India tackles the digital divide

["Irfan Khan" <khania@super.net.pk>]

India tackles the digital divide 

ITworld.com 5/14/02

John Ribeiro, IDG News Service, Bangalore Bureau 


India is emerging as a laboratory for testing out new technologies 
and business models for narrowing the digital divide between urban 
and rural people in a developing economy.
 
Inadequate Internet and telephone connectivity to India's rural 
areas, where more than 70 percent of India's population lives, is a 
key challenge for a number of government agencies, NGOs 
(nongovernment organizations), and multilateral aid agencies. The 
corporate sector too is discovering that bridging this digital divide 
could translate into new market opportunities.

For example, HP Labs India, which was set up in Bangalore earlier 
this year by Palo Alto, California, Hewlett-Packard Co., is 
developing products appropriate for India's rural markets. "Our 
technological focus has been on three areas -- making information 
technology available to those who use Indian languages, improving the 
connectivity options for those outside the big cities who do not 
currently have satisfactory access to the Internet, and affordable 
devices," said Srinivasan Ramani, director of HP Labs India.

"For instance, we are working to create Indian language support for 
an experimental PC that can be used by four users simultaneously," 
Ramani said.

HP Labs India is also examining ways in which digital photography can 
add a second revenue stream to village kiosks that provide access to 
computer facilities and the Internet, and is also experimenting with 
techniques developed by its parent lab in Palo Alto to provide low-
bandwidth multimedia communication. "Teachers and students can create 
their own stories and presentations using such a system," Ramani 
said.

Private sector involvement in projects to build the digital divide in 
India is likely to increase, according to Ved Prakash Sharma, head of 
information technology (IT), and computers and communications 
specialist in the National Agricultural Technology Project of the 
National Institute of Agricultural Extension Management in Hyderabad. 
"Each one of the facilitators has seen a business opportunity in 
these initiatives, and rightly so," added Sharma. "The growth of the 
Indian rural economy will provide a large number of customers for 
technology companies."

Public sector projects are also looking at creative ways of building 
up the communications infrastructure. Media Lab Asia (MLA), based in 
Mumbai, is setting up a wireless, 802.11 standard-compliant network 
to take Internet and voice connectivity to India's rural masses. Set 
up by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Media 
Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in tandem with the Indian 
government, MLA is focused on developing and deploying technology 
solutions appropriate to bridging the digital divide in developing 
economies.

The project to evaluate 802.11 for rural connectivity is anchored by 
MLA's research hub at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 
Kanpur. Starting with four villages near Kanpur, the project plans to 
create an "information corridor" between Kanpur and Lucknow cities in 
North India, covering about 25 villages along the route. MLA plans to 
deploy 802.11, which has so far not been used in rural connectivity 
in India, because of its lower cost, according to Dheeraj Sanghi, MLA 
scientist at the IIT Kanpur research hub.

While it is premature to evaluate the impact of the recent MLA and HP 
initiatives, earlier projects for providing solutions for bridging 
the digital divide report considerable success. The 
Telecommunications and Computer Networks (TeNeT) Group in the Chennai-
based Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, has used its in-house 
developed corDECT Wireless Local Loop (WLL) technology to provide 
Internet and voice connectivity to 250 community kiosks that offer 
these services to over 700,000 people in rural India, according to 
Ashok Jhunjhunwala, professor of the electrical engineering 
department at IIT Madras, and head of TeNeT. The WLL is based on the 
micro-cellular, DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) 
standard proposed by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards 
Institute).

"The people in rural India are overwhelmed by this kind of service," 
Jhunjhunwala said. "There are certain things which they can get done 
online like getting government application forms, market information, 
etc., without actually physically going to the government 
departments."

Support for Indian languages and the availability of applications 
appropriate to the rural masses may decide whether information 
technology will be viewed by the villagers as an urban intrusion or 
as tool relevant to their needs. "Only about 5 percent of those who 
buy newspapers seem to buy English language newspapers," said Ramani.

