|
Would
you believe me if I told you that steel can be cut with water?
Would you think I’m crazy if I suggested that the desktop
computing paradigm that exists today with PCs and Windows
and silicon chips would be ancient history a few years from
now? And how would you react to this reckless statement: Before
this decade is out, people in every village of India, literate
or illiterate, will be using computers and the Internet as
matter-of-factly as they sip their morning cuppa today.
Bizarre as it may seem, water is being used to cut steel these
days. Research at MIT’s Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
led to the development of a microcontroller that controls
a high-speed water jet so accurately, it can go right through
steel. There’s a whole lot of technology like that, which,
with a little bit of embedded computing, produces unexpected
results.
It appears extreme today to think of the PC as dinosaurian.
Fact is, outside of the white-collared corporate desktop world,
it’s inevitable that the box-monitor-keyboard form factor
will evolve into something more suitable for the rest of the
world. As the price of hardware continues to drop dramatically,
experts believe it won’t be many years before a far,
far cheaper device than the PC will be affordably available
to more than half the world’s populace. Like the evolution
from the mainframe to the mini to the PC, this new device
too will likely redefine the entire IT paradigm and spectrum,
and it could have a totally different set of interfaces and
operating principles than what we’re used to today.
Which brings us to our third proposition—an all-pervasive
computing device deployed and used throughout rural India.
Preposterous? Well, the Ministry of Communications & Information
Technology (MCIT) doesn’t think so. And, putting its
money where its mouth is, the Indian government seed-funded
the formation of Media Lab Asia,“convened”
by the aforementioned renowned MIT Media Lab, to achieve just
this goal.
Fancy terms like “bridging the digital divide” and
“closing the gap between the information haves and have-nots”
go down very well at conferences, but what’s the reality
on the ground? Sadly, after years of intense research and
dozens of products/solutions
from various government-funded bodies like the NCST, C-DAC,
NIC, IITs, etc, etc, we’re hardly a toe’s length
away from square one, and still grappling
with issues like fonts, multilingual interfaces and such like.
Not that the research has been at all sub-standard. It’s
just that everyone’s been working in different
directions and sometimes even at cross-purposes.
So why then would yet another research outfit, Media Lab Asia
(MLAsia), be any different? Because its role is that of a
facilitator, says MLAsia founding director Alex Pentland.
Media Lab Asia hopes to leverage and enable people who have
already started to take action and make things happen. It
will help solve technology challenges by sharing them across
a broader base, and through the setup of world-class research
hubs at the IITs and other universities across the country.
It will be the go-between, connecting esoteric research with
practical pilot projects conducted in villages by NGOs, and
it will take things to a critical point at which commercialisation
will be viable for entrepreneurs and industry.
But first new kinds of knives to cut through barriers such
as cost, language and power need to be found. The challenge
lies in creating low-cost, language-independent, friendly
devices and connecting every person in India irrespective
of location. Then would come digital service provision and
local content creation.
Media Lab Asia is looking farther into the future than anyone
has dared to in India so far. They talk of providing bits
for all by inventing a world computer, which will be language-independent
by design. This device would serve the purposes of not just
rural India, and would transcend barriers of affordability,
power requirements and language-based interfaces. Perhaps
it would be an offshoot of the Simputer project at the IISc
in Bangalore, which MLAsia might support. It would probably
draw from Sanjay Dhande’s “Info Thela” project
at IIT Kanpur, which postulates so-called bicycle computers
that combine mobility with self-generated power.
The language issue might be addressed by providing icon-based
and speech interfaces in Indian languages developed out of
research by MIT’s Deb Roy and drawing from work done
by Anupam Basu at IIT Kharagpur. It’s unique because
it separates the (open-source) technology portion from the
linguistic part,permitting
just about anybody to record the content for the multi-lingual
speech interfaces.
The connectivity issue would be taken care of by using an
enhanced adaptation of the wireless 802.11 protocols, using
the unlicensed spectrum
to create wi-fi networks for almost-free rural connectivity.
The work already done by Ashok Jhunjhunwala at IIT Madras
could serve as the base for this.
Yes, a few of the requisite bits and pieces and bytes seem
to be aligning themselves appropriately, but it’s going
to be a long an arduous trek to the big picture. The stakes
are huge indeed, for bringing about a digital revolution amidst
a population of one billion means unleashing the energies
of the world’s second largest human resource, as IT secretary
Rajeeva Ratna Shah eloquently
puts it.
But, as we have learned so expensively in the past, with India
it’s not just about finding the right knife. It’s
about putting it to use effectively that counts. And that’s
something that even a Media Lab Asia cannot do for us.
-
Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com
|
