Slashdot Mirror
Networking Technology At Work In Rural India
abhikhurana writes "Whenever a news item about a plan to offer aid to a poor community in a developing country to set up an Internet backbone or any similar story is posted on Slashdot, there is always a debate among the readers if there is any point in spending so much money on such activities when people in such communities don't have basic amenities like clean drinking water. So when I came acorss this story,
I decided to post it to slashdot. It's about new software developed by Indian Institute of
Technology, Chennai, which allows video conferencing on low-bandwidth connections, and the impact this technology is having
on the small rural communities where it has been deployed."
Dude, if a community can't afford water, how is it going to afford e-anything?
I understand that utilizing the existing infrastructure is key in these sorts of projects, but I really have one question
Why do the people of rural India need videoconferencing?
It woul be much more suitable for scientific outposts in remote places in the world where the people can utilize the conferencing technology along with other data compression schemes to increase their "connectivity".
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
Maybe you can partner this up with cheap WiFi and some solar powered WiFi repeaters.
You could also have one attending physician in charge of many physician assitants in many small towns, instead of just using it for teaching.
But still, these people still need basic infrastructure, like clean running water, hospitals, electricity, and a working sanitation system.
However, I could see this useful for a doctor who may be visiting a rural community to see a patient. Say this patient has a disease he has never seen before, the doctor could talk to doctors in other cities to get their opinions and even said back pictures of the patient, allowing for a correct and accurate diagnosis of the patient.
I wish I could be less of a cynic. This certainly seems like a good idea, but people used to think television would save the world too, by making it possible to educate the masses about critical political or social things.
I can easily envision this technology getting used for entertainment. "No drinking water? No problem! Just tune in at a kiosk and forget your troubles for a half hour!" Then available bandwidth starts getting eaten up by mindless drivel instead of important information (like the doctor or agriculture specialist mentioned in the article), and some bright person realizes they can charge people for advertisements to consumers who can't afford anything...
Noble intentions perhaps, but many of the world's problems have nothing to do with technology, so it seems wierd to me to try to use technology to solve them.
Wow, a lucrative publishing contract! I don't have to be evil anymore. --Meteor
I suspect Lem was being satrical. But it's not news that countries with no infrastructure often leapfrog more developed nations. I'm told that Indonesia never built an earth-based telephone infrastructure, because by the time they could afford to do it, it was cheaper to get their own comsats. And we've all seen the way the Third World has embraced cell phones and text messaging.
WRONG.
Before you get all of the above which are very very expensive, as in 100s of millions of dollars. You have to find some sort of way to be productive like sewing textiles or above subsitance farming or factory production, etc. Any successful development story starts with the fact that the country or region in question made something first that people wanted and then it developed. If you build all this infrastructure wherever, as soon as the money stops flowing in, and it would have to flow in permanently and forever, it would all fall apart. This has happened over and over again in Sub-Saharan African and else where.
[ANGRY-RANT]
that we are TOTALLY screwed... if they got ppl coming up with new technologies that WORK over in India... it means corpers and domestics need even LESS of us here in the US... obviously us americans didn't come up with it... which means what? That that's another set of IT jobs that leaves the US to go to those guys. (or at least contracts that we could've had) Face it, we're not falling behind but we're not exactly price competitive these days either.
Granted we don't know how well they work and how secure they are... but guess what? If the technology outsourcing thing keeps picking up (not an *if* anymore is it?) we're gonna lose MORE jobs and they'll get more. In the end the corpers'll have to sell to the affluent here and to everyone elsewhere. It will look as if the US economy rocks on paper but it will hit rock bottom for at least 2/3 of us that aren't well to do, prices won't go down either, they'll go down only enough to be affordable if you forgot to pay rent. It won't happen next year all at once, but how many of us will be unlucky enough to be dead of natural causes that soon? In 20 years the slums we saw in all the futuristic society movies may be the slums many of us will call home.
To old timers among you, I ask this... have you made any breakthroughs lately? If not, I doubt tenure will keep you around these days. Unless you're a teacher. Tenure nowadays just means a higher pay job to eliminate and a bigger bonus to get for some CEO somewhere.
I'm not a doomsayer. I'm just a guy realizing that other than in small semi rural expanding areas here in the USA (where ppl can't afford to outsource offshores because no big corps have taken over yet) everyone else is gonna have a hard time finding jobs once they lose them...) Here at least (I live in a little suburban hell in VA) you can at least start a small company and hope to survive against the big guys... but how long will that be before ANOTHER republican president takes over and completely destroys the tatters of our so called "recovering" economy.
[/ANGRY-RANT]
-Khyeron
The problem with introducing technology into the underdeveloped countries is not the technology itself, but the way it's applied. Typically, it comes from some industrial-world aid agency that simply doesn't understand local conditions. They'll invent complicated systems that attempt to duplicate features of Western infrastructre, without considering prerequisites that a less developed country doesn't have.
