VILLUPURAM: When the San Francisco-headquartered Wikimedia Foundation recently decided to pick two IT-based organisations in India for its hackathon grant for developing software for the enhancement of its free educational website (wikipedia.org), nobody really counted a small company from Villupuram.
Reason? The nondescript rural town in Tamil Nadu was one of the most backward districts in the country not long ago, and never figured in the world IT map.
But the Foundation zeroed in on the Villupuram GNU/Linux Users Group (V-GLUG), reportedly the first Indian free-software organisation, where volunteers consist of rural youth trained on high-tech software for free. The non-profit organisation advocates the use of free software in digital tools, including computers and smartphones.
Professionals who hold top positions in IT conglomerates reach out to the youth and provide them free training on coding programmes. V-GLUG volunteers include students from various government arts colleges in the district, too.
"One of the volunteers is the son of a single mother, who has worked a better part of her life as domestic help. Another is a daily wage labourer’s daughter. Many volunteers are from underprivileged families. Here, they are taught crucial programming languages like Python for free," V-GLUG manager U Karkee told The New Indian Express.
Though the district is often labelled ‘backward’, technology has helped put Villupuram on the path to development. "There is nothing like application of technologies to boost economic and social growth of youngsters in rural areas, if we teach them the right ways to use it. This is the idea behind V-GLUG," says senior coordinator J Syed Khaleel.
The organisation has been training youngsters for the last eight years and several of its alumni have landed jobs at top IT companies. A Venkatesan, a BSc Computer Science student from Arignar Anna Arts College in Villupuram, says, "With such an amazing opportunity to work with Wikimedia, I feel like I now have a golden ticket to uplift my future. I would never have got a chance to interact with global coding engineers had not I enrolled with V-GLUG."
Another V-GLUG initiative is a grassroots-level campaign to provide education on technological aspects to 100 villages in the district. Programmes in this regard are already completed in eight villages.
"Some people have this misconception that men are more fluent with technological advancements and their inception, and women are only at the receiving end of what is created. Here, we train rural women in coding programmes. This is hugely beneficial as software coding can fetch you high salaries within just a few months of commencing work. So, women from these rural areas contribute to their family's finances at an early age itself and this will make them economically independent," says S Viji, one of the campaign organisers.
The Wikimedia grant will help these youngsters set higher targets in life and through them, this ‘most backward’ district stands to gain a great deal.