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The Indian Info-Rickshaws
DoomDoom writes "CNN is running a story
on how the Indian government is delivering health and educational services on a WiFi equipped rickshaw to the poorest of its citizens. It's a poetical union of a typical third world product with high-tech! Do you still think computing is unnecssary for the poorest of the poor?"
"By using computers, I can improve my knowledge," Sharma, whose parents plan to pull her out of school at 15
Ouch. I complain that I only was able to go to a technical school [putting myself through college now]; at least I got to finish out high school.
It amazes me everytime I read about how hard so many people have it, then I look around and see these hideously overweight people driving SUVs, tossing out food, with a ridiculous sense of entitlement (e.g. "society owes me because I'm special") to that effect.
I wonder if more of us in America will ever wake up and realize how good we have it? Yes, of course, the wealth/technology/etc we have introduces its own set of problems, (e.g. SCO, Microsoft, obeisty, ...) but I'd rather
deal with that anyday than lack of education or starvation.
feh. stuff.
If they need to change a tire, and use the hub to get tech support, will they hear an english speaker? ;)
I could use a few ex-dotcommers to pull my rickshaw around. They'd be getting a pittence, I'd get transportation and it's clean for the environment. Win Win situation ... who wants to sign up?!
This is awful! Now, these newly uplifted Indian masses will take even more of our programming jobs!
Grumble, grumble...populism...communism...grumble grumble!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The thing I have to wonder about is:
How is this really effective?
With a single rickshaw, even with decent class organization, how are these skills going to help people get better jobs or do their work better? Especially when they are barely completing junior high school years?
While it is a nice way to spread tech around, I dont see how it makes life better for people than the same amount of money in other educational things (books, teachers, that much money goes a long way).
Not only is cheap computing vital for the poor of the 3rd world, but for us here in America.
If you want to build community here in America, where mass media has supplanted our face to face community, cheap wireless broadband might be vital. Otherwise, you get a hollow corporate teevee community, which pushed hollow corporate consumer values into children's heads. When Americans get online, they can rebuild that community. Cheap computers and broadband are needed in order to distribute video entertainment, which need not be produced by large corporations.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
especially free pr0n, which is only available on the internet.
Probably every single one of you reading this post has spent more time in front of your computer today than these people will, at a rickshaw, in a month. And the Indian government wants to "... use technology to improve education, health care and access to agricultural information in India's villages ..."? If they were serious about that they'd create a tiny computer center in each village and instead of sending rickshaws around, send teachers instead.
What always amazes me is how governments in other countries manage to get IT projects finished with tiny budgets. Here in the UK or in the US the rickshaws would have cost 100s of thousands each and a small fortune to run. Look at eVoting for example - i've heard prices of $10000 per machine! WTF costs $10000 to stick an unsecure crappy computer in a box and put some strung together voting software on it? India they do it with some custom build hardware and it costs nothing!
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Slashdot in 5 Paragraphs
It's good to see the Indian government is taking the initiatives to bring modern technology to within reach of the rural community.
In the article, it mentions many Indian villages are poorly wired, telephone lines can go dead for weeks at a time, making wireless technology the most reliable Web connection.
However, what it takes is a willing government to find an alternative, rather than giving promises to improve telephone lines.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
I'll bet it's even poetic, which is how most normal people would have put it since "poetical" is an extremely uncommon word and the more proper usage is, indeed, "poetic".
... oh wait, terribly sorry. Forgot where I was for a second. Stupid me.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Secondly:
You're absolutely correct. It is just you. If you're not interested in the article just because it's not about something more interesting (like Scott Peterson's latest hairstyle or the outcome of the six-hour finale of 'Who'll hook up with the mad axe murderer?') then I respectfully suggest that you move along. The majority of people onDrill baby drill - on Mars
As to who thinks there are better places to put resources, none other than Bill and Melinda Gates think so. Two of the high profile efforts are and AIDS vaccine and TB efforts, although there's plenty more fronts they're throwing financing at.
I remember an interview with him (can't find it online) where he recalled being at a meeting with dozens of people pitching high tech solutions to Third World problems and him rejecting almost all of them in favor of vaccines. He said it was silly to start laying down fiber optic cable (this was a few years before WiFi) in an area where you couldn't draw clean water from a well.
