00:01 Speaker 1: Namaste. Thank you so much for having me at this conference and I really apologize for not being led in person. I'm so glad this conference is happening and thanks to GuideStar, and Lucy, and others and all the sponsors. Because it's a very critical question that we are addressing about digital dependencies. India's very young population is going to mature in this new digital age, and I think it opens up very critical questions for society. And especially for civil society and how civil society is going to react and create a whole new era of functioning in a democracy. So, I'm very happy this is happening. I think from what I've seen of India's civil society organizations, I think some of them have quickly learnt and joined this digital universe very effectively, but the bulk of the organizations probably are just waking up to the immense potential that it has. And there are some organizations that are also almost technophobic, and I think we need to address the fears that some of them have about what participating in a digital universe that is controlled by large corporations or perhaps they fear surveillance by government, and how do we bring them to the discourse table? 

01:26 S1: Because one of the things I do believe is that the same technologies that allow for surveillance equally allow for participation and sousveillance, which means looking at power structures from below. And we really need to see how we can employ that potential in civil society's work. I think that in the continuum of samaaj, bazaar and sarkar, that is society, state, and market, it is going to be very important to understand that we can not hide too much from this digital world and therefore how can civil society organizations also act as a check and balance on this potential of technology to amplify everything, both bad and good. And how can we think a new design for civil society itself? Let me give you a very small example from the work that we have been doing, say in, Arghyam, which is the foundation I set up for water and sanitation back in 2005. When we developed the India Water Portal which was envisaged as a knowledge platform on water, it was born in an area where some of these fascinating new technologies that are not been deployed and so it is sort of an old fashion idea of a digital presence. And you can't take something that was designed then and retrofit it. So we now have to rethink it completely.

02:54 S1: And on the other hand, EkStep which is the learning platform that Nandan and I set, and Shankar set up two and a half years ago is already born in an age where so many digital technologies have converged and combined. So the way this organization is born is very different. And we have had a sharp learning curve from our earlier work, my husband and myself. And so I think this organization is developed as a new child of the digital age, and it incorporates a value structure which I believe is dear to my heart and very important to articulate that this platform will be open, it will not hide behind proprietary walls, it will have many shareable structures. It has simple to use toolkits. It allows many actors to talk to each other. It is mobile-friendly. We're talking about things like offline internet for those with poor access to the internet. We are talking about creating three layers, a shared digital infrastructure and toolkits co-created by many of the actors in that sector and then an amplification layer. So I think there's so much tremendous potential for civil society organizations to scale their work, to find new partners across geographies, to de-risk from any local conditions, to pull in the power of collaboration and co-creation, that I hope we can enable India's thriving civil society to participate more fully in this inevitable digital universe.