Manthan-AIF Award is a first of its kind initiative in India to recognize the best practices in e-Content and Creativity. It www.manthanaward.org was launched on 10th October 2004, by Digital Empowerment Foundation in partnership with World Summit Award and American India Foundation.

The Manthan-AIF Award winners for the year 2004-05 were awarded on 23rd July, 2005 at India International Centre, Lodi Road, New Delhi in a one day Manthan-AIF Award gala cum conference on e-Content and Sustainability organized by Digital Empowerment Foundation. The Conference cum award gala was attended by over 150 people from various walks of life and came from different regions and background and represented various States across the length and breadth of the country.

Emphasizing on the importance of e-Content & Creativity for and by the grassroots people, the Manthan Award 2005 recognized and awarded 27 initiatives out of 104 nominations received for the following 8 categories.

The categories were:

• e-Business
  
• e-Entertainment
  
• e-Culture
  
• e-Learning
  
• e-Health
  
• e-Governance
  
• e-Science
  
• e-Inclusion

Categories for Manthan-AIF Award 2006 [4 New categories have been added]

The overwhelming response from the participants of Manthan-AIF Award 2005 has also encouraged us to increase the numbers of categories for the Manthan-AIF Award 2006.

Following is the list of categories for Manthan-AIF Award 2006:

• E-Business: Support and optimization of business processes; creation of new business models in e-commerce and m-commerce, business to business, business to consumers, internet security and other areas; supporting Small and Medium Enterprise’s on the marketplace.
  
• E-Culture: Preserving and presenting cultural heritage in line with the challenges of the future; demonstrating valuable cultural assets clearly and informatively using state-of-the- art technology.
  
• E-Entertainment: Supplying digitized entertainment products and services; entertaining the user in this world’s variety of languages and its cultural diversity; supporting movement from one-way to two-way, from single to multiple players, interactive entertainment and the synergy between analog and digital platforms.
  
• E-Science: Fostering global collaboration in key areas of science, and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it; providing measures to promote and demonstrate scientific processes and make them accessible to citizens; scientific projects articulated through new media.
  
• E-Health: Developing the consumer-centered model of health care where stakeholders collaborate, utilizing Information Communication Technology, including internet technologies to manage health issues as well as the health care system.
  
• E-Government: Empowering citizens and serving public services clients; fostering quality and efficiency of information exchange and communication services in governmental and public administrative processes; strengthening participation of citizens in information society decision making.
  
• E-Learning: Serving the needs of the learners to acquire knowledge and skills for a complex and globalizing world; creating active e-learning communities and target models and solutions for corporate training, supporting first steps in multimedia.
  
• E-Inclusion & Livelihood: All measures supporting IT integration of least developed states of India into the Information Society. Reducing the “digital divide” and “content gap” between technology-empowered and technology-excluded communities and groups – such as rural areas and women. Bridging society through multimedia.
  
• E-Education: Empowering the education paraphernalia with new technology tools; transforming schools, universities and other educational institutions through interactive, personalized and distributed learning resources; providing infrastructure for the rural based educational institutions, especially schools.
  
• E-News: The expansion of traditional media into new media and leveraging the technology as medium to reach larger masses, offering content in local language and in all form of electronic and digital medium.
  
• E-Localisation: Interventions of ICT has been instrumental in empowering life at the grassroots level in many ways such as application in local language, vernacular content and digital tools to work in oral medium. Agriculture, eco-tourism, ayurveda, artisans skills, organic food, are all being strengthened by the electronic and digital technologies
  
• e-Environment: The spread of all the concerns is of high importance as far as environment is concerned. Especially with emerging globalisation, environment is being affected badly and it requires all kind of technology and medium to spread the right message and messages of devastation it can create. Of course, ICT can play a huge role of responsible dissemination of information about environment. This category is open to all those efforts in the areas of environment where ICT and its components are playing significant role.

Special Categories

• E-Youth: India’s 45percent youth population is getting digital with the speed of thought and adopting newest technologies to empower themselves and to work efficiently. Youth are also involved in offering innovative ideas, application, and initiatives which is empowering the masses.
  
• M-Content: Mobile has become the most powerful medium for the exchange of content, services, and building communities. With the high penetration of mobile devices, content and services are becoming essentials in mobile devices. New content applications and innovative content is supplementing into the strength of the mobile devices.
  

Manthan-AIF Mission
To create an information rich society where everyone, irrespective of caste, religion, race, region, gender etc., are empowered to create, receive, share and utilize information and knowledge for their economic, social, cultural and political upliftment and development.

