Bringing the benefits of computer technology to rural villages in India will require a substantial amount of work — and a lot of extra car batteries, said professor Jitendra Shah.
Shah — who works in the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, an organisation that develops supercomputers in Mumbai — has launched a computer programme designed to alleviate the grinding poverty found throughout the country.
In a pilot installation in a village near Mumbai, students use PCs, donated by Via Technologies, to perform geometry homework, while local women track their savings in a micropayment program. Later this month, college teachers from around India will take a three-week training course that will allow them to replicate the program in other regions.
The PCs run on car and truck batteries. Unfortunately, the batteries regularly need recharging and the public electrical power system can't always handle the demand. Three weeks ago, the village transformer blew because too many people tapped into it illegally, a chronic problem in the area. The government refused to rebuild the transformer until the villagers promised to punish anyone who stole power. The day after it was rebuilt, the transformer blew again.
"We've got power this morning, but I don't know for how long," Shah said. One possible source of relief: a future project that would replace most of the PCs with solar-powered thin cells.
Shah is on the front lines of a movement to help bridge the digital divide. The number of PCs installed worldwide is expected to grow from about 670 million today to around one billion by 2010. Most of those new machines will be installed in emerging nations.
Other projects in India include a cash machine that can also serve as an Internet kiosk. It costs about 50,000 rupees, or just under £600. One of India's largest banks is deploying it in rural communities, said PD Sohale, directorate of information technology for the state of Maharashtra.
Intel, meanwhile, is developing a PC that can run on car batteries and comes with a special case that keeps out dust, according to Intel India President Ketan Sampat. The company is also developing a program in Kerala that will put PCs in the hands of local entrepreneurs, who will then sell computing time to villagers.
The difficulty of life in these rural regions is hard to overestimate. Located east of the metropolis, the village is in the path of New Bombay, a massive construction project designed for Mumbai's growing population of 17 million.
