Rural India to gain from high tech think tank

THE INDIAN INSTITUTE of Technology (IIT) in Chennai has some plans to provide rural India with infrastructure support which look like they really might make a difference.

Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, at the department of Electrical Engineer masterminds a thinktank called the Telecom and Networks (Tenet) group which comes up with wizard plans to aid rural India and then negotiates for private companies to take them up and make them real.

The IIT occupies 23 pleasant wooded acres in Chennai, and was established by Indian prime minister Jawarhlal Nehru in the 1950s. He said one of his current objectives is to find a suitable PC and clients which will work with an integrated power supply at a bill of materials cost which includes a low end LCD. "The obstacle," he said, "is the cost of the LCD screen". He's looking at a system from, he said, a Cambodian company called Jhai. The PC, acting as a server would link to six other clients with the whole system using 100 watts or so, and possibly powered by a maintenance free car battery, or a wind turbine generating 300 watts, where suitable.

He's also considering how to use mobile technology to do the same and he's obviously got some idea how this could be done but, he said, he's not ready to talk about that yet.

His colleague, DK Raju of Tenet, is clearly a man passionate about bringing tech and other benefits to rural India, and showed us round a number of projects it's got on the boil. He said that 65 per cent of the population of India still lives in a rural setting, with their only hope being in their children. He said Tenet has a serious commitment to education and healthcare with the greatest need for local entrepreneurs to implement the technology that's been developed. These entrepreneurs would act as owners of kiosks in villages, or clusters of villages, using a variety of software and hardware to make micromoney from the developments.

Corvan units provide both data and voice connections which can be extended using line of site masts to 20 or 30 kilometres providing broadband and as many as 4000 lines.

Tenet has also worked on producing software which is now being rolled out which will translate English into eight of the main Indian languages, and the kiosks will also be able to provide online English learning tools.

Raju also showed a solar powered Indradhanu weather system, and a way of converting existing satellite-cable TV to provide upload facilities. In our travels through the countryside this time round, we've noticed quite a few villages which have a large satellite dish used to feed TV into the area.

In healthcare, Tenet came up with an idea implemented by Neurosynaptic Communications Pvt Ltd and called Remedi. This setup takes vital signs from people including temperature, and blood pressure, which can be viewed remotely by experts. The kiosk owner can offer this telemedicine service and by linking to the access centre can send those results to a doctor over the internet anywhere in the world.

One of Tenet's most interesting invents is a cheap ATM, again organised by kiosk operators, which costs way less than the R800,000 a conventional model does and uses thumbprint recognition to dispense cash. The machine is just the vanguard of more impressive plans that would include online banking.

The Indian companies that developed the technology have already successfully exported it to other countries with similar infrastructure problems as India. The real need, however, was to recruit local people as kiosk operators and for them to develop local services which could help them to grow their microbusinesses and turn them into going concerns which would in the process give clear benefits to rural India.