HP and other companies and agencies working on bridging the rural 
divide are hence focusing on developing technologies that will enable 
India's masses to interact with computers and the Internet using 
their native language, usually the spoken language because of the low 
levels of literacy in India.

HP Labs India, for example, has developed a prototype for a system 
that allows users to phone in and query a server, using voice 
commands, for news from its database. The relevant news is then 
played back to the user. The system, which uses technologies such as 
automatic speech recognition, VoiceXML (Voice Extensible Markup 
Language) to specify the dialogues, a text-to-speech engine for 
playback of typed in content, and multimedia, has been configured to 
support spoken Hindi and Telugu, two key languages in India.

Inadequate funding could derail some of the projects that aim to 
narrow the digital divide, however. PicoPeta Simputers Pvt. Ltd in 
Bangalore was set up by four designers of the Simputer -- essentially 
a handheld Internet access device -- who took "entrepreneurial leave" 
from their jobs as professors at the Indian Institute of Science in 
Bangalore to make the Simputer technology commercially viable. 
Although the Simputer prototype was ready in April last year, to date 
only 150 Simputers have reached the target users. At these volumes, 
the contract manufacturer, Bangalore-based Bharat Electronics Ltd. 
cannot deliver the products at the about $200 price point that the 
designers had targeted. The current price is closer to $300.

Although a large number of agencies including the Indian government 
showed interest in the Simputer both as a design achievement, and for 
its potential role in bridging the digital divide, there has been a 
delay in getting funds, according to Vijay Chandru, co-founder and 
director of PicoPeta Simputers. "We have a fair idea of the 
applications that will work and the business model, but to fine tune 
these on the field we have to seed at least 10,000 of these devices 
into users' hands, and for that you need deep pockets," Chandru 
added.

Things are looking up for PicoPeta, however, as it has managed to get 
a $100,000 grant from Nice-based South Asia Foundation for the 
deployment of Simputers in a village education pilot program. 
PicoPeta is also working with a NGO on a micro-banking pilot project, 
and Chinese and Malaysian companies have shown interest in the 
technology. The Simputer Trust is meanwhile adding new functionality 
to the product this year, including a CompactFlash expansion slot for 
wireless options such as GSM (Global System for Mobile 
Communications) and 802.11 based 
connectivity. The target of 100,000 Simputers in the field by the end 
of next year may still 
be achieved, according to Chandru.

The focus of most of the projects that aim to bridge the digital 
divide in India is on 
building sustainable business models for village entrepreneurs. 
Although subsidies and grants 
are expected to give the pilot projects the necessary seed funding, 
the long-term objective is 
to evolve self-sustaining business models for rural access to 
information technology. 
"Subsidies and grants are not parts of our model at all," said 
Ramani. "We will pay our part 
of the costs of pilot efforts, but even here, the focus on 
sustainability will ensure that we 
will not try to prop up that which cannot stand on its own legs."

Surprisingly India's government bureaucracy, usually maligned for 
dragging its feet on 
development issues, is seen as supportive of the digital divide 
projects. "The bureaucracy is 
very supportive on these initiatives," said Sharma. "In fact the most 
successful projects are 
those which have direct support from bureaucracy. Today's bureaucrats 
are more development 
oriented than one would normally imagine."

There is clearly a great deal of seriousness on all fronts in India 
about taking information 
technology and communications to rural India, and the villagers are 
also receptive. "Our 
visits to villages have shown that there are enthusiastic and 
innovative users (of information 
technology) in areas outside the big cities," Ramani said. It usually 
takes about six months 
for villagers to start viewing technology as a tool, according to 
Sharma. "In the first few 
months, they view it more as an object of curiosity or as a machine 
for the educated and urban people," Sharma added.

John Ribeiro is an IDG News Service correspondent.


http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/020514digitaldivide/