Newsroom

By SAMEER MOHINDRU and PRASENJIT BHATTACHARYA

India's push to lend more money to farmers has coincided with a rise in agricultural output, supporting claims the funds are helping improve the quality of fertilizers and seeds while cushioning farmers from the impact of higher costs.

But farmer suicides, long seen as emblematic of the malaise in Indian agriculture, also continue, illustrating a key drawback: Money isn't reaching the small farmer most in need of it.

Although credit is just one of several factors that determine the health of the farms, it has grabbed attention in India because small farmers with less than a hectare of land account for nearly 80% of the country's hundreds of millions of farmers.

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VenturEast, previously APIDC Venture Capital, today announced a $150 million VenturEast Proactive Fund that will invest in both early stage companies building new technologies as well as growth stage companies using technology to build growth.

A significant focus of the fund will be to invest in businesses that address the needs of the digital divide/bottom-of-the pyramid markets and the needs of SMEs.

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Azim Premji shared this thoughts on ICT in education in The Economic Times. An excerpt:

One of the few things on which there is consensus across the entire ideological spectrum in economics and politics is that literacy and education are perhaps the most significant drivers of development and democracy. For societies to improve their literacy levels and the quality of their education, multiple complex factors must be worked upon. Information and communication technology (ICT) can facilitate improvement on several of these dimensions. To me, use of ICT for literacy is almost intuitive, given the challenge of reaching out to large numbers which a country like India faces. ICT provides us an effective tool for connecting with a large number of remotely located learners at a low cost.

My perspective on the use of ICT for education and literacy is based on our interaction with the parents and schools in over 1,300 villages in 2000, through the Azim Premji Foundation. Through these interactions we gained the following perspective: Parental feedback indicates strong demand for computers; they also consider computer interface as an enabler for knowing English; ICT can strengthen our efforts for universalising primary education and; ICT could also be the solution to a uniform high quality of instructions without replacing teachers. But more than that, we learnt that ICT also has a huge role in attracting children to the school, and creating excitement in and around the school.

Continue reading “ICT has huge role in attracting children”

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By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Well, here’s something you don’t see every day. I was visiting an Indian village 350 miles east of Hyderabad and got to watch a very elderly Indian man undergo an EKG in a remote clinic, while a heart specialist, hundreds of miles away in Bangalore, watched via satellite TV and dispensed a diagnosis. This kind of telemedicine is the I.T. revolution at its best. But what struck me most was that just underneath the TV screen, powering the whole endeavor, were 16 car batteries — the E.T., energy technology, revolution, at its worst.

Some 250 million Indians today have cellphones. Many of them are people who make just $2 or $3 a day. More and more are getting access to computers and the Internet, even in villages. But only 85 percent of Indian villages are electrified — and that is being generous, since many still don’t have reliable 24/7 quality power.

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Some of the world's leading information technology corporations are in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, for what organizers are calling a historic summit focusing on Africa's growing IT sector. Representatives of tech giants are calling for business solutions to alleviate poverty. Noel King has this report from Kigali.

Industry leaders say chronic poverty in Africa will be alleviated by investment in information technology, rather than foreign aid.

At the Kigali summit, representatives touted programs that are aimed at producing profits for both foreign investors and Africans, without using traditional models of charitable aid.

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Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In fact, in India workmen like Mr. Manohar, a house painter, are usually forbidden to touch clients’ computers.

So you can imagine Mr. Manohar’s wonder as he sat in a swiveling chair in front of a computer, dictating his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then, with a click of a mouse, Mr. Manohar’s page popped onto the World Wide Web, the newest profile on an Indian Web site called Babajob.com.

Babajob seeks to bring the social-networking revolution popularized by Facebook and MySpace to people who do not even have computers — the world’s poor. And the start-up is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: many of the hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of technology workers who are working here are turning their talents to fighting the grinding poverty that surrounds them.

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Today, technology experts are meeting with leaders of 10 African countries in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. It's the Connect Africa Summit. The goal is to increase the continent's access to the Internet, and attract investment opportunities for economic growth.

Gretchen Wilson reports from rural South Africa.

On the side of the road, 20-year-old Esther Tlou sells plastic gas cans all day. The high-school graduate earns about 2 bucks a day.She's business-minded, though -- she still pores over her old accounting textbooks, and to save money, she sleeps here in the open. That's where she dreams of different kind of work.

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At the age of 23, when many women are waiting for their knights in shining armour or catching a flight to a plush university overseas, Saloni Malhotra was busy nurturing her dream of a technologically empowered rural India. Today, at 25, she heads DesiCrew, a rural Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company with 10 centres and 60 employees. "And it’s growing," she says happily.

It all began when Saloni was listening in rapt attention to Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Professor of Electrical Engineering at IIT-Madras, at a seminar on ‘Rural Business Hubs’ held in Delhi. Jhunjhunwala is also the co-founder of Telecommunications and Computer Networks group (TeNet), a coalition of 14 IIT faculty members that works with a vision to provide ‘world-class technology at affordable cost.’ This tallied with Saloni’s idea of "creating a service that could dramatically transform the way the BPO industry operates, while empowering rural India through sustainable income generation, thereby enriching lives."

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In India, Nissan has a marginal presence; it sells 250 cars a year from the two high-end models it imports. Renault sells around 2,500 Logans a month from its joint venture with Mahindra. That may be a start, but it is a small one in a market of 1.4 million passenger vehicles a year and 192,000 light trucks and buses.

Rival Suzuki Motor Corp.’s local venture sells half the cars in the Indian market, which can’t seem to have have enough of the Japanese firm’s compact cars. That might be at the heart of matter for the Franco-Japanese alliance.

To truly make a dent in the Indian market, it might have to get its hands greasy with a small car venture. Ghosn [Nissan's CEO] is negotiating with Bajaj Auto, India’s second largest two-wheeler maker, for a car that will sell for $3,000 (Rs1.19 lakh) and for which Bajaj will provide the engine.

"Although they have entered late in India, they want to dig deep," said Rajat Dhawan, who tracks the automotive sector for consulting firm McKinsey & Co. "Ghosn is throwing the weight of Renault and Nissan behind the opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid."

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Eyeglasses have been around for hundreds of years but millions of people in the developing world still suffer from poor vision, degrading their ability to learn and work. Jordan Kassalow, cofounder and chairman of the Scojo Foundation and former CFR fellow for global health policy, says the scope of the problem is “huge.” The World Health Organization only recently started classifying people who cannot see without the aid of glasses as blind and so the issue has lacked the attention and research it requires.

His foundation focuses on creating small businesses in developing nations for selling simple reading glasses, found in any drug store in the United States, without a prescription. Besides reading, these glasses are also useful for activities such as separating rice from stones and differentiating types of seeds for planting. Kassalow says his foundation and other organizations working on the issue have barely been able “to make a dent in the problem.” He notes that organizations need to get this right since the solutions are simple, otherwise it does not bode well for more difficult health issues such as HIV/AIDS.

Click here to listen to the Interview.

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