It was an innocuous-looking radio device. By the look of it, no one can imagine its potential to liberate women, allowing them to take part in decision-making that may have immense impact on their lives.

Revi Sterling, research fellow from University of Colorado’s Atlas Institute, while speaking at the IEEE-ACM conference on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for Development in Bangalore, said that the device records information and looks for other devices in the vicinity to pass it over.

“This is a simple-to-use alternative to mobile phones,” said Ms Sterling. “The user needs to press the record button, speak into the device and release it. When they do that, the audio content travels through the network to the nearest available device and allows to be accessed. The messages can also be broadcast, after post-production in local radio.”

Kenya calling
She spoke of how women in Kenya, where she deployed the devices as part of her doctoral research, had problems in owning mobile phones and were not included in decision-making.

“The network in which the devices function, is built on 802.11 (WiFi) standards and therefore there is no great cost to be incurred such as setting up base stations as is done for the mobile phones,” Ms Sterling said.
A paper by Naga Yasoda of Cognizant Technology and Rajesh Veeraraghavan (researcher from UC Berkley), explained how a rural computer network, installed to provide information such as weather, crop prices etc, was converted into a mobile-operated one.

IT village
Varana, one of the first villages in the country to become an IT-enabled rural area, has been struggling to make the most of the computers installed in kiosks. The reason, the research team from Microsoft Research found ranged from maintenance to the performance issues of the PCs installed there.

“We found the 54 kiosks meant to provide agriculture information, besides things like tele-medicine and distance education, had poor connectivity and didn’t have local language interface. This meant that the farmers couldn’t really use them,” said Dr Kentaro Toyama, Assistant Managing Director of MSRI.

“Coupled with lack of budget allocation for technology upgrade by the government, the kiosks and the network didn’t really achieve the stated objectives almost seven years after being installed,” he said.

The question for the researchers was a simple one — is it possible to replace the existing network system with a cost-effective one?

The team connected the PCs with the database server and made sure they talked to each other. The farmers could access the PCs using SMS application on the mobile phones. This way, the original Varana project was made wireless and farmers found it friendly and easy to use.

Besides successful implementations, the two-day conference also heard from researchers studying the impact of ICT researches on certain social groups.

Low cost Braille
The team from Carnegie Mellon University, for instance, spoke on the effectiveness of a low-cost, low-powered Braille tutoring device, which they have designed and used for conducting a pilot study in a blind school near Bangalore.

If installed at schools, the researchers say that this braille tutor would improve low literacy among persons with blindness in developing countries. 

“ICT is one of the areas where interest and activities are very high,” said Prof Balaji Partha sarathy of IIIT.
“So, it's possible that we may hear sporadic experiments and implementations that may not have a wider relevance.”

Prof Parthasarathy mentioned that the third edition of the conference is being planned either in US or in another developed country.

L Subramani