Bringing computing to India's masses

Via, however, admits that it will need to select battle-hardened software. "There is no way I am going to take care of all of the problems," said Ravi Pradhan, country manager for Via. "The idea is to get as close to perfect as possible."

Others are taking a more socialistic approach to lowering costs. Intel, for instance, promotes communal arrangements that spread the cost of a computer across an entire village.

In the southern state of Kerala, Intel has helped the government launch a programme that assists local entrepreneurs in lining up financing to set up an "Akshaya Centre" — sort of an Internet cafe — and pays them to provide PC training to one member of each family in a village. The Akshayas also provide videoconferencing for families with overseas relatives, data entry for local cooperative banks, and links to commodity exchanges.

The system is modelled after a long-established practice in which India's ubiquitous pay phones are owned by individuals, not the national telecommunications companies. "Akshaya could become one of these programs that scales out across the country," Sampat said.

Thin is finally in
The Indian market may also finally provide an outlet for the thin client, a type of basic computer tried repeatedly in North America and Europe by Oracle and Sun with little success. Thin clients, sometimes known as network computers or dumb terminals, effectively are used only to communicate with a server; the server itself is the device that stores the data, houses the applications, performs the calculations and connects to the Internet.

Although a server can only handle a finite number of thin clients, advocates say the systems reduce both hardware costs and support headaches.

Professor Deepak Phatak of the Indian Institute of Technology conducted a study of computer use in a bank and determined that thin clients would cost about a third as much as multifunctional personal computers. A large insurer installed 13,000 of the machines after the study, he said, and other companies are contemplating similar moves.

"Ninety-five percent of the employees only used a single application," Phatak said. "Fifteen thousand rupees (£200) gets you a thin client with support for three years."