Joyojeet will be talking in this week's seminar: CSE 590f Computing and the Developing World Wednesday, January 28, 4pm, CSE 403
RuralScope: An Repository for Tracking Rural Disbursements Joyojeet Pal UW CIS and UW CSE Concerns among development professionals about designing robust information systems to enable efficient disbursement of development funds are seen in the rising interest in e-governance projects in various parts of the developing world. The National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) Scheme in India has been one of the largest rural unemployment benefits schemes in the world, both in economic terms and in complexity of implementation. The scheme currently offers payments to over 31.1 million households throughout the country. Within the first few years of its implementation, a number of allegations of irregularity in both the implementation and disbursement. The information-related problems posed by the NREG implementation mirror issues faced by several similar rural development projects around the world that involve small disbursements to large numbers of recipients. While a large amount of data exists both on the outlay and expenditure of disbursements as well as past monitoring, poor organization of the data hampers accurate evaluation of the progress and impact of the scheme. RuralScope is an initiative to create an efficient and searchable system of data, first for use by field monitors, and second for use by researchers studying the impact of such programs. Through an annotatable online feature, RuralScope also aims at aggregating various sources of knowledge about the NREG scheme, potentially offering a model for similar development projects where access to information on users is hard to reach. Bio: Joyojeet Pal is a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Information and Society at the School of Information, University of Washington. His research is broadly on technology and economic development. His recent work has focused on children's shared use of technology in education.