Some years back, there was a big push to build factories in Africa to process Sunflower seeds into oil. This would have connected a resource (lots of African farmers grow sunflowers) with an unmet need (lots of Africans needs to consume more vegetable fat). All the money was essentially wasted: the factories couldn't sustain themselves without huge subsidies. It cost too much to transport the seeds to the factories and the oil to the consumers, especially in areas with bad roads, corrupt local officials, etc.
A better solution came from an inventor in Vermont: a cheap sunflower seed press. Sell them to farmers so they can process the seeds themselves, and sell the oil to their neighbors. The whole process is economically self-sustaining: farmers pay for the presses with profits from their oil, and profits from the presses pay for more presses. The only problem they had starting up was getting a grant to develop the press. It seems that nobody was prepared to fund a development effort that only ran to $30,000...
The bottom line is that technology can solve third-world problems. It just has to be the right technology.
People are homeless.
Gah! If it wasn't for technology like the Internet or TV you wouldn't know they were hungry (probably could by mail, but Americans are too lazy to become involved in mailed communication).
If it were for airplanes, you couldn't drop food shipments.
Priorities are fine. Food versus technology isa not prioritizing. It's basic neanderthal wanking pretending they're better because they're supposedly more concerned.
Luddite morons.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
In Bali, Indonesia I recently visited a hindu flavoured temple dedicated to water for rice paddies (it was on a permanent spring). I was surprised to see in the outer less sacred areas of the temple, were facilities for community social events and possibly school. There was a badminton court set up under one hall (they have roofs to keep off the rain but no walls). Another area was the local bath house and laundry (well downstream of the holy water). The temple had all the facilities needed for weddings, funerals, community meetings, school, sport etc. Around the corner was a marketplace for food, furniture etc.
Would this have been counted as a temple but not a school?
It's not about the application, it's about the infrastructure.
It's a poor country. What better way to improve the economy than to provide them with technology that allows them to be productive and earn a living even from such remote places?
A bit of training and you have potentially thousands of Google Answers researchers, or chat-room moderators, or whatever jobs suitable for large amounts of low-qualified, low-wage work force who can work remotely online.
It's the logical step following the call-centres movement.
Fewer medical facilities and schools than churches? So what?
I would guess that this is true for any area of the United States or any other democratic country that tolerates multiple religions.
A quick perusal of the Yellow Pages for Madison, Wisconsin, USA shows roughly half as many listings for schools as churches. And the combined number of hospitals, pharmacies, clinics and chiropractors is less than the number of schools.
So hardly an indicator of unnecessary religious strife. India's a giant complex democracy that is still very young. Hell it took the US almost 200 years to figure out it should let all its people vote. Tolerance does not grow easily. You must work at it hard. The fact that India even holds it together is impressive.
No, I'm not new to Slashdot, and yes I know the answer already...but goddamnit people. One of the most important points in the article is that the villagers spoke with an agricultural scientist. They were so thrilled and learned so much that they requested MORE meetings with other scientists/doctors. This is knowledge that the villagers are receiving. I'll rehash the over-used but very wise phrase "Give a man food and you feed him for a day. Teach him to grow it, and you feed him for a lifetime." The most powerful thing about the internet over say...water...is that you can teach the villagers how to get their own water!!! Imagine that! A learning tool....as opposed to sending smart westerners in to fix all their basic needs without them learning how to take care of themselves. Afterall, wasn't the internet supposed to be about the proliferation of knowledge? Seems like a good thing to me.
I'll snip the text jic.
The Kalkaji Experiment
The first experiment of teaching computing skills to underprivileged children was done at Kalkaji, New Delhi. In January 1999, a hole was made in the boundary wall of NIIT office at Kalkaji and a computer kiosk was installed. As the computer was accessible from the outside through the opening in the boundary wall, the experiment was named as "Hole-In-The-Wall.
The objective of this experiment was to check if people would be interested in using an unmanned Internet based kiosk out in the open, without any instructions. It also aimed at ascertaining if an unmanned kiosk can be operational without any supervision in an outdoor location.
The boundary wall of the NIIT office where the computer was placed is adjacent to a slum, which has a lot of children from 0-18 years of age. Some of these children do not go to school and a few, who do, go to government schools that lack resources, good teachers and student motivation. These children are not particularly familiar with the English language.
The results of the experiment have been quite exciting. Within three months of opening up of the Internet kiosk, it was found that the children, mostly from the slum, had achieved a certain level of computer skills without any planned instructional intervention. They were able to browse the Internet, download songs, go to cartoon sites, work on MS Paint. They even invented their own vocabulary to define terms on the computer, for example, "sui" (needle) for the cursor, "channels" for websites and "damru" (Shiva's drum) for the hourglass (busy) symbol. By the fourth month, the children were able to discover and accomplish tasks like creating folders, cutting and pasting, creating shortcuts, moving/resizing windows and using MS Word to create short messages that too in the absence of keyboard. When the issue of whether the kiosk should be removed from the boundary wall arose, the children strongly opposed to the idea. The parents also felt that the computer was good for their children. The kiosk continues to be operational till today with approximately eighty children are using it per day.