Now, don't get me wrong. Any effort that conveys health information or basic education to people who need it is, by definition, a Good Thing (TM). Also, this is an indigenous effort of Indians (presumably the Indian government) helping their own, not someone outside trying to find the best place to spend their money. One would assume (and the photos of healthy people in TFA certainly imply) they've already got their vaccination, clean water, and hunger plans already in place, so they might as well experiment with alternate education efforts.
Still, I have to wonder about the long term viability of this project. With India's struggling masses, you have to wonder if the money might be better spent elsewhere.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
When oh when will the /. crew get it into their heads that the rest of the world is not living in filth, squalor and poverty? They have a middle class in India too you know! Jeez! I mean, which is it? Are the Indians robbing us of our god-given, high-skill programming jobs or are they living in mud-huts and unable to read or write? Make up your minds!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Liar.
Most poor in the 3d world are, and have been, scraping by with barely enough housing, food, clothing and medical for generations. They're quite familiar with how to get by that way, thank you very much.
The ones that aren't stupid, which is remarkably many of them, know that the only way out of this multi-generational rut is by learning a skilled trade.
It sounds like the bulk of the 3d world poor are some kind of whiny welfare cases. They're not. They're just born into grinding poverty and are all willing to work hard as hell to get out of it, if they were only given an opportunity.
Facetime with a computer is an opportunity. Even if it just means you can say you can wield a mouse and type Word documents, that's a stunning chance for doing better than shovelling shit from one place to another like your illiterate father and grandfather did.
This is so perfectly out of a william gibson novel i want to hurl :)
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No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
I work for the Australian arm of a large Indian software company. As part of the community projects run by the company, we fund the improvement of sanitation infrastructure in some of the poorest parts of India. As these places do not receive much information about software development, these projects are the only way my company is known in these areas.
When people from my company travel to rural India and mention who they work for, people immediately assume they build toilets!
Instead by providing a means to allow the people to educate themselves, they and their peers will be able to improve their own situation and thus have a stake in continuing to improve. With the exception of _real_ need handouts do not ultimatly improve a persons, much less a nations future.
Btw I think this from world fact book is relevant:
Educating these people (and thus providing a means) about their own environment will do much more than you give credit to helping those destitute.
read this http://in.rediff.com/money/2004/aug/19spec.htm
I was working in the NGO tech sector in Cambodia for a while and came across a similar project, which also made it to CNN. See Digital Home Mag
Rumor has it that this project only ever sent and received a handful of emails before everyone lost interest.
It turned out that internet is pretty irrelevant to the locals. The only people who got anything out of it were the aid workers who got covered on CNN.
An email connection that is only available once a week at best when the rickshaw comes round is not much value to anyone, especially if you dont know anyone else who has an email address. Teaching spreadsheets and MS Word is not much value in a community which has no computers the rest of the week. If you are reliant on subsistence agriculture like I suspect most of these villages are, you are likely more worried about digging your fields by hand than calculating crop yields. Telemedicine is all very well but irrelevant if you cant afford the drugs or surgery required. There is very little internet content relevant to a rural farmer. Any grand talk of eGovernment are pointless if your local government is not on line.
The best you can hope for is a couple of kids get a glimpse of the outside world and get the ambition and drive to get out and make something of themselves.
The people who set up these projects on the other hand get to pat each other on the back, fly off to nice conferences in expensive hotels where they tell each other about how valuable their work is, and of course appear on CNN.
In my experience as soon as there is a community has a purpose for an internet connection, the free market kicks in and internet cafes spring up like mushrooms. As any traveler will tell you most moderately prosperous 3rd world towns are full of internet cafes full of local kids IMing each other.
A better use of government time would be laying copper (or even fiber) to these villages so they could start with a phone connection, and then use government policy to keep internet connection costs down.
A better use of our resources would be to stop subsidizing our farmers so that the 3rd world poor can compete fairly and work themselves out of poverty.
First of all, lets not turn this into yet another outsourcing related to flame war
Secondly, being an Indian, I can tell you this (and similar technology related efforts) make a big difference. In a lot of different ways. While these projects may or may not fulfill their key goal (whatever this may be), what it does provide is a sense of confidence to the people. A feeling of being cared for by the government. A sense of being looked after. And then, all such gadgets/advancements still generate a sense of wonder in the people. There is a sense of novelty associated to such devices/initiatives.
The point I'm trying to convey is, in the more developed world, such devices or initiatives happen far too often (and maybe even at a faster pace). For a big, poor country, that broke out of the shackles not too long ago (we have been independent only 60 years now), such initiatives bring about lot of self belief and confidence.
http://efil.blogspot.com/