About LifeLines

The LifeLines India service was born of a dream to create a digital inclusion programme that would make a real difference to people’s lives in rural India by improving their access to technology and information, and narrowing the digital divide for them.

This dream came into fruition under the partnership of British Telecom, CISCO Systems and OneWorld in September 2006 with the launch of LifeLines as an information service for the agriculture sector, catering to rural areas in north and central India. 

The strategic objectives of the LifeLines service are two-fold:

• To increase livelihood and income opportunities for rural communities through access to key decisive information; and
• To create a sustainable delivery model by concurrently creating a contextual knowledge base as queries get answered
  

LifeLines leverages a mix of internet and telephone technologies - to enable the provision of essential and demand-based information, advice and guidance to remote and rural communities in India through the medium of “voice, in the local language and within 24 hours.” 

The modest initiative has today flourished into an impressive programme for grassroots knowledge delivery, covering:

Agricultural experts and educationists empaneled in the service, work to render advisory to LifeLines users in their relevant fields of information - whether pertaining to a pest-management solution to save a dying crop in the field, or about which best method to follow to tackle a tricky math problem in class VI. 

A successful journey

In the last three years, Lifelines has covered much ground in successfully delivering digitally engineered information and knowledge systems to communities in remote rural locations across India; and the results today are well discernible -

Rural farmers and teachers alike are dialing LifeLines to connect to the information highway via phone where they can get solutions on a range of daily queries - teachers consulting on common classroom topics, and farmers obtaining advisory for their livestock and farm-based queries.

The growing interest in the service is visible as users employ their newly acquired knowledge on the ground - farmers adopting better apiculture practices in Himachal Pradesh, or planting drought-resistant varieties of crops in Bundelkhand, and teachers in West Bengal and Rajasthan employing new pedagogic techniques to make lessons more interesting in their classrooms.

Accomplishments

The journey of the LifeLines service since it commenced in September 2006, has been peppered with successes and recognitions both in India and abroad.

In 2008, LifeLines joined ranks with 25 global innovators who were honored as a Tech Awards Laureate by the prestigious Tech Museum of Innovation for employing technology solutions to benefit humanity. In the same year, the service partnership between BT, Cisco & One World South Asia won the Big Tick Award, which is UK’s most prominent CSR award conferred to companies integrating responsible business practices for positively impacting society. 

The US Congress has awarded Special Congressional Recognition to LifeLines for outstanding service to the community. LifeLines has been featured in the ‘Responsible Business’ series broadcast by the CNBC network and extensively profiled by mainstream Indian print-media, at the e-Agriculture.org initiative of FAO, and at the WEF summit in India and Davos.

Most recently, the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) presented their 2009 Award for Social Responsibility to the LifeLines alliance between One World, BT, and Cisco in February 2009.