Friedman: How techies are transforming India

http://www.livenewsindia.com/news/friedman-how-techies-are-transforming-india/

Author : By LM
Date of Publication : Mon Nov 07, 1:10 am

NEW DELHI – The universe strike 7 billion people final week, and we consider we met half of them on a highway from New Delhi to Agra here in India. They were on foot, on bicycle, on engine scooters. They were in pickups, dented cars and congested into motorized rickshaws. They were dodging monkeys and camels and cows. Somehow, though, though advantage of military or stoplights, this upsurge of amiability that is complicated India impossibly went about a business. But usually when your mind tells we that this vanquish of people will certainly overcome all efforts to lift a mass of India out of poverty, we start to notice a pattern: Every few miles there's a cellphone building and a fresh-looking building poking out of a tranquil chaos. And a pointer out front constantly says "school" – engineering school, biotechnology school, English-language school, business school, mechanism propagandize or private facile school. India is still a usually nation we know where we can find a billboard promotion "physics degrees."

All these schools, and 600 million cellphones, and 1.2 billion people, half of whom are underneath 25, are India's wish – since usually by leveraging record and smarts can India broach a truly improved life for a masses. There are a million reasons because it won't happen, though there is one large reason it might. The likely unequivocally is happening: India's immature techies are relocating from using a behind bedrooms of Western companies, who outsourced work here, to inventing a front bedrooms of Indian companies, that are charity creative, low-cost solutions for India's problems. The late C.K. Prahalad called it "Gandhian innovation," and we encountered many examples around New Delhi.

Meet Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya, a CEO of Ekgaon. His concentration is Indian farmers, who make adult half a race and consecrate what he calls "an rising marketplace within an rising market." Ekgaon built a module module that runs on a cheapest cellphones and offers ignorant farmers a voice or content advisory module that tells them when is a best time to plant their crops, how to brew their fertilizers and pesticides, when to allot them and how many H2O to add.

"India has to boost plantation productivity," explains Aditya, "but a farms are small, and advisers from a Agriculture Department can't strech many of them. So they go for scuttle-butt methods of planting, that leads to low capability and dirt desertification." Ekgaon tailors a recommendation to any farmer's specific soil, stand and continue conditions. Some 12,000 farmers are already subscribing ($5 for one year), and a devise is set to grow to 15 million in 5 years.

Meet K. Chandrasekhar, a CEO of Forus Health, whose concentration is "avoidable blindness." A entertain of a world's blind people, some 12 million, are in India, Chandrasekhar explains, and some-more than 80 percent of those are blind as a outcome of a miss of screening and a miss of ophthalmologists in farming areas. In a past, extensive screening compulsory mixed costly evidence inclination to check for diabetic retinas, cataracts, glaucoma, cornea and refraction problems, all of that means 90 percent of a avoidable blindness in India. So Forus invented "a single, portable, intelligent, noninvasive, eye prescreening device" that can brand these vital ailments and also yield an programmed report; it can be run by a lerned technician, who by telemedicine connects patients to a doctor.

"We work with a Dutch association on optics, and a University of Texas supports us in business development," Chandrasekhar adds.

Finally, there's Nandan Nilekani, a former CEO of Infosys Technologies, India's outsourcing giant, who is now heading a supervision bid to give each Indian citizen an ID series – a essential beginning in a nation where many people have no driver's license, pass or even birth certificate.

In a final dual years, 100 million people have sealed adult for an central ID. Once everybody has one, a supervision can broach them services or subsidies directly by cellphones or bank accounts, though unhandy or hurtful bureaucrats siphoning some off.

"We're bringing a many worldly record to a many deprived," pronounced Nilekani. "The hyper connected universe is giving us a possibility to change India faster, during a incomparable scale, than ever before."

Friedman is a columnist for a New York Times and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner.