Rural India surfs rickshaw Net
By S. Srinivasan
Associated Press
BITHOOR, India — For 12-year-old Anju Sharma, hope for a better life arrives in her poor farming village three days a week on a bicycle rickshaw that carries a computer with a high-speed, wireless Internet connection.
Associated Press
Designed like temple carriages that bear Hindu deities during festivals, the brightly painted pedal-cart rolls into her village in India's most populous state, accompanied by a computer instructor who gives classes to young and old, students and teachers alike.
Indian schoolchildren gather around a mobile Internet classroom in the village of Bithoor. The traveling computer provides connectivity to rural areas with unreliable phone lines and low incomes.
"By using computers, I can improve my knowledge," Sharma, whose parents plan to pull her out of school at 15, said in Hindi, before joining a class on Web cameras. "And that will help me get a job when I grow up."
The bicycle cart is the center of a project called Infothela, or info-cart. It aims to use technology to improve education, healtcare and access to agricultural information in India's villages, where most of the country's 1.06 billion people live.
Conceived in 2003 by the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, about 10 miles southwest of Bithoor, the project is paid for the national government and provides free computer classes in six villages here in Uttar Pradesh state.
Another computer on a pedicab is being used in an experiment to help doctors in Lucknow, the state capital, provide consultation to villagers through video-conferencing in nearby Saroha village. A project to disseminate the latest crop prices and farming methods is also being developed.
In Bithoor, on the banks of the Ganges River in northern India, manual labor is the alternative to farming and annual incomes rarely exceed $130. Sharma's teachers make only $11 a month. Young people look for jobs in cities, but often lose out to better-educated urbanites.
"Computers and the Internet open up new opportunities for these villagers," said Lalty Dutta, a project official.
With only 12 computers and four Internet connections per 1,000 people, India has one of the world's lowest Internet usage rates and much of rural India remains oblivious to the sweep of technology. But the villages involved in Infothela all lie within a 50-mile wireless corridor created by the Institute of Technology and linked by high-rise Wi-Fi antennae and amplifiers along the highway.
Until recently, such technology was the privilege of a tiny segment of Indians — engineers in the country's software hubs who earn more money while in their 20s than Bithoor farmers do in a lifetime.
India churns out 300,000 engineers each year and is a growing software power, but farmers are the backbone of its economy. Infothela seeks to break the disparity that confines access to technology and growing affluence to the cities.
Many Indian villages are poorly wired — telephone lines can go dead for weeks at a time — making wireless technology the most reliable Web connection.
The mobility of a cycle rickshaw, which is light enough to cross muddy, potholed roads, ensures that the same computer and Internet connection can be used by people in several neighboring villages.
The Infothela cart has a specially designed frame and cushioning to protect the computer and accessories from the bumpy ride.
"The mobile platform is necessary to reduce cost of ownership because the resources are shared by a larger population. It is also necessary to push information to women and elderly people who can't travel outside their village," said Manoj Kumar, a project manager.
The service is free for now, but fees will eventually be charged, Kumar said.
A few miles from Bithoor, another cycle rickshaw carries its high-tech load to Gorahah village, where men and women gather side-by-side for a class on electronic mail. The mix is nothing short of a revolution in tradition-bound rural India, where women are often kept indoors.