[pictures]
Kalkaji photos - 6th March 2002
Photos courtesy of Professor Ronald Lee, Director, Erasmus University Research Institute for Decision and Information Systems (EURIDIS), Rotterdam, Netherlands.
- - - - - - -
The Madangir Experiment
The Government of Delhi in partnership with NIIT Ltd. and with the support of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (MTNL) has initiated the Bhagidaari project for the setting up of 6 Internet Kiosks - each Kiosk having 5 computers - in Ambedkar Nagar.
Ambedkar Nagar, earlier known as Madangir, is a residential colony (and not a slum) in South Delhi which houses people from lower socio-economic strata. Unlike Kalkaji, the residents of Madangir are relatively better off. Most of the children are aware of computers and a few of them have even used it in their schools.
Each of these kiosks is connected to the Internet through an ISDN line. The computers allow access only to the Internet and not any applications resident on the computer itself. The reason being that the kiosks are not manned, so it is possible that the users may knowingly/unknowingly delete certain vital applications/programs leading to a non-functioning computer. However, certain security measures are being worked out to resolve this issue and access to computer-based application will be provided in due course.
A customised web interface has been developed and deployed to facilitate the ease of surfing the Internet. The interface focuses on a variety of areas including educational contents, and caters to a wide variety of audiences. The major areas covered are education, edutainment, entertainment, news, information about Delhi and India. But the web interface in no way restricts the users from accessing any other kind of information.
Currently, the estimated number of users per day range from 40-60. M
You often hear the economic and social libertarians saying, "Government is the problem, not the solution. If you want you want more goods and services, let the marketplace take care of itself." I guess these two examples prove that this is actually true -- but when taken to extremes, the price of this approach can be pretty high.
No India will find a way of employing tech that will be radically different than the West. You can bet that they will learn from our mistakes caused by dot com stupidity and greed. No dot com debacle for them. The gold rush is over, we are about to lose out because we do not know how to be realistic in our commerce. We do not see the importance of the changes in the world economy.
The concept of a GNP is not a concept of economic growth, and to say that growth in GNP is a measure of developement is a falacious assumption, especially in countries like India of China.
To assume that this tech is expensive is rediculous, the cost of sending messangers, sending teachers to remote areas, Doctors, technicians,
administraters, health nurses, more than offsets the cost of the tech and equipment. Our problem in the west is that everything computer has to have bells, whistles, video candy, and super fast expensive communication tech. Funny but simple video communication that we have been able to do since the early 1990s will catch on and be a great boom for India. We ignored it because we didn't care to use it for anything other than goofy web garbage cam and it did not entertain us sufficiantly. We are becoming a shallow silly
over endulged bunch of brain dead consumers and it shows. Most of the rest of the world doesn't envy us, they fear, and some pity our greed.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
> more important things like improving their culture?
> First, introduce modern culture and modern notions of morality;
Aren't we the self-declared pundits on barbarism and modernism. If you mean not having an MTV culture, not wiping out the indegenous people but co-existing with them, not having hate groups like KKK (don't winch) mean India has a barbaric culture, then you must be right. Unlike some countries, civilization in India has been around for more than 5000 years, so it has to be barbaric, right?
But first, please get some basic facts about India straight:
1. Despite being exploited and oppressed by the British for more than 200 years, India is not going astray. She has one of the strongest democracies in the world. For example, when the Prime Minister of India declared that he wanted to help US out with troops in Iraq, major public disapproval forced the govt. to act otherwise. In 50 years after independence, India has managed to put up more than a handful of industries. Excess food is exported, and donated to UN. There is a burgeoning middle class, which is now threatening to take jobs away from countries like US. All this in FIFTY years, starting from the uneducated, impoverished, totally undeveloped state that the British managed to keep India in.
2. India does not have one culture. There are more cultures co-existing in India than you can find in Europe.
3. Unlike some cultures which like to fry criminals, Indian society is very tolerant. Which is probably why people committing anti-female atrocities still walk around.
There are plenty of areas where the country is performing fairly pitifully, i agree. Like female infanticide, as you mentioned. Let me assure you it is not as widespread as you think it is. But that is not the point. The point is why infanticide is present in the first place ? Because parents think girls will be a burden to them: they cannot earn a living doing physical labor. Which is why technology is so important. You have to show the older generation that it is possible to make a living without becomming a construction laborer or working on a farm. You have to show them that in the modern world, females have as much chance of sustaining themselves as the males.
I am saying this most respectfully-- most westerners, including those writers sitting in air-conditioned rooms at WSJ, do not know $hit about the third world. If you want a better understanding of the workings of a very complex society like India's, please drop by sometime. We will even have plenty of bottled water for you, don't worry. Till then, adios with a parting message:
We do not eat frog brains, we do not make soup with monkey eyes floating in it, and we do not jump around from tree to tree.