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M.I.T. and India are bringing the Media Lab to town By
Leon D'souza
MUMBAI, India -- A month ago, I bemoaned India's widening digital divide in a piece entitled "Is India Falling Through the Net?" For the uninitiated, the point I sought to make in that essay was that the lack of basic information infrastructure has kept rural India isolated from the benefits of the information age. Consequently, the social chasm that separates urbanized, westernized, English-speaking India from the rest of the country is widening. This gap has the potential to destabilize Indian society, as information poverty in an information age signifies incapacity, isolation, privation and misfortune. The Indian government has been rather slow in recognizing the impending danger of technology-driven social instability, believing for long that the high-tech industry, given its dependence on knowledge workers from the sub-continent, would deliver India out of the depths of Third World Hades. Leading technocrats warned that the unevenness of development would thwart India's plans, but the government seemed oblivious of this with politicos engaging in passionate rhetoric about India being a global software superpower. This euphoria contributed to what seemed like a downright disregard for the plight of more than 900 million Indians who have yet to experience the joys of personal computing. In India, considerable stimulus is required to elicit an appropriate government response. India's massive English language press and the overabundance of self-styled intellectuals with regularly featured columns serves precisely this purpose. Some activists and armchair critics with a voice in the media took up the cause of India's information poor in their columns several years ago. Thanks in large part to their efforts, and the guidance of some technology pundits, the country's laggard political establishment has finally taken a significant step towards bridging India's digital divide. Media Lab Asia Enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sunday, the Government of India in collaboration with MIT, announced the launch of a one-year exploratory project to create the Media Laboratory Asia (MLA) in Mumbai. MIT plans to develop ways to bring the benefits of the most sophisticated emerging technologies to the daily problems of India's poorest and least educated people Tech guru, co-founder and senior director of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte noted that "the overarching goal of MLA will be to facilitate the invention, refinement and deployment of innovations to benefit all sectors of Indian society." MLA is envisaged as a distributed organization that will work with industry, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government, and importantly, ordinary people, to bring technological innovations to villages across India. The Indian government has committed $12 million toward the program, $1.7 million of which has been earmarked for MIT's participation. Seed funding will be provided by the government of India, and the remaining funds will be raised by MLA from the private-sector and other non-governmental sources. Findings at the end of the program's first year will form the framework for making decisions concerning a 10-year MLA project, and will determine the role that MIT would play in its development. According to Media Lab sources, the program will apply a project-based approach to research throughout India, i.e. research will be converted into widely distributed, on-the-ground projects. It will focus on changing lives by developing enabling technologies and facilitating outreach. Potential MLA research topics are fascinating. For instance, in the area of digitally assisted health care, MLA will develop small, low-cost, wireless, position-aware telemedicine appliances and sensors that will allow nurses to perform simple diagnostics. These systems will also support bi-directional information flow to primary health centers and district hospitals. In my previous article on India's digital divide, I pointed out that India's linguistic diversity and the lack of softwares in regional languages poses a major problem in addition to low PC penetration. MLA aims to tackle this problem by developing multi-lingual and multi-literate systems that will support content and applications that speak to people in their local tongues. These systems will respect a range of written literacy levels thereby ensuring that information technologies benefit all members of society. To solve the access problem, MLA will work to develop innovative technologies, applications, assessments, and entrepreneurial business models that will connect 300,000 villages without telephone service to the Internet. New ultra-low-cost technologies - from open-source hardware to technologies for printing circuits - will be deployed widely to produce inexpensive computers. The current regulatory environment discourages Internet and basic service operators from moving into rural communities. MLA's Internet and telecommunications policy research will help foster universal rural telecom service. In short, if it manages to achieve all of its marvelous objectives, Media Lab Asia is the answer to India's prayers. However, glitches remain. Silicon Highway with Potholes A project of this magnitude requires serious governmental commitment to infrastructure development. Media Lab Asia is likely to be headquartered in Marol, one of Mumbai's worst locales. Basic infrastructure, such as the condition of approach roads, remains abysmal. Although a substantial chunk of money has been committed to improving infrastructure in the area, work proceeds at a tardy pace. One expert sarcastically christened the area, "India's silicon highway with potholes." Telecom companies have excavated the area in order to lay fiber-optic cable, however high-speed connectivity at affordable prices is still an issue. Ultimately, one can only hope that Media Lab Asia goes beyond flatulence
and makes a tangible difference to the lives of India's poverty-stricken
rural masses. |
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