A brief update of today's meeting: As usual, today's meeting started with stocktaking of various ICT for development initiatives. And I am very pleased to learn Shaddy's views on OneWorld South Asia's involvement in youth programmes. This, I guess, will happen through various cross-sectoral issues and programmes. As Jennifer has indicated earlier, we are going to work closely with TakingITGlobal, and its allies, on several fronts.

In next few days, I will be having meetings with my colleagues in different programme areas, particularly with Grassroots Communications, Knowledge for Development and Policy Advocacy to frame working issues and directives for furthering this work.

Writing for Sachi, ISEC, Bangalore is in progress and I hope to send across this article within next few days.

Tunza's recent issue focuses on how young people can help their socities in achieving the MDGs. With insightful articles, interviews and lots of sketches, this issue of Tunza is really interesting.

Bangalore is going to host the 2005 Tunza annual comference during October.

The interactive nature of internet has opened up the possibilities of enabling public participation in global policy-making processes, hitherto confined to few selected government, private and civil society sector representatives.

Various local, regional and international policy consultations, preceded by online discussions through out the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), demonstrate that even a global policy dialogue such as this can be inclusive and participatory in nature. Since the early stages, civil society organisations organised thematic and regional online consultations to elicit local and regional views for formulating their inputs for the Summit.

More: Digital Opportunity Channel.

Yesterday, I was reading Dennis L Meadows’ ‘Is it too late for sustainable development?’, a lecture published in the Volkswagen Foundation’s 2000 Annual Symposium book in Hannover.

In this paper, Meadows elaborates further the concept of sustainable development modelled in the book Limits to the Growth. Simply put, in this paper, it is argued that the notions of poverty eradication and ensuring food security as being advocated by international policy-makers and politicians will be challenged by current demographic trends worldwide and diminishing contributions of natural resources, energy and technology. Partha Dasgupta, an economist, favoured that actions taken locally can have positive implications in sustainable development.

Global policy directives are imperative when it comes to certain problems that are global in nature. Club of Rome’s mapping of such areas is very useful in this regard.