Proposed research schedule: Feb - April

1. Researching a detailed history of the Information Village project, supported by visits both to the coordinating foundation at MSSRF and to the villages in Pondicherry themselves
2. Studying the achievement of long term sustainability of this project, with emphasis on how local villagers are involved. I am particularly interested in how unsophisticated end users can make use of advanced ICT with such success.
3. Investigation of strategies for managing infrastructure depreciation. (The lack of long term funding for maintenance and replacement of initial technological investment is one of the common causes of failure of development projects. I wish to see how this has been addressed by the project.)
4. Establishment of links between the RAC and the proposed Virtual Academy for Rural Prosperity. I see this as a way in which the RAC can establish itself as a serious player in Indian rural development, with benefits both to India and to the College.
5. Establishment of working agreements between the RAC and MSSRF on bids for research and consultancy funding in South Asia and the tropics.

Project outputs from the Information Village study

1. I plan the major output to be a paper, working title Achieving Sustainability in Knowledge Transfer: a case study from Tamil Nadu. The target for this would be the journal Development and Change (Blackwells). This specialises in rural development and change management and is taken at the RAC so will be directly accessible to our students.
   I will also target Information Technologies and International Development; (MIT press) and Journal of Rural Studies (Elsevier Press) as alternative or additional publishers.
2. I am a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), and I would plan a paper for their Geographical Journal looking more generally at the impact of the Information Village Project on the villages themselves, rather than at the sustainability of the project's methodology.
3. I have had an abstract for a paper for the RGS annual conference on this topic accepted for the annual conference in August 2006.
4. I also see interest in this project in the popular professional press. I would plan to write a general interest article “The Information Villages of Tamil Nadu” for either the Geographical Magazine or Appropriate Technology

Additional activities during the study leave period

I hope to work with the GIS and remote sensing lab at MSSRF to see the range of GIS applications being undertaken there, particularly in the area of rural development and land management. I am interested in the potential for using GIS in researching the value of coastal mangroves for erosion and tsunami protection. This could be relate to promoting the restoration of mangroves (Satyanarayana et al 2001) or the introduction of new coastal vegetation strips. Recent work by Bishop et al. (2005) indicates that even a thin forest fringe between the beach and inland areas could provide a surprisingly high level of protection.

I hope that I can give some useful input in these areas, which may result in jointly authored work with MSSRF in either the International Journal of Geographical Information Science or more directly, the International Journal of Remote Sensing.

Outputs on GIS developments

I plan to write a general interest article for GeoConnexion International magazine which is the bi-monthly professional magazine for GIS professionals, on the “State of GIS in Tamil Nadu”. I have contacted the editor of the magazine and he is keen to have such an article.

GIS education in Tamil Nadu

I hope MSSRF can give me introductions to the universities in Chennai and Pondicherry. I will follow these up to establish the state of GIS in higher education in South India, as far as I can. This will be of particular interest to the GIS education sector in the UK and Europe.

Outputs on GIS education

I already plan to submit a paper to the European GIS Education Seminar (EUGISES 2006) in Krakow in September 2006 on the use of GIS in rural policy education. I will submit an abstract for a second paper on “GIS education in South India” which again will be of interest to them as they always have sessions on non-European GIS education.

References

Bishop P., Sanderson D., Hansom J. and Chaimanee N. (2005) Age-dating of tsunami deposits from the 26 December 2004 tsunami in Thailand The Geographical Journal 379-381

Satyanarayana B., Thierry B., Lo Seen D., Raman A. and Muthusankar G. (2001) Remote sensing in Mangrove research- relationship between vegetation indices and dendrometric parameters: a case for Coringa, East Coast of India paper presented at the 22^nd Asian Conference on Remote Sensing, Nov. 2001, National University of Singapore

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