What is a Smart Village?

Smart Village is a term used worldwide to describe a concept focused on holistic rural development. In India, 68% of the population live in areas described as rural and face unreliable access to electricity, scarce water resources, and issues with waste disposal. To address these challenges India is developing Smart Villages.

The goal of this program is to create technology-based local solutions and then implement them in rural ecosystems to improve the quality of life by leveraging education, and creating access to technological knowledge.

Education brings access to technology

La Fondation Dassault Systèmes India is working with the Vigyan Ashram School in Pabal, Pune on a Smart Village project. The aim is to educate local students with the skills needed to learn, identify and then apply new solutions: thus, they will be able to better manage energy, recycle waste and grey water, increase agricultural production, and ultimately, make the entire village self-sufficient.

Vigyan Ashram will train students to develop open source design solutions that can be implemented in villages and rural areas without access to modern infrastructures. The students will then use their knowledge gained in class and through experiments to provide villages with new ideas to modify former practices. The ultimate goal is to help villages reduce dependence on the central electric grid yearly by 10%, reuse 100% of grey water, adopt efficient composting to significantly decrease the amount of non-recovered waste and generally, adopt more innovative agricultural practices for the benefit of the village and its ecosystem.

Here are several examples of what the Smart Village program teaches students:

• daily use of solar-powered devices
• power conversion to enhance solar and wind energy-based power generation
• efficient composting to treat vegetable and other organic waste for effective agriculture reuses
• treatment of grey water for agricultural or non-drinking purposes
• Implement additional innovative agricultural practices

Vigyan Ashram is developing a program model for other villages to use to adopt new practices too.

“For a large country like India where majority of population stays in villages, the villages need to manage their requirements locally to become self-sufficient. By adopting emerging technologies and innovative practices, they will be able to achieve these objectives for their villages. With the help and guidance of La Fondation Dassault Systèmes, we are able to make digital designs of appropriate technology solutions and implement them in the Pabal and Mukhai Villages. These open source designs will be available for others to adopt in their villages. We hope our efforts will lead to a decentralized and circular economy and make Indian villages self-sufficient, ‘Smart Villages’. “

– Professor Yogesh Kulkarni, Executive Director, Vigyan Ashram

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Adopted by all United Nations Member States, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries – developed and developing – in a global partnership.

La Fondation Dassault Systèmes supports Vigyan Ashram’s project, meeting three of these goals: Quality education, Clean water and sanitation, and Partnerships for the goals:

About our partner

The Vigyan Ashram School is located in Pabal, Pune, where they run a FabLab and teach courses that comprise engineering, fabrication, construction, basic carpentry, agriculture and more. . . with a focus on concrete application for rural ecosystems. Many of the students from villages are beneficiaries of the skill and competency training Vigyan Ashram conducts to make these students contributors to a developmental vision for rural ecosystems.

You can watch a short video produced about our partner, as posted on LinkedIn by Marie Pierre Aulas, La Fondation Dassault Systemes General Manager.

Discover more projects supported by Dassault Systèmes La Fondation