Thiruvaiyaru is a small town on the banks of river Cauvery, some 13 kilometres north of Thanjavur, in what was once the rice bowl of Tamil Nadu. It was here that
the great music composer Saint Thyagaraja lived and composed his immortal compositions on Lord Rama and where connoisseurs of Carnatic music assemble
every year in early January to listen to hundreds of performers sing his compositions in unison. We were there on a mission, viz. to see for ourselves how technology
affected the lives of the poor in rural India. On a sunny and humid afternoon in September 2009 we went to the home of Ms. Amudha Baskaran, who had learnt to
design and make low-cost ornaments using stones, glass beads and other such inexpensive material and had started earning a reasonable income.

M S Swaminathan Research Foundation