The Hindu : 'Wireless is the way to go'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 03, 2002

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National

'Wireless is the way to go'

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE DEC. 2. Wireless connectivity is the only viable way to go, if the rural masses are to be e-nabled, there is simply no way one can put wires into the ground on the scale required, feels Phillip Clay, Chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Prof. Clay, an expert on urban planning, was here to interact with local IT institutions and deliver a keynote address at an international conference on collaborative design for sustainable innovation. "It is very farsighted of the Indian Government to have opened up the "Wi-FI" spectrum (the 802.11b wireless connection standard)," he said.

The MediaLab Asia, set up a year ago as a collaboration between MIT and the Government of India, was currently addressing the logistic challenges in harnessing wireless to solve the "last 25 Km problem'' — the final gap that in many cases needed to be bridged before the remote corners of the country could share the benefits of Information Technology.

The other challenge, according to Prof. Clay, was to make the personal computer — or a PC-like device — sufficiently affordable and rugged for operating in remote areas. "We tend to think in the United States that $ 600 was an affordable PC — but I do see that would not be appropriate here." In taking such technologies to the masses, he also warned that a country needed to create its own set of rules. "Technology does not have ethics," he said.

Prof. Clay hoped that Indian institutions would come forward to use the large course resources that MIT had recently placed in the public domain. While MIT may not have the ability to interact with every user, its faculty was available for any specific help. MIT has had a long association with Indian academia: It led the American consortium whose programmes resulted in the creation of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-K) in 1961 — and exactly forty years later, it again joined hands with the Government of India to create MediaLab Asia. MIT was associated in the joint studies, which went into the INSAT range of satellites launched by ISRO. In recent years, MIT has launched an India Programme to support its students to work in leading Indian technology institutions.

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