[Reader-list] More on MIT Media Lab Asia in Mumbai

[Shekhar Krishnan]

MIT, Indian government establishing
Media Laboratory Asia joint project

June 24, 2001

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the 
government of India are establishing a one-year exploratory project 
to create the Media Laboratory Asia (MLA), which is conceived as an 
independent, non-profit organization.

The Indian government has committed $12 million toward this one-year 
program, $1.7 million of which has been earmarked for MIT's 
participation. Seed funding will be provided by the government of 
India, and the remaining funds will be raised by MLA from 
private-sector and other non-governmental sources. Findings at the 
end of the program's first year will form the framework for making 
decisions concerning a 10-year MLA project and will determine the 
role that MIT would play in its development.

"The overarching goal of MLA will be to facilitate the invention, 
refinement and deployment of innovations to benefit all sectors of 
Indian society," noted Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and senior 
director of the MIT Media Lab. "MLA will not be a bricks and mortar 
initiative. Rather, it is intended to be a distributed organization 
that will work with industry, non-government organizations (NGOs), 
government, and most importantly, ordinary people, to bring these 
innovations to villages across all of India."

MIT plans to develop ways to bring the benefits of the most 
sophisticated emerging technologies to the daily problems of India's 
poorest and least educated people. This would include assistance in 
formulating an innovative approach to research at MLA, providing 
guidance in identifying potential funding partners, and establishing 
working relationships between organizations in India and research 
groups at MIT.

Once the MLA is formed and definitive agreements are reached, the 
program, based in India, will be staffed by project developers from 
India, visiting researchers from MIT, and participants from numerous 
NGOs. Though the program's agenda has yet to be formulated, the 
research agenda envisioned will be rooted in a handful of basic 
tenets, including:

*  Young people are a country's most precious natural resource and 
with the aid of new technologies can serve as an army of innovators 
and teachers.
*  Penetration of new technologies is best achieved through a 
self-perpetuating and entrepreneurial approach.
*  Technology-enabled innovations will only flourish if they are part 
of the daily lives of all people, at all levels, including 
entertainment and leisure.
*  Rural communities can sustain lucrative enterprises, and inventive 
telecommunications can stem the tide of urbanization and the growth 
of slums.

The MLA program would apply a project-based approach to research 
throughout India, and draw on the MIT Media Laboratory's experiences 
in converting research into widely distributed, on-the-ground 
projects. Two recent examples include the Computer Clubhouse Network 
(with over 100 locations scheduled, winner of Drucker Award for best 
not-for-profit in America), and the LINCOS (Little Intelligent 
Communities) projects (with over 60 locations scheduled, winner of 
Alcatel Award for science and technology-based development projects 
in Latin America).

While there are many areas where technological innovation could 
affect development, MLA research would place special emphasis on 
projects that would touch all sectors of Indian society from villages 
to cities, from government officials to local agriculturists, from 
kids to seniors, from athletes to the disabled.

The following project ideas give a glimpse into potential MLA research topics:

Changing Lives

*  Disaster control: The development of new sensors and wireless 
technologies could help locate people, detect contaminated water, and 
avoid illness; new types of emergency shelters could provide 
inexpensive and
immediate housing. Information technology and communication tools 
could assist in the coordination of relief efforts, and could link 
and reunite families.
*  Learning communities: New technologies could bring Internet 
exposure to hundreds of millions of children. These children could 
then take the lead in introducing the practical uses of these 
technologies to their
communities.
*  Digital health: Small, low-cost, wireless, position-aware 
telemedicine appliances and sensors could allow auxiliary 
nurse-midwives to perform simple diagnostics, environmental analysis, 
and gathering of epidemiological information. These systems could 
likewise support bi-directional information flow to the primary 
health centers and to district hospitals.
*  Local entrepreneurs: As rural India relies on the informal and 
agricultural sectors for most of its economic activities, new digital 
financial products and services, as well as innovative forms of 
e-commerce, could support these economic sectors with more efficient 
information flows and cheaper transactions.