Inspiring the information society
It is information which is taking us ahead not technology alone. The information society will remain an empty concept if one talks solely about technology, network and access issues. We need not only to consider the general use or impact of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs), but also the cultural messages which they can relate. The Manthan-AIF Award is established to guide India through those best e-Contents from the country which stands out due to their excellence in carrying message and creating knowledge.

India wide selection for the best e-content practices – Manthan-AIF Award 2005 – received more than 100 nominations from 21 states for the eight categories prescribed in context of the World Summit Award, which was formed in 2003 under the framework of United Nation’s World Summit on the Information Society.

Out of 104 nominations 95 nominations were found to be valid and were considered for the Jury evaluation process. E-Governance category received the maximum of 25 percent nominations closely followed by E-Learning with 23 percent nominations. In e-Inclusion category 20 percent products were nominated whereas e-Health and e-Culture received 15 percent and 10 percent nominations respectively. E-business, e-Science and e-Entertainment were among the least nominated categories.

Majority of products were nominated form the private companies and the governments. Private companies nominated 31 percent products whereas the government body nominated 26 percent initiatives for the Manthan-AIF Award. National and International NGOs including the Trust had 21 percent nominations. The Academic institutions had 11 percent nominations for the award and the rest are joint initiatives of government, institutes, community help groups etc.

Manthan-AIF Award selected the JURY of 16 members comprising of eminent experts in various walks of life of academia, government, corporate, civil society and experts.Top
 
Objective

The goal of the entire Manthan-AIF Award process is simple: making visible the contents that already exist and thus demonstrating the richness and diversity of content creativity to those interested in understanding and planning the Global Information Society.

The Manthan-AIF Award wants to demonstrate to you, the readers – experts and diplomats, civil society activists and policy makers – the existing range of creativity and excellence in the use of the IT tools and communication networks. It might confirm your conviction that access to networks and ICT platforms is beneficial to the high quality and value of e-contents which are produced and available. It might also lead you to consider that quality contents, their production and economic sustainability require changes to the way markets operate and governments act.

Innovation comes from the ground

The Manthan-AIF Award emphasizes the importance on cultural diversity and identity, the creation of varied information content and digitalization of educational, scientific and cultural heritage.

The Manthan-AIF Award is the first of its kind initiative in India which will open doors for global recognition and support to the local initiatives. Innovation comes from the ground. It is created by people wishing to communicate. In order to extract and recognize excellent content, initiatives should be taken to select and promote creative content developers in all world regions.

E – Content will indeed enable every citizen to have complete information about his/her rights, privileges, strengths, and how he/she can become self reliant on the basis of information prowess.

We would also take it further by encouraging the development of e-content at every level and enhancing the e-content production capabilities and inducing poverty alleviation exercises.

India is a vast country and has ancient history which reflects its cultural, educational and social richness. Top
 
The Manthan Award
HONORARY BOARD MEMBER
Peter A. Bruck
Chairman
World Summit Award
Austria

The Manthan Award
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Osama Manzar
Founder and Director
Digital Empowerment Foundation

Shankar Venkateswaran
Executive Director
American India Foundation

Dr. Madanmohan Rao
Research Director AMIC, Singapore

Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala
IIT Madras

Dr Bibek Debroy
Secretary General
PHD Chamber of Commerce & Industry

The Manthan Award
PATRONS
Mr. F C Kohli
Former CEO
Tata Consultancy Services

Mr. Ganesh Natrajan
Dy MD & Chairman
Zensar Technologies

Mr. Sanjeev Chopra
Secretary
Industrial Development &
Information Technology
Uttaranchal Government

Prof. Anil Gupta, IIMA
Executive Vice Chairman
National Innovation Foundation

Manthan Award – From UN to World Summit Award

The Linking of global opportunity to Local Knowledge base
The Manthan-AIF Award is a national initiative following the footsteps of the World Summit Award (WSA) which is an international body formed under the framework of United Nation’s World Summit on Information System (WSIS) 2003-05. Digital Empowerment Foundation has an exclusive tie up with WSA to run similar initiative in India and thus the Manthan-AIF Award.

It covers the length and breadth of the country which has 18 officially recognized languages and numerous other languages and dialects. Lots of initiatives have taken place in remote India, unfortunately those initiatives due to language and information barrier never get their due recognition and die due too lack of recognition and promotion.

In fact the Manthan-AIF Award is the first step towards not only recognizing those initiatives nationally but at the international level as the Manthan-AIF Award winners will automatically get nominations in the World Summit Award 2005 to be held in Tunis.

Once the initiatives at the local level get its due recognition, the replication of those initiatives will start taking place for the rest of the country. This process will indeed help the 70 percent of the population, who live in the remote areas.

Pilot projects in various parts of the country have clearly demonstrated the enormous potential of ICT in reducing the harassment of citizens and corruption.