National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, an apex Institute for training, research and consultancy in Rural Development and related sector of Ministry of Rural Development and Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Government of India. (refer http://nird.org.in/ for further information).
Every year NIRDPR is conducting around 1500 training programmes in and off campus and conducts numerous research studies in thematic areas of Rural Development.
In November, 2017 NIRDPR conducted a three days workshop for faculty members and research staff of NIRDPR on ODK with the direct support of OSGeo-India foundation in the leadership of Dr. Venkatesh raghwan, Professor, OSAKA City University, Japan. On third day of workshop our IT team was trained on server side operations and a computer was set-up as ODK Aggregate server in NIRDPR. Since then we are using ODK and managing field data of our research studies, consultancy projects and use is increasing with increased confidence in researchers of NIRDPR. The ODK interface is also translated to Hindi using online Transifex platform. Whole IT team of NIRDPR support the research staff in designing of forms and collection of data. Remaining tasks are handled at the level of IT team.
The future plan is to migrate to ODK-2 software suit and propagating the whole eco-system of mobile data collection to other National and International organizations which are in connection with NIRDPR, with the help of leaders/experts in the field. The ODK work flow in NIRDPR is shown in picture.
We are introducing ODK in our regular National and International training programmes also. We conduct government sponsored training programmes for CIDAP, ITEC and AARDO countries. We have 29 nodal institutes and 90 regional institutes in 29 States of India in connection with us to take NIRDPR mandate forward.