The title comes from a lecture sponsored by the Mahatma Gandhi Centre, Colombo, Sri Lanka on the 20th October 2009. The Mahatma Gandhi Centre has been advocating a four pronged approach to fast tract resettlement of war-displaced people who have ended up in camps. These people left their villages as fighting intensified and are yearning to return to their respective places. The Mahatma Gandhi Centre has proposed that they could be grouped on the basis of their village of origin even while they are in the camps. Those who are not in camps but living in their war-affected villages can also be encouraged to form rehabilitation groups based on development interest like Food Production, Women’s Welfare, Culture, Services etc that will benefit the village. While encouraging these groups to discuss their own village development priorities when they return, the Mahatma Gandhi Centre is of the view that connecting every village through IT should be a priority measure towards reconstruction and rehabilitation. This was the essence of the message of Dr. M. A. Mohamed Saleem, President of the Mahatma Gandhi Centre, when he introduced the topic and the speaker to the friends of the Mahatma Gandhi Centre who attended the lecture.

Dr. Saleem further said "Some of you may already be familiar with the Mahatma Gandhi Centre (MGC) but there are others who are not. The MGC is a very small and relatively a new organization, established on a firm conviction that we, the Citizens of Sri Lanka, deserve a much better condition than what we have today. We at the MGC also firmly believe that our condition in this country cannot improve unless we are prepared, individually and collectively, and genuinely commit to uphold, as a matter of faith, that the country belongs to all. This country is now at the crossroads: it can either move towards a new future of peace and prosperity by being magnanimous to learn from the past mistakes, and correct its future course embracing everyone in the main stream of nation building or people in this country can slide back into another era of trading enmity and bitterness. In a country like ours where political compulsions blur human compassion and justice, our biggest challenge for the future is establishing moral authority. At the Mahatma Gandhi Centre we believe that, some day, compassion and justice will have to become the touchstone in all our matters. Therefore, the MGC activities are aimed at achieving those values through rural empowerment and good governance; self reliance in food and energy, alternative health care and resource management and increasing public awareness on people’s rights and rights to information.

"The MGC has always advocated that preparation for post-conflict is equally or even more important than ending a conflict. We have suggested to the powers that matter in this country reconstruction of the war affected areas should not be equated with building highways, airports and super markets. We believe that reconstruction and rehabilitation after prolonged suffering and trauma should start with the people, and we believe that war affected people should be given all the opportunity to internalize that they are part of the reconstruction to restore trust and confidence in the process. We believe that people of every village could be identified even while they are in the IDP camps, and they should be encouraged to form village welfare development committees (for want of term call it Gramarajya) to take on developmental responsibilities when they return to their villages. They could even be given some level of training while they are in camps, for instance to search and remove explosives buried in the vicinity or in any other skills or trade so that they could be self supportive once they are back in their villages. What will also be important is to keep returning people actively engaged in some vocation without having to live in a state of idleness so that they can relate back to the village(s) as quickly as possible.

"We believe that connecting every village with IT – even the remotest village by ensuring solar or wind power generation - will be much simpler, quicker and cheaper than providing road or railway connections. Once there is a way of reaching out to others, prejudices and barriers can be broken, and once again, people will have the opportunity to rediscover the values and sentiments of humanity that had united them in the past with the rest of the country. We at the Mahatma Gandhi Centre believe that IT and electronic connectivity has a very immediate and an important role in our reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts of this country, and therefore, we titled today’s talk "Connecting Globally and Living Locally: IT as a tool in societal rehabilitation in war affected areas" so that we can analyze in depth the practicality and importance of using this tool to fast tract rehabilitation".