PUNE: What does Prof Nicholas Negroponte have to do with an Indian farmer who used a rural information kiosk or a soochanayala to sell a cow for Rs 3,000?

Or, for that matter, how is he concerned with three widows from Haryana who used a Drishtee.com soochanalaya in their village, communicated with the district magistrate and expedited their pension dues?

Negroponte, who is internationally recognised as an IT visionary promoting the use of IT for poverty alleviation, will be the star attraction in Baramati on Saturday when he addresses the second annual Baramati Initiative on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Development.

A slew of Indian and international IT experts, visionaries, technologists and bureaucrats will deliberate for three days on a variety of possibilities relating to IT and upliftment of the poor.

They will also examine innovative rural e-commerce and e-governance and e-cooperative initiatives in India, along with e-education ventures for slum children and others from low-income groups.

Co-organised by MLA, Digital Partners and the Sharad Pawar-led Vidya Pratisthan’s Institute for Information Technology, the Baramati meet is scheduled to be attended by Nasscom director Kiran Karnik, MIT Media Lab scientist Michael Best, a host of technology developers and their beneficiaries and IT secretaries from Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Jharkhand.

Interestingly, Pawar is now seeking to replicate the Maharashtra government’s Warna Wired Village project on a larger scale in Baramati by taking e-commerce and egovernance to nearly 100 villages in Baramati.

Although the Warna wired village project has failed in its e-governance objective, it has succeeded marginally in establishing e-communication between farmers and the Warna sugar co-operative.

The Baramati wired village initiative, under which 75 rural IT kiosks will be established over a six-month period, is based on the CorDect wireless in local loop (WLL) technology developed by IIT Chennai’s Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala.

“We plan to network about 70 villages in a 25-km radius and introduce e-governance, e-commerce facilities over the next six months,” Dr Amol Goje, director of VIIT told TNN. He said that talks were on with Dirshtee.com and others for the development of e-governance and ecommerce software.