Category: Deeshaa (Rural Development)

Atanu Dey visited the Mercedes Benz International School in Pune: “[It is the] Rolls-Royce of schools in India. They follow the International Baccalaureate Organizations curricula. About half their students are Indians and the others are the children of expatriates working in multinational firms in Pune…It is the kind of school that if you have to ask what the tuition fees are, you probably cannot afford it. With only 167 students, it is as exclusive as it is expensive. The annual fee is mind-bogglingto me at leastover half a million rupees a year. The top fees is Rs 5.7 lakhs ( approximately, US$ 13,000) and the one-time fixed cost is Rs 3 lakhs.”

He concludes his trip report with the following observation: “When I look at the vicious cycle of poverty that the majority of Indias children are caught in, I have only one hope and that is education. If we can educate just one generation fully, we have some hope of solving Indias problems. That is the challenge but given the uneducated leadership, I am afraid that it may not come to pass.”

[via Reuben Abraham] John Daly writes: “The rich countries are spending more on ICT, and the investments are buying knowledge and information processing capacities that potentially increase productivity and improve targeting of efforts. The increase in productivity, in relatively egalitarian rich societies, benefits large numbers of people, helping them further away from all aspects of poverty. This ICT investment provides a competitive advantage for the rich countries versus the poor. The real digital divide is not measured in personal computers and cell phones, but in the power that people and societies have to appropriate ICT for their benefit.”

WSJ writes:

Relying on signals transmitted from a satellite to a receiving dish and from there to a set-top signal-decoding box, rather than through cables, digital TV can transmit anywhere, delivering more channels and better picture quality.

“Digital TV is going to change the dynamics of the Indian TV marketplace,” says Vivek Couto of Media Partners Asia, a consultancy in Hong Kong, who sees a looming commercial battle between digital and cable companies.

Mr. Couto expects India to have 12 million paying subscribers to digital TV by 2015 — a huge jump from just 400,000 currently — generating 45 billion rupees, or about $1 billion, in annual revenue. Cable connections are expected to exceed 70 million by then, he says.

There is pent-up demand for such service. India is the world’s third-largest television market with 108 million TV-equipped households, a number that is growing by about nine million a year. But that still leaves half of all Indian households without a television set. Moreover, many existing TVs are old 14-inch (35-centimeter) black-and-white models that can’t receive some satellite channels via cable, even if cable operators were willing to hook up remote areas for new subscribers.

The New York Times writes:

Across the continent, fewer than 10 percent of working people have health insurance, pension coverage or other forms of social security, according to the International Labor Organization, the United Nations’ oldest specialized agency.

But that is slowly changing, and not just because some African governments are expanding their ailing social security systems, vestiges of the colonial days and geared mostly to the vast number of people on the government payroll.

The bigger push is coming from everyday Africans who are tired of waiting for politicians to address their needs and have begun spinning their own safety nets.

Plans in which neighbors come together and create their own makeshift health coverage are the rage in Africa, particularly in the continent’s west. Here, the plans now have a significant presence in 11 countries and membership has grown beyond 200,000 people.

Atanu Dey writes:

The crux of my argument is that information and communications technology (ICT) plays a supportive role in an economy. Not unlike in a body, where the nervous system though critical is worthless unless the musculo-skeletal is robust, the digital network is worthless unless there is an underlying non-digital economy of stuff such as manufacturing, agriculture, and services. You need to have factories and farms, roads and railways, schools and shops, houses and hospitals not just broadband digital 3.5G MP3 camera phones for surfing the web.
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What India needs to pay attention to is the underlying hard economy which is the infrastructure upon which the soft economy of internet and services can ride. In this one, I will briefly focus on one bit of the hard economy: the railroad transportation system.
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Steel wheel over steel rails is the most efficient method of transporting goods and people, especially when both volumes and distances are large. It is super efficient and clean because of a number of reasons. First, because steel wheels over steel rails have very low friction and with aerodynamically designed trains, you can have the least cost per ton per mile. Next, you dont have to use fossil fuels. You can generate electricity using whatever technology and power the trains. Third, you can use the same system the tracks and the signaling and switching system for both passengers as well as goods.
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The core of the IRTS is a very fast rail network connecting the major population centers. The backbone of the system is high speed trains that move between metros such as Mumbai and Kolkata (via Nagpur), between Delhi and Bangalore/Chennai (again via Nagpur.) These I call the Cross Links which are different from the Diagonal Links which go between Mumbai and Delhi (via Ahmedabad), Delhi and Kolkata (via Kanpur), Kolkata and Bangalore/Chennai (via Hyderabad), and Bangalore to Mumbai.

Also read a follow-up post by Atanu.

[via Gilder Technology Newsletter] Wired writes about Bill Gross’ Sunflower Solar Concentrator:

Gross turned that bigger-is-better thinking upside down. By combining Internet-age technology, clever design, and inexpensive Chinese manufacturing, he realized that a radically downsized solar concentrator could retain all the efficiencies of its giant cousins and also fit on a roof. It was the PC paradigm all over again.

