Bridging the digital divide in Mumbai
Published: 10 May 2005 12:55 BST
Because of the construction, farming in the village has disappeared and with it most of the employment. The project also bisected the road to the school, so it has become impractical for most children here to attend on a regular basis, Shah said. Many villagers received land in compensation for the building project but then sold it to speculators without a clear understanding of the market value or extent of their holdings.
The villagers are also supposed to get preference in hiring for some jobs, "but employers reject them because they have no experience in computers," he said.
The first step in the project involved translating programs into Indian regional languages. Most people in rural communities are not fluent in English or Hindi and very few applications have ever been translated into Gujarati or Marathi, Shah explained. A set of libraries also had to be created to get Indian characters to pop up on screen.
"These people understand the value of computer education," he said. "When I came up with something in Marathi, they picked it up in a half an hour."
All of the software is based on Linux. "The one software application I thoroughly love comes with the MS logo," Shah said. "But this country can't afford it. Every step forward for this country can't come at the cost of a dollar."
Internet connectivity and hardware has to be cheap as well. Right now, there is no Internet connection, but mobile service, which costs about £2 a month, could help solve that problem.
The PCs run on a discontinued processor from Via and a relatively small amount of memory. (Although the first machines were donated, the programme is designed to become self-sufficient.) The goal right now is to design a box that will cost 10,000 rupees, or close to £100 with a monitor.
"Even at 15,000 rupees with an LCD monitor, such a system would sell like hotcakes," Shah said.
Donated monitors, unfortunately, are impractical because of governmental regulations prohibiting donated hardware from being used for commercial purposes.
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