This Tiruchi academic is on a mission to create awareness about technology among rural women

K Meena, former vice-chancellor of Bharatidasan University, has balanced her professional career with a voluntary undertaking to educate women in villages about the benefits of picking up computer skills

K Meena remembers carting a boxy personal computer in the 1990s in a van to the villages near Tiruchi and the look on the faces of the people who would crowd around them immediately. “There was a lot of curiosity; like a circus had come to town,” she says. “Our team would explain the different parts of the machine, and allow children to play basic games on it.” In 2021, with a much narrower urban-rural divide in technology, the story is being recast, with major changes. “Now I just take a laptop with me, and seek out women in rural areas to show them how the computer can be a tool of empowerment,” she says.