peoplesreporter

Information has been the key to development in the past. Without it or the capability to process it. every one would have been re-inventing the wheel. All information is passed on through communication of one kind or the other. be it print audio or visual. electronic or interpersonal. And that is why those who wish to control development in their favour generally keep a tight control on information or communication or both. Besides this. the very volume. complexity and diversity of information required to be processed by each individual in this interconnected world. makes it difficult for the have-nots to do much about their situation.

Therefore, those of us who are supposed. to be helping the have-nots to do something about their situation. cannot escape the question of development communication and information. Given that information in today's society is so vast and complex. and that any person. s needs are situation and time specific. there is no short cut to organising that information in such a way that people can easily have access to what they want to know. In the form that they can relate to.

It is in this context that various documentation centres have sprung up allover the country in the voluntary circles. And chronologically these came after the sharp rise in media communication activities among voluntary organisations in the seventies. Thus they represent a further response among voluntary organisations to the growing and changing needs of information in development work. Documentation centres in the voluntary sector and outside it may range from simple libraries to complex information organisations or propaganda outlets. Hitherto, they have been seen merely as support groups to other development organisations. Today they are part of the search for alternative social relations in the more immediate environment and the effort to build alternative structures in the form of autonomous and democratic groups. The documentation centres do realise that the social structures relating to information and communication of this information is one of the essential components of this egalitarian society. And in an age where such structures are getting increasingly centralised. people oriented and participatory information structures are going to be of primary importance. These structures cannot be built in a vacuum after the revolution or change of policy or autonomy laws, Prasar Bharati Bills or what have you.

Documentation centres are called upon to challenge the established communications order and move towards a new understanding of education, and developing social consciousness. Centres must emerge from behind their prescription-supply-counter, and move towards nurturing autonomous structures which enhance democratic information flow. We see that by and large, information has been the privy of the intellectual elite even in voluntary organisations. Even among them, information is supplied in packaged sets, the forms of which themselves betrays the underlying higher-flow of communication. However by mere fact of being an organised and efficient information centre, there is a higher or lower flow and documentation centres cannot evade their responsibility in this regard. What must be checked is whether these flows are between autonomous groups showing mutually respecting relations between receiver and supplier.

The emphasis of documentation centres should be to ensure that the forms of information available and shared with others are such that they can be related to at the level of the receiver, based on free choice, or at least as much choice as is possible rather than concentrate on finely processed dissemination. Documentation centres must continually evolve elaborate systems wherein the receiver can relate as much as possible to the original content of the material and that too in the for that is still decalcified and easily cognisable to the receiver.

Given this setting, let us examine the role of documentation services within the larger context of development communication and more specifically relevant to the readers of People's Action. The first thing that strikes one who is reading a manual on village level technologies, Is that there are always solutions. Almost every possible situation and problem has had its history of solutions, built by the people themselves in their different settings. There are also now, intermediate or appropriate technology solutions.

The problem facing the development communicator be it at a mass level through radio/TV or book, pamphlet or posters or at an interpersonal level through activists of voluntary organisations is how to reach situation, area and time specific solutions to the people. If we agree that the most likely place that you are likely to find a situation area and time specific solution, which people themselves can handle is the very people facing the problem itself that's where we have to start.

Given that information in today's society is so vast and complex, and that any person' s needs are situation and time specific , there is no short cut to organising that information in such a way that people can easily have access to what they want to know, in the form that they can relate to.

Participatory researchers have shown us how while working with local groups and activists, they have been able to develop information through the involvement of people themselves. and make it part of the liberation efforts of the marginalised people.

The challenge in this context to the documentalist and the development communicator is how to build on this information base, incrementing it while at the same time not letting it get lost to abstraction. theory and ! the ivory tower. which is the ! fate of almost all information ! collected by the traditional research and library systems.

Documentation centres who have been meeting every year , have been discussing this question for some time. One of the efforts is to try and evolve a system for documenting and retrieval of information from the grass roots. so that the specific solutions found by local people in similar situations can be easil~ accessed. Besides this. information is in the idiom and form that can be directly useful. There are three areas that need : to be developed. from a , documentalist point of view:

Really speaking none of these can be really developed in the laboratory. It must be by definition through non-directed (i.e. without any pre-conceived notions) field interaction. exchange and transmission. And for this interaction to be really useful and even possible the documentalist has to work with the grass root level workers and activists on the one hand and development communicators on the other. It is a lot like the work of participatory researchers but different in the sense that the unit of information that is being stored, classified, indexed and retrieved is very small and its use and cross reference is wider and in different context. For example, a tape recording of an interview with a ninety year old on household practices could be used for technology issues, women's debate, ecological assessment, alter the view of local history of struggle social practices taboos, style of education, story-telling, memorising etc. And most probably tomorrow a totally different topic not hitherto focussed on. This is the final frontier and use of documentation.

Does this mean those documentation centres who have been collecting information from non-academic sources over the lost decade and a half under subject heads relevant to development and social change and organisation of the poor people stands irrelevant or outdated. Certainly not. Grass roots level information without the backing of existing documentation would be totally inadequate and out of place to be useful over a long period of time. This was the experience of several documentation centres. who were trying to work only at the grass root level or limited to certain movements. as the information collected. classified and used. tended to grow into itself for the narrow purposes of that particular group. and the organisation of the material itself tended to preclude inter-subjectivity or, shall we say exchange and use in similar situations elsewhere, beyond the cursory benefit of that information as a case study. Also the documentation centres concerned tended to die along with the Issue or at best live on the laurels of their earlier work. Thus one is looking for a long term serious documentalist approach and commitment rather than a one- time research/action view and this approach is based on people's knowledge collected at the ground level as well as from more formal sources: newspapers, academic studies, films, other media and reports.

This is prompted by our growing belief that people oriented information must be available to people if any kind of long term structural change in favour of the poorer masses has to be sustained. In this connection, development communicators also face a similar situation. And hopefully documentation centres will be useful to them too.