Enabling Technologies

*  Multi-lingual and multi-literate systems: Innovative technologies 
could support content and applications that speak to people in their 
local tongues. These systems could respect a range of written 
literacy levels, ensuring that information technologies could benefit 
all members of society.
*  Access and beyond: Today, 300,000 Indian villages are without 
telephones. Through innovative technologies, applications, 
assessments, and entrepreneurial business models, a vast number of 
these villages could be
connected to the Internet.
*  Inexpensive computers: New ultra-low-cost technologies -- from 
open-source hardware to technologies for printing circuits -- promise 
to bring the cost of computing down to dollars and eventually to 
pennies. These could be produced locally and deployed widely.
*  Personal fabrication: The means for rapid prototyping of 
mechanical, electronic, and computational function could be reduced 
to small-scale facilities that could be made accessible to rural 
entrepreneurs -- initially for access to labor in technology 
deployment, and perhaps eventually as a platform for the indigenous 
development of appropriate information technology.

Outreach

*  Television: With 70 percent of India viewing television, popular 
programs such as soap operas could be an effective means of reaching 
people. New forms of TV soap operas could explore ways to educate, 
excite, and enliven Indian communities on the role of technologies in 
humanistic development.
*  Rural service provision. The current regulatory environment 
discourages Internet and basic service operators from moving into 
rural communities. New Internet and telecommunications policy work 
could help foster universal
rural service.

The MLA would bring together scientists, students, industry, NGOs, 
and investment and multilateral organizations to create new 
opportunities for people across all of India. The MLA will not be in 
one place, or even in one country. It will instead be a distributed 
community working to invent a richer, healthier, and more creative 
society.

The MLA would pursue projects designed to improve the lives of people 
by leveraging new technologies. In parallel, the design model 
developed would enable these projects to be applied in countries 
throughout Asia.

Projects would typically have an area of technical innovation, 
in-the-field testing, and a plan for sustainable deployment. Project 
partners would include not-for-profit organizations such as technical 
and management universities and NGOs. Partner organizations benefit 
from the MLA through sharing of MLA staff, equipment, and other 
resources. Partners participate through in-kind contributions to MLA 
projects.

The MLA is intended to attract a large number of sponsors and 
investors, primarily for deployment of innovative infrastructure and 
services in rural communities. The plan calls for MLA to be sponsored 
by industry, foundations, investment and multilateral organizations. 
Sponsors would be asked to contribute to the MLA finances, with the 
government of India providing seed funding.

The research will respect the sensibility, values, and tradition of 
the people of India. The program will need to function on multiple 
scales:

*  Helping to guide a national operational office to coordinate 
logistics across the country, interface with senior contacts in the 
government, industry, and non-governmental organizations, and suggest 
national-scale resources (e.g., satellite transponder and broadcast 
television time).
*  Creating a network of regional research centers that harness local 
strengths and provide focus for particular problems. These would be 
based at places that already have a group of people who can provide 
intellectual leadership.
*  Working with grass-roots organizations to develop and assess 
projects based on scalable entrepreneurial models.

Through participation in selected projects, the Media Lab at MIT 
would help develop frameworks by which national, regional, and 
village level participants could perform effective collaborative 
research. The MLA research program interface to the MIT campus could 
evolve from bringing in senior collaborators and selected graduate 
students for joint exploratory work to establish one of the MLA 
research branches at MIT, in order to manage the exchange of people 
and projects between the institutions, as well as to provide a focus 
for the fundamental research activities.


MIT Media Lab working to bring Internet to rural India

By Steve LeBlanc, Associated Press, 07/14/01

CAMBRIDGE -- The MIT Media Lab is famed for exploring technology's 
esoteric outer edge, from experiments with "electronic ink" to the 
world's first automatic baseball strike-zone detection system.

Now the lab is embarking on its most ambitious real-world project 
ever: bringing the Internet to rural India.

The challenges are staggering.

Despite an academic infrastructure and strong technological economy, 
India is home to a third of the world's poor, many of whom live in 
the 300,000 villages without telephones.

It's there that the Media Lab and Indian government hope to spark a 
technological revolution and create a populist, self-sustaining 
economy using wireless devices, "ultra-low cost" computers, local 
resourcefulness and even soap operas.

The effort promises to bring the world's newest technology to one of 
its oldest cultures, opening the door for online matrimonial 
services, virtual business links and e-mail contact between far-flung 
family members.