Gross’ R&D team tried at first to avoid silicon entirely, converting concentrated sunlight into electrons with a Stirling heat engine, a superefficient refinement of the steam engine. When that proved too difficult to bring to market, the engineers set it aside and reluctantly turned back to silicon. They tried dozens of configurations to maximize the stream of photons: 8-foot parabolic dishes, arrays of 500 tiny motorized mirrors, ridged Fresnel lenses mounted in gleaming aluminum tubes. By the start of 2004, there were two contending designs: a clamshell-style reflective dish that closed up in high winds and a grid of moving mirrors.

Then, in a weekend flash of inspiration, a young Caltech physics grad named Kevin Hickerson figured out how to reduce the number of motors needed to move 25 mirrors independently, a major cost factor. Instead of two motors for each mirror – the traditional approach – Hickerson’s solution requires only two motors for any number of mirrors. The key is a mathematical curve known as the conchoid of Nicomedes (named for the ancient Greek mathematician, who discovered it). A grid of ball bearings arrayed to match the conchoid is attached to a frame inside the Sunflower. As the motors move the frame, the bearings control each mirror’s position individually.

The resulting Sunflower 250 is heavy enough to stay put in high winds, but light enough to be lifted by two installers. To take full advantage of outsourced manufacturing, it’s sized to fit into a shipping container; commercial units could be transported to your favorite big-box retailer’s rooftop direct from the Shenzhen factory.

Atanu also pointed me to this BBC article on China’s plans for its new cities:

Internationally renowned designer, sustainability architect and author of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough, argues that we can only think of our future cities if we think about what our intention is as a species…Mr McDonough’s ideas for the Next City are about to be played out in China where his company has been charged with building seven entirely new cities.

Waste is energy in Mr McDonough’s Next City vision; methane is used to cook food. A quarter of the city’s cooking will be done with gas from sewerage. “The energy systems will be solar energy. China will be largest solar manufacturer in the world,” says McDonough.

Atanu Dey offers a suggestion – inter-generational transfers.

Here is how it works. You go through the course and after finishing the course, you decide at some later time what it was worth to you. Depending on what your valuation of the whole exercise is, you decide whether it is something that is worth doing, and make a donation which goes to support those who will come after you to learn meditation. After all, you learnt meditation because someone before you donated the resources for your instructions and your stay at the center. The current generations instructions are made possible by the generosity of previous generation, and the current generation provides the resources for the instructions of future generations.

Here is what I propose as a model for higher education. First, start an institution which will teach qualified students for free and provide those who need a living allowance. Only admit those who promise to give back to the institution according to their means later. And during the years of study, the least the institution can do is to produce human beings who are not only capable of earning a living, but are decent enough to recognize their obligation and fulfill them. If the institution fails in either of these two objectives, the institution does not have a reason for existence and should be allowed to go out of business.

A number of people emailed me about this in the New York Times:

An international consortium, including Indian and American companies as well as the World Bank, is planning to establish thousands of rural Internet centers in India to bring government, banking and education services to isolated villages.

The project, to be announced Thursday, is intended to bring Internet-based services to individuals who must often travel long distances to conduct banking or business with the government. It is being undertaken by Comat Technologies, an Indian provider of Internet services; ICICI Bank, India’s second- largest commercial bank; and Wyse Technology of San Jose, Calif., which makes computer terminal equipment.

The goal is to serve rural villages with populations of more than 5,000. Ultimately the plan calls for centers or kiosks in 5,000 villages in the state of Karnataka; Bangalore, the Indian high-technology center, is the capital of Karnataka.

The project, subsidized by the state government, will include money to train residents in computer skills. It comes after some disappointing results of earlier efforts to bridge the digital divide, which separates the Internet-connected world from less-developed areas.

The centers, connected to the Internet by either land lines or satellite links, are each to consist of 5 to 10 inexpensive “thin clients,” simple computer displays that are more rugged and less expensive than personal computers.

I don’t have any more details, but this is like the teleinfocentre idea I had written about a couple years ago. It is great in theory, but will be hard to make it work on the ground.

News.com writes:

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.

To save power, 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.

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 Economist writes: “Diesel fuel made from oilseeds, petrol replaced by ethanol made from corn, sugar or grainor even straw. They’re here and are starting to change energy markets.”

American output of maize-based ethanol is rising by 30% a year. Brazil, long the world leader, is pushing ahead as fast as the sugar crop from which its ethanol is made will allow. China, though late to start, has already built the world’s biggest ethanol plant, and plans another as big. Germany, the big producer of biodiesel, is raising output 40-50% a year. France aims to triple output of the two fuels together by 2007. Even in backward Britain a smallish biodiesel plant has just come on stream, and another as big as Europe’s biggest is being built. And after long research a Canadian firm has plans for a full-scale ethanol plant that will replace today’s grain or sugar feedstock with straw. Output is still tiny compared with that of mineral fuels. But the day of the biofuel has arrived.

The reason is simple. Forget greenery or energy security, the grounds on which governments justify subsidising biofuels. Just take the past year’s soaring price of mineral fuels, subtract the biofuel subsidy, and the answer is plain: for the user, biofuels are currently cheaper. Indeed, in America’s corn (maize) states, locally produced ethanol is close to being competitive even without subsidy; imported Brazilian ethanol could have been so long ago, had not a federal tax credit for ethanol, originally 54 cents per American gallon, been carefully balanced by a 54 cent tariff.