Suno Suno / Heeli Keeli

As part of “la Caixa” Banking Foundation call Challenge Work4progress 2019, Janastu / Servelots in collaboration with Digital Alternatives (DA) and Medha is working in the Mirzapur district, Uttar Pradesh state in India. With a larger objective to encourage rural women, students, young women in traditional labor and skill contexts, typically low literate and unconnected or unable to discover or publish useful content on the Internet, to find purposeful online communities to actively engage with for their collective needs of skill development and entrepreneurial aspirations.

Servelots started in 1999 with the aim of developing a Pantoto project, based on web software for communities to manage community knowledge. In 2002 Servelots initiated Janastu, a collective and non-profit that sought to understand and support the technology needs of other non-profits and communities. Janastu has been granted 12A tax exemption for its work on “Software Commons”.

Janastu and Servelots have been engaging with WiFi-mesh networking since 2004 after the tsunami havoc on the east coast of south India. We started working with friends from the Freifunk community and other organisations working on rehabilitation-related networking needs. After the Dharamsala Wi-Fi Summit in 2006, volunteers worked with students and local communities to set up urban mesh networks similar to those of Freifunk. The  Follow the Sheep project  with a pastoral network in India experimented with tiny mesh networks at nomadic shepherd camps in 2010. We also worked with the deployment of a Commotion network in a rural area which is in the forests and hills about two hours from Bangalore, after an OTI workshop in 2014.

Since then we have been encouraging the use of mesh for services such as archives and annotations for low literate community needs for media making, archiving and retrieval using a number of approaches.

8 members from Janastu team had planned to visit Mirzapur in march 2020, tickets were booked for both flights and trains. With the covid situation we had to cut short on people and finally Dinesh and Shalini went ahead with the visit.

While planning for the Mirzapur field visit, Janastu got in touch with the MNREGA Mazdoor Union (MMU) group from Rajatalab, Varanasi district and Satendra, representative of Development Alternatives (DA) at Mirzapur.

Suresh from MMU group introduced us to the Dhuriya village in Mirzapur district and Gram Saba Jesava, Bindpurva with the help of local coordinator Urmila. We met a group of women and young girls. Briefly we introduced ourselves and asked the women to say something about themselves. Some said they are housewives, some work at stone quarry. Girls we met were mostly school dropouts but some were going to school (9th-11th std). We asked their interest in work, skills that they identify in themselves. Then we engaged with telling why we were there and what was our interest in work. We introduced a Raspberry Pi based recording device and asked them to give an introduction, their aspiration and asked what they would record for themselves or for others in the form of story, songs, dialogues, shayari, etc…

With Satendra (DA), we visited MDDS (Full form?) in Mirzapur who introduced their team. Along with two of the field coordinators from MDDS we planned our field visit to village Saripur.

Sneha (name changed) is a school drop out. Her day to day activities are to help with doing household work, going to bazaar to learn tailoring. Also a beautician for friends and family, during the weddings and any other events in the village. As a hobby she is writes shayari (Couplets in hindi or urdu) and she maintains a book full of sharayi with lot of colorful decoration. Her other interests are Mehandi designs, dancing and singing. During her leisure time she along with her friends gather at one place and play bollywood dance numbers and they all dance and sing to it. Sometimes they tune into the FM stations and dance to the songs played. She feels she has a knack in comedy, and given an opportunity she thinks she can do something with stand up comedy genre, if it can generate alternate income.

The below map shows the spots we have visited, with some interesting pictures from the region.