consultancy Services.

The SHARP project has worked with the VIIT's Baramati based schools to run the project.

According to Dr. Puran Prakash, the General Secretary of SHARP, "Creating a network of health promoting schools, children, their families, hospitals, health professionals, UN and Development Agencies, NGOs, and corporate houses, has ensured that promoting health through schools is the most cost effective health approach and the investments made in school health yeild ever lasting returns."

A project that is worth documenting! For more details write to sharp@schoolindia.org

John Davies of Intel talks of the four pillars of development intervention at Baramati Conference

John Davies, Vice President, Sales and Marketing Group and General Manager of the World Ahead Program, Intel Corporation, spoke passionately at the 8th Baramati Conference. Showing two video films, one of the Baramati school children learning computers, and another of the World Ahead programme across developing countries.

He mentioned about the Telecentre Project at Vietnam's Lao Cai where wimax connectivity has enabled the communities to access education, health care, livelihoods opportunities.

Emphasising the four development focus areas of the Intel's World Ahead Programme, being Accessibility, Connectivity, Education, and Content. The initiatives had inspired and improved the opportunities of the people who benefited from the programme, and thinking of an entrepreneural model to combine free services with paid for services, it was possible to make impactful interventions.

Calling for a need to do a lot more, John congratulated the work done by Baramati's VIIT, and other partners around the world.

Jainder Singh reiterates the role of ICT on egovernance for better accountability

Jainder Singh, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of India, in his keynote address at the 8th Baramati Conference on ICT for Communities - scale and economic benefits - quality, accessibility and assessment of government services. The NeGP aims to provide the IT backbone for citizen centric services. Learning from the diverse pilots for scaling up has to be undertaken, when roll outs. 100,000 CSCs. Connectivity and content 18,000 colleges (Rs 10,000 crores over five years), e-Courts (13,000 courts), Broadband across the country etc are some of the scaled up projects undertaken by the Department.

The scale is unprecedented, 70,000 CSC are to be made operational by December 2008, with minimum revenue support and bid to be implemented by NGOs, Private Agencies, etc. Other USOF centres, Post Offices, PCOs, etc. will be housing the CSCs delivering agriculture, health and livelihoods services.

Wishing the conference a success, Jainder Singh ended the keynote address with a call to the delegates to share and learn from the successful initiative of Baramati.

8th Baramati Conference Gets Off to a start - 1

The eighthBaramati Conference has just been inaugurated with the lighting of the traditional oil lamp with an introductory welcome note from Sharad Kulkarni, the Chairman of the Governing Council of VIIT. The Baramati conference is being co-organised by VIIT and Intel and is being held at Baramati from 23-26th March 2008.

The inaugural session is being moderated by Sharad Kulkarni, and has key note presentations from Subas Pani, Secretary, Planning Commission, Government of India, Jainder Singh, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of India, John Davies, Vice President, Sales and Marketing Intel World Ahead Programme, R Siva Kumar, Managing Director, Sales and Marketing, South Asia Intel.

Dr. Amol Goje, the Director of VIIT and the inspiring leader of the Baramati Initiative is looking forward to two days of exciting deliberations on "ICT for Communities - Scale and Economic Benefits" the running theme of the conference. "We expect to learn from the experts in the next two days, but also it is important for us to showcase practical examples of how things work on the ground".

Mr. Pani shared his experience of working in the Election Commission of India, the importance of project management, detailing and multi-lingual needs were reiterated.