For just $1,000, the new collaborative, known as Media Laboratory 
Asia, can hook up a rural Indian village through a shared Internet 
connection.

The government already has kicked in $12 million for the first year 
and anticipates spending about $200 million over the next decade on 
the project.

The project, still in its infancy, has begun deploying the low-cost 
technology in about 20 villages and hopes to connect another 1,000 
villages in the next 18 months, officials said.

"In less than a year, the lab is being set up and we are working 
feverishly on the whole thing," said Ramakrishnan Srinivasan, 
director of the Ministry of Information Technology's Education and 
Research Division in New Delhi.

"We find a lot of synergy between (MIT's) commitment to high 
technology and our interest in using technology for the benefit for 
the common people," he said. "We are not underestimating the 
challenge before us, but we think we are going to make a difference."

The Media Lab, stacked floor to ceiling with computer gadgets and 
buzzing with the hum of caffeine-fueled students, may seem far 
removed from the realm of social justice and economic equity.

Not so, according to Mike Best, a research scientist who is splitting 
his time between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 
Cambridge and Media Laboratory Asia in India.

Despite its cutting edge reputation, one of the missions of the Media 
Lab is helping technology reach the lives of ordinary people.

Even an idea like electronic ink -- an innovation that could 
transform a computer screen into a paper-like product -- is 
envisioned as a way to make new technology super-inexpensive, simple 
and available to all.

"That's the entire point here, that real out-of-the-box, cutting-edge 
thinking needs to be applied to technology for these real social 
issues like poverty, health care and education," Best said. "That is 
core to our mission."

In India, that means trying to integrate the innovations into the 
existing culture and economy.

To connect a village to the Internet, Best envisions the creation of 
"telekiosks" where local residents could rent time on computers to 
send e-mail or surf the Net.

The model is based in part on the popularity of cable television in 
India, where local entrepreneurs install a satellite dish near a 
village, then run wires to homes and collect monthly payments, Best 
said.

The model also echoes rudimentary telephone service in some villages, 
where entrepreneurs armed with a single line and a stopwatch offer 
phone access to local residents.

To help raise awareness among Indians about the possibilities of the 
Internet, the Media Lab is also talking to soap opera producers in 
"Bollywood," the nickname for Bombay, India, the world's busiest film 
production center.

In a country where more people have access to televisions than 
phones, the lab hopes to co-produce a soap opera highlighting how 
ordinary Indians can benefit from new technology, Best said.

The goal is help create a local market for low-cost computer products 
and services within India, which already has a booming export market.

Srinivasan compares the potential impact of Media Laboratory Asia to 
the creation the Indian Institutes of Technology during the 1950-60s. 
The institutes helped sustain the country's technological boom of the 
past decade.

While past infrastructure changes have been spearheaded by the 
government, Srinivasan sees the Media Laboratory Asia as a change, a 
collaboration between academia, the private sector and the government.

While bringing the Internet to rural India is one the initiative's 
top goals, the project is looking at other ways technology can 
benefit the lives of ordinary Indians.

The lab is exploring the development of new sensors and wireless 
technologies that could help locate people, detect contaminated water 
and avoid the spread of disease in the wake of natural disasters.

Other innovations include small, low-cost "telemedicine" appliances 
to help nurse midwives perform simple diagnoses and devices that can 
help people speaking local tongues and with varying levels of 
literacy use computers.

Last year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched Media 
Lab Europe in Dublin, Ireland, although it drew criticisms from local 
academics who resented the notion that the country needs MIT and 
faulted the Irish government for spending millions of dollars.

Zoe Baird, president of the nonprofit Markle Foundation, considers 
the partnership one of the more ambitious efforts at combining 
resources in academia, business and government.

"This is a very significant project," she said. "Hopefully, it will 
become a place where people in the region can develop the information 
technology tools that meet their needs."

MIT's project is not the first attempt to expand access to the 
Internet in India, which has been connected to the web since 1995.

The Indian Institute of Technology in Madras has developed a 
technology to help reduce the cost of installing one telephone line 
in villages, which could improve connectivity to the Internet.

_____

Shekhar Krishnan
58/58A, Anand Bhavan
201, Lady Hardinge Road (T.H. Kataria Marg)
Mahim, Bombay 400016
India
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