India's greener IT revolution

Indian children are getting online in much greater numbers

The man who helped mastermind India's "green revolution" in agriculture in the 1960s is now hoping to do a similar thing for information technology in the country.

MS Swaminathan was one of the key figures in the plan to make India nearly self-sufficient in food through technology which allowed for intensive farming techniques.

And he is now behind efforts to get India's rural poor online as quickly possible - through mobile phones, information kiosks and even resource centres, connected through the satellites of the Indian Space Research organisation.

He told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme how he is now pioneering efforts to connect as many of the country's population as possible to the internet so that they can be part of a new "knowledge revolution."

"I always said the green revolution helped increase the productivity of wheat and rice and so on - but the knowledge revolution which we have launched increases productivity in all its dimensions," he said.

Cutting bureaucracy

Mr Swaminathan said that the information-centred approach is India's "evergreen revolution" - a perpetual increase in productivity without ecological harm.

He said there is currently a very big gap between "scientific know-how" and "free-level do-how"; one that can only be bridged by IT techniques.

Farming was revolutionised through hybrid grain seeds

The two worlds recently came together as the first national virtual congress of woman farmers of India was held online - an indication of the scale of growth already under way in getting information technology to the rural poor.

He explained that crucially, India's typically tight bureaucracy had in fact been comparatively untroubling.

"Fortunately, in our own work, bureaucracy is not involved," he said.

"In the whole IT sector in India, the reason there was explosive growth was because bureaucracy had very little role.

"The same thing happened in the green revolution - the farmers who did the trick in the 60s - we just gave them the seeds and the technology and they went on.

"Similarly, IT is one area where there is a lot of creative work; there are a lot of systems of empowerment for people. But we can only show the way - the government will have to do the scaling up."

He also stressed that Said it will be even more significant.

"It will be even more important, because it can impinge on every aspect of human life," he said.

"Health, HIV-Aids, tuberculosis, and even deficiencies in diet. Many of these problems can only be eradicated by education, knowledge, empowerment - the dynamic information at the right time and the right place."