Not many of us nurture the passion to contribute to society and bring about a change. But there are a few like Ashwini Rath who live with the aim of being changemakers and contribute towards the betterment of society at large. With an objective to provide a high end technological platform to disseminate Odia literature and glorious Odishan culture globally, Rath launched odisha360.com.
‘’We have been working towards creating a comprehensive online encyclopaedia with holistic information about Odisha and its people, and the plan to introduce a localised crowd-sourced content platform so that people can publish and interact on diverse topics,’’ says Rath. Apart from this, he is also working on a project with a mission to help rural schools and students to interact with good faculty and make cutting-edge study materials easily available to them. This has given birth to Anwesha Foundation, a non-profit and charitable organisation, aimed at creating and spreading awareness among the people in the society about quest for knowledBorn to a family of academicians and people with literary leaning, Rath grew up with a sense of cultural awakening. After post graduation in physics and years of research in mathematical and computational physics, he chose to be an entrepreneur to take information technology to the grassroots level in Odisha. A writer by discretion, Ashwini is also involved with IT consulting and product development for the growth of knowledge based socio-economic development.
Currently involved in Cloud Computing, which is a practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer, Rath has authored a book ‘Cloud Computing: Facing the Reality’, which has become one of the oft downloaded books in the concerned domain. He is one among those few Odias who have made a mark of their own in the field of software writing and getting international acclaim for the same. He is striving to bring information technology within the reach of the mass and universal access thus enabling them to manage massive data seamlessly. ‘’We no longer need a diary in our briefcase to carry our personal information management. In the process of change, we do not even carry the same device containing our data as we move. Rather we change our gadgets as per our lifestyle, contacts, daily journals, financial details, etc. from cloud. We can manage all our spending online using banking Apps and virtual wallets. It makes life cluster free,’’ says Rath.
Not just personal portfolio management, it also has a much higher user aspect in the national security system by ensuring error free data accumulation and citizen information.
‘’With government getting closer to its citizens and services becoming quicker and transparent, corruption and bureaucratic delays are expected to be reduced to a great extent. In fact, government will get opinions and support from citizens directly, and will be able to decide on better governance through Cloud. This would empower individual citizens with adequate information and capabilities to participate in nation-building in a greater way and pave the way for strengthening the democratic system,’’ reminisces Rath while discussing the utility of cloud computing for general masses.
Ashwini is also a prolific blogger writing on various subjects ranging from science to psychology. ‘’I have perhaps inherited the flair for writing from my grandfather, Basudev Rath, who was a brilliant poet in his own right,’’ he says with humility.