Kanpura enjoys its 'global village' status

Kanpura is playing host to some unusual guests for some time now. They include software experts of the National Informatics Centre (NIC), Ajmer’s collector Rajesh Yadav and a few other bureaucrats. These new faces are making the people of this nondescript village 40 km from Ajmer glad, and proud.

Their guests are, in fact, readying this IT-enabled village for US president Barack Obama.

No. He won’t visit this place. But he will take in its beauty---to know how the country’s e-governance scheme has changed it---through video conferencing, sitting at Mumbai’s St Xavier’s College on his visit to the city on November 7. A fortnight ago, a delegation, comprising senior officials of the US Administration and industry, had visited this village to see the role of IT in bringing improvement in the lives of its residents.

Ajmer district collector Rajesh Yadav says he is satisfied with the preparations. “IT experts of NIC are busy doing the final arrangements. As Kanpura is well-connected with optical fibre cables, video-conferencing can easily be done,” he says.

The village, which falls under the constituency of union Minister of state for communications and IT Sachin Pilot, has all the ingredients to be the model IT-enabled village of the country. It has an advanced IT system in place which can provide rural people access to health- and education-related data as well the functioning of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) processes.

This, however, is not for the first time that a US president has chosen to get a glimpse of a Rajasthan village to experience grassroots India. In fact, ten years ago, former president Bill Clinton had come calling to Naila, a small village near Jaipur, to experience rural India. He spent nearly two hours with the villagers. “It would have been great had Obama come to our village like Bill Clinton who visited Naila. But still our Kanpura has become a VIP village. We are excited that the American president has shown interest in our village,” says Sitaram Yadav, a resident of Kanpura.