Information Technology for Participatory Development

Information resource is going to play a key role in social, cultural and political progress as well as in productive and sustainable economic development. The ease and speed, with which new knowledge is produced, organized , packed, retrieved and disseminated through IT based systems and applied together with old knowledge our traditional libraries store, will be the strategic determinant in whether the country, state, a region, an institution or individual prosper or lag behind in the new services-based economy. This book, putting together papers, presented at the special session on Information and Local Administration of the National Seminar on Right to Information, attempts to deal with the various aspects related to information technology for participatory development. It should be of interest to development professionals who are government officials, academics, or those from civil society; information professionals; librarians and managers of community information centres as well as all readers interested in IT application in participatory development programmes.