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."
"Doc? Doc? Hey you there? I've got the kidney in my left hand and the crowbar in my right?"
Doctor on other side of the world..."Hey, iChat a/v went down again, what the hell does 'beta' mean anyway??"
Dude, if a community can't afford water, how is it going to afford e-anything?
...wrote in one of his books about a banana republic where a program was introduced to help every family in the country to purchase and learn to use a helicopter, because it would come out way cheaper than building the network of roads through the jungle between scattered settlements.
So true... Often modern technology is simply cheaper than the "simple" stuff. Think cellular phones in areas without standard phone networks...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Education
Really, how many teachers are motivated to help the unfortunate, but not so motivated as to live in a poor village?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
So when I came acorss [sic] this story, I decided to post it to slashdot.
:)
Funny how you just up and "decided to post it." Have you discovered some secret way to bypass the editors? If so, please share.
We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked.
You can either go to what appears to be their main page at: http://isee.enmail.com, and register, and get spammed, or you can go here: http://tenet.res.in/isee/ and download it directly without any registration.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
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.
The census of India 2001 ( a site Site Optimised for Netscape! )came out recently and is covered in India Today ( this article is not free however. Check your local library for a copy of the magazine. Its very interesting)
The 2001 Census data has information on Houses, Household Amenities and Assets in India and has very interesting findings. It seems there are some 2.4 million places of worship in the country, as against 1.5 million schools and colleges and a mere 600,000 hospitals and dispensaries. No wonder there is so much unnecessary religious strife.
The point is, there is a lot of opportunity for growth and innovative technology is greatly needed there to increase the level of education and quality of life there. The question of which technology is most needed first is very difficult to answer.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
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.
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.
Why do the people of Slashdot ask dumb questions without reading the article?
Since you're probably long gone I'll summarize for you:
0. In rural India, it's often really hard to get to places due to very poor roads, that get washed out in the rain, and the population is very broadly distributed on farms.
1. A teacher in the city can educate children in a rural area. (viz., telecommuting)
2. Doctors can run virtual clinics for villagers to give them medical advice.
3. Scientists can have meetings with local farmers to give them crop advice.
All of these things are IN DEMAND by the people who had a chance to try them out.
simon
home page
One of the successes of "microcapital" in developing countries is AKASHGANGA which provides computer aided milk collectors in rural India. Automating milk tabulation and analysis in milk collectives has reduced queue times, thus decreasing milk spoilage, and provides more accurate assesments of milk contributions.
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.
"It has two good aspects. The villagers can go to the kiosks to 'talk' to their dear ones, while the person who runs the kiosk can earn too. For the last two years, the villagers have been sending voice and video mails from the kiosks," Jalihal said.
OK you (we) guys in the US who have been failing to deliver mass market videophones for decades... here is an Indian guy who does it over a crappy dial-up line. And they have a business model too. Now do you understand why your jobs are disappearing to India?
I weep.
Backward, possibly even barbaric, societies are characterized by skewed priorities in spending. The Indians spend hundreds of millions of dollars on atomic-weapons research. Witness the recent attempts at building missiles with the capability of delivering a nuclear warhead. Meanwhile, the population engages in massive female infanticide or abortions targetting female fetuses.
Identical comments apply to China. Millions of dollars are spent on atomic-weapons research and on sending astronauts into outer space. Meanwhile, the population engages in massive female infanticide or abortions targetting female fetuses. Instead of spending millions of dollars on weapons research, why do the Chinese refuse to spend those wasted dollars on education programs that improve their backward culture?
The evidence for this anti-female atrocity is overwhelming. Please read "Mystery of the missing women" by the "Toronto Star". The normal male-to-female birth ratio is 1.05. Japan, Canada, the United States of America (USA), and even Vietnam have this ratio. By contrast, India, China, and South Korea have a ratio of 1.15. Further, the ratio of women to men is, normally, 106. Japan, Canada, the USA, and even Vietnam have this ratio. By contrast, India, China, and South Korea have a ratio of about 95.
It really is a big joke to read about how Indians or Chinese are bringing high technology into remote parts of India or China. They have their priorities completely backwards. First, introduce modern culture and modern notions of morality; then, worry about whether the Indian or Chinese boy can surf the web. By the way, having a modern notion of morality is unrelated to the degree of wealth in a nation. Look at impoverished Vietnam. It has a normal ratio of women to men. Look at wealthy South Korea. It has an abnormal ratio.
The female shortage in China and India is extremely severe. It is so severe that even the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), in 1999, did a front-page story on the problem in China. According to the WSJ, Chinese men kidnap Vietnamese women and force them to be brides. When they try to escape, the Chinese men cut their Achilles tendon.
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!
Prof. Jhunjhunwala and his team at IIT Chennai are also the people who invented WLL (Wireless in Local Loop) cellphone technology.
...
Their high bandwidth cellphone technology has been sold and deployed in both China and Brazil, but here in India our largest WLL cellphone network uses Qualcomm's CDMA2000 protocol..
funny the way the world works
shooting is not too good for my enemies