SEGAYA SHALINI is an unlikely internet entrepreneur. She lives in Pinjavakkam, a village of about 500 people 100 kilometres west of Chennai in Tamil Nadu. Pinjavakkam has an intermittent electricity supply and only five telephone lines, yet Shalini has organised an “always-on” internet connection to let locals surf the web as they would in any other internet cafe.
With her webcam and microphone, Shalini offers her customers email access, virtual consultations with a doctor, a weekly Q&A hour with farming experts in Chennai and even the chance for people who won’t or can’t use a keyboard to catch up with distant friends and relatives. Shalini’s business has been made possible thanks to Ashok Jhunjhunwala of the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, who is creating cheap technologies that will extend the modern world to the most remote places. Pinjavakkam is one of 193 places in the area that are part of his most successful project so far.
Jhunjhunwala has connected these sites to the internet via a system he developed called corDECT, which exploits essentially the same digital technology that connects a domestic cordless phone to its base station. Only in this case Shalini’s computer replaces the handset, while the base station is an antenna 10 kilometres away. Because of its higher data rate corDECT has the edge over mobile phone networks, which also reach several of his networked villages. Mobiles phones manage 9.6 kilobits per second at best, while corDECT operates at up to 70 kilobits per second.
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Jhunjhunwala’s idea has enjoyed explosive success. The first trial system was installed in February 2000. Today, some 50,000 villages across India are hooked up, and more than a million people bought into the system last year alone. Telecoms companies in South Africa, Tunisia, Kenya, Kazakhstan, Fiji and Yemen have also adopted the system.
But what do people in rural communities, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet, need the internet for? Shalini, who set up her business with a micro loan, is still struggling to answer that question, and is having a tough time convincing some local people to give it a try. “Not many people come here, maybe five or six customers a day,” she says. “Most are students checking their email.”
Jhunjhunwala’s thinking is different. He has a “build it and they will come” attitude. “There are a lot of rural uses,” he says. Businesses just have to find the ones that appeal to rural people. “Few businesses will come to rural areas because one village will only produce a few dollars a month in revenue, but if they have access to tens of thousands of villages, the business model starts to add up.”
“One village only produces a few dollars in revenue. But give businesses access to tens of thousands of villages and the dollars start to add up”
One service that has been a resounding success is e-choupal – choupal means meeting place in Hindi. It is a system created by a Kolkata-based trading firm called ITC to provide farmers with real-time prices for their crops so they don’t get ripped off by middlemen. Farmers can also buy grain, farming tools and get weather reports online in their own language. More than 3 million farmers in northern and central India now use the system. ITC is installing satellite internet connections at select rural centres and receives a fee for every purchase made through the site.
Jhunjhunwhala has moved on to develop other low-cost technologies. He is creating interfaces that will allow blood-pressure gauges, pulse meters and ECG recorders to connect to a computer so that doctors can diagnose patients’ illnesses remotely. For people who cannot afford PCs, his group is developing a “thin client” – a cut-down computer that runs programs off a central server, which supports many users and can be based kilometres away. He expects the units to cost around $130 each.
“Our income in India is a fraction of your incomes in the US and Europe,” says Jhunjhunwala. “So we need high-tech solutions that cost a fraction of their price in your countries.” Otherwise, millions of people will continue to go without.
