AI must be harnessed to build smart villages
The Statesman|July 19, 2023
With the climate clock ticking to show only 6 years to limit climate warming to 1.5oC, we are drifting into disasters and calamities without a game plan on how to avoid them.
ANDREW SHENG AND SNEHA PODDAR
AI must be harnessed to build smart villages

Even as nations struggle to attain the 2030 UN sustainable development goals (SDGs), the reality is that cities are in mortal danger, whereas the rural grassroots may hold realistic solutions to tackling social and planetary justice.

Accelerated migration into crowded cities has only heightened social alienation, trauma and concentration of buildings and transport vehicles. While cities consume and emit carbon, it is the rural areas that provide vital support to the cities with food, water, energy, resources and carbon capture. Yet villages receive limited policy attention.

Hitherto, the mainstream political hope was to use technology to create “smart cities”, but it is unrealistic to expect cities to “de-grow”. With over half of the developing world's population residing in them, the rural villages remain the stewards of most of the land and seas which provides water, food and natural resources for the rest of humanity. Smart villages using technology can safeguard nature as well as narrow the social gap between them and the cities.

Hence, village communities, living closest to nature, could be what legendary ecologist Dana Meadows called the leverage point, where with relatively few resources, we can make a larger and more immediate impact on climate change and ecological diversity, while meeting our basic needs.

First, our current top-down governance structure cannot be the only way to solving human problems. Silobased state action often lacks coordination and good bottom-up feedback, resulting in perennial electoral overpromise and under-delivery. Moreover, growing concentration of market forces in large global companies generate oligopolistic tendencies that ignore their corporate social responsibilities. Inclusive sustainable development using a bottom-up approach requires a mindset change.

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