E-GRAMPANCHAYAT

Computer Science & Engineering

The Digital Village Web Application envisions connectivity up to the Gram Panchayat level. This Portal can help extend its reach beyond, the level of connected, Digital Villages. A Digital Village is often seen as an idea that can help remove this Digital Divide, enabling development to reach underdeveloped regions, and the country to leapfrog. In physical terms, a ‘Digital Village’ generally refers to a village that is connected to the Internet. Though not specified, the assumption is that connectivity is broadband quality, providing sufficiently high bandwidth for most commonly used Internet applications to work on computers, tablets, and mobile phones. Over recent decades, people’s (rural and urban) communities are facing numerous social and economic changes and challenges. In this project, we have made a review of already existing practices while focusing on the existing implementations of the Smart Village concept and the importance of digital transformation for rural areas. We give special attention to EU policies that we are using as an already existing framework for understanding our forthcoming examples. Our main argument stems from our own previous experiences and experiences of other research approaches and is grounded on the argument that rural areas are not uniform, and that smart rural development has to be applied in combination with a place-based approach. We present the cases of Slovenian pilot practices and support our argument by proposing the Fab Village concept.

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