IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

Crops are a very special type of human artifact, living organisms literally rooted in their environments. Crops suggest ways to embed rootedness in mobility studies, fleshing out the linkages between flows and matrices and thus developing effective frameworks for reconnecting local and global history. Our focus here is on the movements, or failures to move, of "cropscapes": the ever-mutating ecologies, or matrices, comprising assemblages of nonhumans and humans, within which a particular crop in a particular place and time flourishes or fails. As with the landscape, the cropscape as concept and analytical tool implies a deliberate choice of frame. In playing with how to frame our selected cropscapes spatially and chronologically, we develop productive alternatives to latent Eurocentric and modernist assumptions about periodization, geographical hierarchies, and scale that still prevail within history of technology, global and comparative history, and indeed within broader public understanding of mobility and history. © Transfers.

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

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Cropscapes and history: Reflections on rootedness and mobility

This chapter analyses the work of two outstanding Jesuits – Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656) and Jean Venant Bouchet (1655-1732), in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Madurai region of southern India. It aims, in the process, to bring out certain important elements of crosscultural interactions, touching the domains of religion on the one hand and modern scientific spirit and rationality (if not much of science as such) on the other. For analysing the cross-cultural phenomenon, we employ here a framework, which, apart from the more recent discourses on questions of the ‘Other’, also draws from some of the basic ideas of the twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. What emerges is a complicated picture of ‘engaging with the Other’ in these domains (of both science and religion, on the one hand, and East and West, on the other), within a framework of Orientalism which differs from the more colonial forms of Orientalism.&nbsp;

Science and Religion: East and West

Betwixt science and religion-East and West: Jesuits in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Southern India

While researching Internet adoption by rural and remote communities in India we detected a disconnect between people's perception of computers and Internet access as a means to social mobility and their usefulness to them personally. We then observed an ICT4D program where a successful union between technical skill and purposeful activity was established, as gauged by the young workers reporting far more satisfaction and engagement than any others in our survey. We suggest that future efforts at bringing technology education to the bottom of the pyramid build in clear personal motivators for the students to amplify opportunities for success. © 2011 IEEE.

Proceedings of the 2011 11th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT 2011

Purposeful learning is transformative: How experience with media production tools at a digital agricultural extension in India suggests an approach for deepening the impact of educational ICT4D projects

This paper explicates some of the perceptions and usage patterns concerning the rural information cen tres /kiosks and the limitations in effective implemen tation of the 'Information for Development'(14D) mantra. This has been done through an empirical study of five ICT enabled villages in the Thiruvallur district in Tamil Nadu. The findings are based on extensive interactions with various stakeholders like the kiosk operators and various sectors of the rural community. Various parameters such as gender and caste; and issues such as cost, technology choice and sustainability have been considered. The findings highlight the potentials of 04D, the expectations and attitudes at the receiving end, the challenges, limitations and suggestions for more effective implementation in future.

Journal of Rural Development

Icts for rural development?: Answers from below- a microlevel study of five ictenabled villages in tamil nadu

Drawing from the social constructivist approach to the study of science, technology and society, this article tries to examine the role of legal, economic, political and environmental factors in determining the course of the development of electricity in the Madras Presidency under British colonial rule. Apart from these factors, the impact of historical events such as the two World Wars on the trajectories of electrification is also analysed. The combination of circumstances that influenced the development of electricity in a colonised territory was quite peculiar in many ways and significantly shaped its ultimate character.