A mild dose of power

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: The day for Sarwat Hussain Naqvi, the sector coordinator with UNDP NACO, Raipur, has just begun. Meeting a few key people in the office and pushing some files to the head office are a few routine jobs he has to get over with. Then comes the most interesting hour of the day — an hour when he forgets about problems and concentrates on their solutions. An established thinker and practitioner on HIV/AIDS, health and nutrition today, the development professional has ideas that may do wonders for the country’s social burdens. And, if his ideas fail to deliver, he goes on meeting people in the neighbourhood — even those at the grassroots — to help him with a few solutions.

“All one has to do is to participate and reply to a query posted by someone in the group. The replies must make us brainstorm online and help us with solutions. All these have to be done in 15 days. After that, we have to log on to another problem posted,” says the Chattisgarh-based member of United Nations’ Solution Exchange.

Today, with about 12,000 active thinkers and contributors from nook and corner of the country, Solutions Exchange, the mega knowledge management programme of the world body, has been helping India find its own solutions through information and communication technologies (ICTs). So falling prey to another cyclone in Orissa, accepting gender exploitation at the workplace, dying of AIDS with no security for the kids one is leaving behind may not be a fate you have to resign yourself to. It only requires thinking, finding ways out, speaking up and implementing.

Now in its third year, Solution Exchange (www.solutionexchange-un.net.in) offers communities of development practitioners a forum where they can provide and benefit from each other’s solutions to day-to-day challenges.

The communities, organised around selected development targets derived from the Five Year Plan and globally mandated Millennium Development Goals, address issues within 10 broad themes of AIDS, decentralisation, education, environment (water, sustainable environment, clean technologies), food and nutrition security, gender, health (maternal, child and public), poverty (work and employment, microfinance), ICT for development and disaster management. The initiative, launched in March 2005, once rich with positive result, would be implemented in other Saarc nations, informs the UN.