The Rajasthan government has claimed sole proprietorship over every drop of rainwater in the arid Lava-ka-Baas village. It has decided to destroy the villagers' traditional water harvesting dam.

There is extensive tiger poaching in Indian jungles, thanks to a demand in China for its body parts that, supposedly, act as aphrodisiacs.

Then there is that whole Dabhol affair.

All of this makes you angry and indignant. If these were newspaper or TV reports, you'd wince and move on. But you have found this online - via email from a friend or a petition at some Web site. You can click, and sign, and write back, telling everyone who logs on exactly what you think about these issues.

And you do. Hundreds and thousands of people across the globe do.

Communication, today, is doing a lot more than making conversations across continents easier. It is also spreading awareness a lot faster than ever before. Says Leo Saldanha, coordinator of the ESG (Environment Support Group) online: "The attempt is to get information out in the fastest possible manner." This also turns out to be cost-effective, bringing down the tremendous expense involved in traditional forms of dissemination.

The mere signing of a petition online lends valuable moral support to volunteers working at a cause offline. Then there are the other effects, too: the story gets to the media, people signing in are inspired to take action, public opinion pressurises authorities, and other defaulters get wary.

Some individuals also offer immediate advice. For example, when the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) covered the Rajasthan water crisis, responses flooded in. A professor of Civil Engineering at IIT Kanpur offered advice on specifications for the earth dam (johad); a water resources engineer in New Zealand suggested an alternative management strategy; someone suggested creating rooftop cisterns in homes to collect rainwater; while a certain Jo Kirkpatrick wondered why "the villagers don't digs ponds (pukur) as they do in Bengal to catch rain - the village officials wouldn't have any right over them."

Priya Shah, editor of an environmental ezine in India, read the report, gathered all the facts, drafted the Rajasthan Water Alert and put it up at Petitionsite -- drawing further attention to the issue.

While most people who sign a petition online forget all about it, members of Enron Action say that their experience shows "how unbelievably large a difference a small group of committed people can make, even when they are able to spare only an hour or two a day."

A dedicated volunteer may just gather straight facts that can be presented online, which in itself is a big thing. Says Om Damani of Enron Action, "Very often, even people who are relatively informed engage in heated discussions on an issue, entirely ignorant of some of the most important facts of a case. A group that collects all relevant facts about an important issue and summarises its findings on a Web site creates a valuable source of reliable information that is otherwise hard to find, or sometimes distorted."

It was with the intention of providing such reliable information on the Dabhol project that Enron Action was set up. The team first emailed several individual activists, journalists and groups in India. Apart from the publicity the site received, these activists then went on to host their own causes on it. Some of these were documentations, some public interest litigations, others simply opinions. However arbitrary it may seem, these voices have made AltIndia an emerging hub of online activism in India today.

Being online is more than merely setting up a site or sending a lot of email. It is about tracking development and building a sense of community between volunteers. It is about giving the latest news flashes, posting policy material, reminding people about and receiving reports, sending invites to meetings, creating listservs and actively networking the group. The Virtual Volunteering site is a good example.

In his book Virtual Bonfire, author Jon Lebkowsky says, "Email alerts don't work unless there's someone at the other end who can interpret the issues, lead discussion and debate." In order to reach real decisions, Lebkowsky strongly recommends having a physical anchor -- perhaps a monthly meeting - as part of a site's programme.

Most activists agree that efforts on the Internet really work only when they are an extension of strong ground level efforts. Most documents at the Enron Action site, for example, have been possible only due to the tremendous offline efforts of Abhay Mehta.

The groundwork becomes especially important in our age of information overload where, Saldanha says, "The need is to highlight concerns not merely rhetorically or ideologically, but based on fact and analysis." He also talks about the soul of activism - communicating with the affected community and making them the central focus of any initiative.

"The idea is to highlight their struggles and not assume a position of representing their struggles."

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