Government of India Comes Forward to Support Mission 2007: Every Village a Knowledge Centre Subbiah Arunachalam Distinguished Fellow M S Swaminathan Research Foundation Chennai 600 113, India New Delhi, 12 July 2005 India's Finance Minister, Mr Palaniappan Chidambaram, announced today that the Government of India would support the Mission 2007: Every Village a Knowledge Centre, to the tune of Rs 65,000 million [roughly US $1,500 million). He was speaking at the Second Convention of the National Alliance for Mission 2007: Every Village a Knowledge Centre, held at New Delhi. Conceived by Prof. M S Swaminathan, the man who brought in the Green Revolution to India, the Mission aims to usher in a knowledge revolution in India by connecting all the more than 600,000 villages of a India in a knowledge network by 15 August 2007, the 60th anniversary of India's Independence. After a series of meetings with a wide cross section of people from government, academia, civil society organizations and corporations, Prof. Swaminathan announced the Mission 2007 in mid 2004. As such a huge programme cannot be undertaken by any single organization, Swaminathan went on to build a National Alliance, perhaps the largest multi-stakeholder partnership in the field of ICT-enabled development in the world. There are more than 150 members in the Alliance including the University of California, Berkeley; MIT, Cambridge; IDRC, Ottawa; the Nasscom Foundation, New Delhi, and OneWorld. The first convention of the National Alliance was held in New Delhi in October 2004. The second convention took place in New Delhi on 11 and 12 July 2005. Among the people who spoke at the convention are His Excellency the President of India Dr A P J Abdul Kalam; Mr P Chidambaram, the Finanace Minister of India; Mr Mani Shankar Iyer, Minister for Panchayati Raj; Mr M V Rajasekaran, Minister of State for Planning, and a number of senior government officials. The President Of India, Dr Abdul Kalam was very happy to see more than 135 elected Fellows of the National Virtual Academy for Rural Prosperity - all of them grassroots workers from rural India. Mr Mani Shankar Iyer suggested that the Village Knowledge Centres should preferably be established in collaboration with the Panchayati Raj (village level government) institutions and thus empower the village level leaders and the communities. -----