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Karnataka
By Anand Parthasarathy
Many of the "Mahithi Ghars", or information kiosks, in Goa are across the road from Government offices. But the rural folk prefer to spend Rs. 15 to access an application form and despatch it electronically, though the same form can be had and submitted free of cost at the office. They have realised that electronic transmission fetches them quick action. In Tamil Nadu, an innovative info kiosk operator has installed a web camera on his PC. He recently took a photo of a diseased `ladies finger' (vendakkai) brought in by a farmer and within the day, experts at the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University diagnosed the plant disease and suggested a remedy. The Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh, India's most `wired' rural reach has taken to Wi-Fi technology, so that women shy of coming to the info `dhabas' can access information right from their hearths. An 85 km. stretch between Lucknow and Kanpur is now known as the Digital Gangetic Plain: Thanks to a project of the Media Lab Asia, it has been wired with Wi-Fi repeaters, so that what was conceived in the West as a means of short range communication over 100 metres or less, can be leveraged to provide Internet links of up to 100 km. taking Net-based services to the `unconnected India' of the villages. Ghana, Africa, is creating a Linux-based Wi-Fi router system — and the basic device to link to the Net would be the Simputer, the hand-held computer developed by students and faculty of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. A National Conference on Wireless Networking organised here on Wednesday by the Manufacturer's Association of Information Technology (MAIT) heard a panel discussion on how Wi-Fi — the technology to wirelessly connect to Internet that has been recently legalised by the Government — could be used to bridge the Digital Divide. But to the surprise of many in the audience, the examples cited by the panelists clearly showed that India's rural masses were perhaps ahead of their more sophisticated urban counterparts in recognising the compelling attractions of this new technology — and swiftly exploiting it. The panel chairman, N. Seshagiri, former head of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and one of the father figures of India's electronics revolution, saw Wi-Fi making a drastic change in the pace at which Indians could be `e-nabled'. Vinay Deshpande, CEO of the company Encore Software, which is co-developing the commercial versions of the Simputer, saw this truly `desi' computing device playing a major role in leveraging the Wi-Fi. N. Krishna Kumar, CEO of MindTree Consulting, felt that ultimately it was infrastructure that could make or break such key technologies. The delegates were told that, incredibly, 60-70 per cent of the capacity of 350,000 km. of fibre optic cabling laid countrywide by the BSNL was idle because the `last mile' link to the customer was missing. Dr. Seshagiri suggested that State governments should purchase this waste bandwidth at special prices and join hands with private providers to provide the final connectivity. In his inaugural remarks, the Karnataka IT Secretary, Vivek Kulkarni, stressed that the allocation of frequencies for the Wi-Fi technology was being regulated with 70-year-old laws. New technologies demanded cooperation, not regulation, he added, suggesting that both defence and telecom agencies needed to join hands to ensure that Wi-Fi was not throttled before it could fully develop. The conference heard presentations on Wi-Fi state-of-the-art by leading Indian and international players, including D-Link, Proxim Wireless, Convergent Communications, Cisco, Intel and SMC Networks. Prof. Asoke Talukder of the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Bangalore, described wireless networks for campuses. Prakash Shukla, CIO of Taj Group of Hotels, reported on wireless initiatives of the hospitality industry in India.
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