Mission 2007 is a nation-wide initiative launched in New Delhi in July 2004 with an aim to facilitate the setting up of knowledge centres in each of India’s 600,000 villages by 2007, the 60th anniversary of the country’s Independence.
The Mission’s objective is to facilitate and accelerate, through multi-stakeholder collaborations, the provision of knowledge centres in each village. Each of these centres would be a centre for knowledge-based livelihoods and income-generation opportunities for poor peolple, farming communities and all disadvantaged people.
The Mission envisages broadband connectivity for rural homes at low and affordable costs with integrated tech-nological applications that are relevant to the day-to-day lives of people. Such a bouquet of applications could well turn the info kiosk of tomorrow into a multi-purpose knowledge centre acting as a communi-cation hub. It could also be a support centre for rural entrepreneurship, a trading outlet and social empowerment outfit, a support centre for providing health, education and livelihoods information services.
Such a knowledge centre can be put together on a sustainable platform through partnerships, bringing together the private sector and the government for infrastructure development, civil society organisations for community participation and capacity building, academia for innovation and research and the private sector for leading on the financing and scalability.
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The march towards Mission 2007 
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Highlights of online discussion on info kiosks  |