Much of these discussions seem to be taking place from the perspective that is at a remove, if not alien, to the world they are trying to address.
I am reminded of a project of creating kiosks that is being carried out in a couple dozen villages of India where the donor agency has allocated some $10 million to plan and implement it over a year and a half and some international consulting companies are trying to address the issue of creating connectivity for these underserved areas. All the wisdom of large donors, international consultants and telecom companies has left the project open to never achieving sustainability without writing off every bit of investment. Comparing it to the sustainable models that are emerging locally, the gap is of the order of $1600 to $30,000 in initial investments and it may yield comparable revenues of about $2500 annual from each kiosk. These costs are high significantly because of communications costs being allocated to every kiosk. They evaluated all possible alternatives - from low, medium to high bandwidth and came to architect a hybrid solution. However, what may work in these situations are low power, long battery life, portable instrument-based communication where unit costs have to be brought down well below what the connectivity havens are used to. The technologies identified by Vickram Crishna have the potential to make a difference if they are designed from the perspective of offering an acceptable (that do not de-motivate) level of services at prices way lower than what the industrial world is happy paying. Often times, technologies end up finding answers to problems that we may be struggling with, and create new issues that we need to grapple with. But we need an appreciation that technologies can indeed address these issues significantly, provided the technologists are sensitised to the needs of the underserved world. satish jha president, digital partners india www.digitalpartners.org.in ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
