Nation building, in these times of ANNA, is a very ‘in thing’. There are quite a few people who have been working tirelessly for years now and prof Srivathsan is one such person. He is a visionary with great combination of Modern and Tradition. While, on one hand he has headed IIT kanpur Computer science department and then went onto head Indian Institute of Information technology (IIIT), Trivandrum as founder director and now Pro-VC of IGNOU with a mandate to use technology to change the education delivery; on the other hand he is a philosopher and a scholar in the Indian thoughts – well read about all the ancient books and literature from all religions. His energy is infectious.
Here are a few of the imprints left by prof. Srivathsan –
– kisannet kerala : The kissan project : His brainchild and it is actually headquartered in IIIT.
– Elements of the television channel based on Kissan net kerala – A You TUBE feature on Kissan Net
– His work along with quite a few heads of IITs and IISc resulted in NPTEL channel on Youtube as the project took off. It is to support all technical institutions that need support for academics. You can watch these links on the web and youtube. NPTEL HOmepae; NPTEL CHANNEL ON YOUTUBE
– His vision and work at IGNOU and beyond can be gauged by his paper that you can access on WIKIPEDIA
His talk at IWSB took him back to the days of his struggles with vacuum tube and his experiments with it in his childhood days, and tracing the journey through to bringing in the net connectivity to IIT Kanpur in the early days of internet. How he had to interact with universities in the US to do the troubleshooting, and oversee the laying of the cables at the last mile between the telephone exchange and IIT Kanpur. He shared about the memory on the computers being 64KB in those days and how today people say a few GBs is less.
The session was very insightful and enriching.
He then shared his idea of creating community centres for development. Al these are going to be learning and facilitation centres for Rural development. He has named them interestingly HEART of the real India –
H – Healthcare
E – Education
A – Agriculture
R – Rural Development
T – Tourism and Artists
We are looking forward to contributing in every way to make the HEART matters come true.
www.sreeni.org 