Travel Diary: India- Michael Rawding
Recently, I spent a little under a week traveling throughout India, visiting some of Unlimited Potential’s programs and partners that are working to bring increased social and economic opportunity to the region through the benefits of technology. It’s an exciting time to be in India. The economic success of the nation in the recent past, much of which has been driven by India’s unprecedented IT sector boom, has allowed for the development of much broader efforts to alleviate social and economic disparity. This was my first visit since January of 2005, and the amazing progress made in this relatively short period of time was evident throughout my trip.
Still, the significant challenges caused by what is still fundamentally an uneven society continue to cast a wide shadow over this positive progress. As Orlando Ayala noted here after a trip to India just over a year ago, despite this economic and social advancement, over 98% of India’s citizens remain in the middle and bottom of the economic pyramid. These are the millions of people that we have committed to reach, working to expand the benefits of India’s remarkable economic progress to include those people currently living at or below subsistence levels.
Microsoft believes that technology holds an immense transformative power to address these iniquities. However, we equally acknowledge that while technology is a powerful tool, it is still only a tool. To translate this into tangible human impact requires training and strong partnerships that can scale technology’s benefits to create real and lasting results. During this trip, I met with many of our partners in India, both within the government and the private sector, to discuss how we can continue working together to help generate this scale.
On July 29 in New Delhi, I was honored to deliver a plenary address at eINDIA 2008, India’s largest collaborative ICT conference. The event gathered a variety of participants from across the public and private sectors to share knowledge and examine how the country’s numerous challenges can best be addressed through the benefits of technology. Microsoft was well-represented in the conference, with colleagues participating in forums, panel discussions and keynotes covering a multitude of topics, including addressing IT innovations in municipalities and e-Government solutions, leading changes in e-Education, the sustainability of telecentres, the role of Communities of Practice (CoP) and Networks in eAgriculture, and many others.
In my remarks, I addressed the importance of affordable computing to education—a key aspect of Unlimited Potential’s mission to transform education in India and worldwide. One innovative way of making computing more affordable, particularly in schools, is to allow many people to use a single computer simultaneously. Based on work out of the MSR India lab in Bangalore, Microsoft has developed Windows MultiPoint, which allows as many as 50 computer mice or other peripherals to be attached to a single computer. We’re supporting broader initiatives to transform education in India, as well. Through our Partners in Learning program, we’ve made great progress with Project Shiksha, which aims to accelerate computer literacy for teachers and students across government schools in India. With Project Shiksha, we have trained 260,000 teachers since 2003, and intend to reach another 100,000 teachers in the next year.
I had a few opportunities to explore while in Delhi—particularly noticing the amazing greenery and bird life that flourishes there. I enjoyed a beautiful morning walk around the independence square area in Delhi, and sampled an amazing range of delicious food (which was a constant throughout the trip). After the conference, I continued on to visit a variety of current and future Unlimited Potential programs and business partners that are working to help create new business models that can begin to better reach rural customers in India, providing them with solutions tailored to be relevant, accessible, and affordable to their specific needs.
I first visited a village called Badsa, located outside of Delhi in the adjoining state of Haryana. As we turned away from the busy highway towards the village, lush green farms surrounded the road. With a population of around 5,000 people, Badsa is a predominantly agriculture-based society. The village is around 300 years old, with a few structures still remaining. Like a typical small Indian village, Badsa also has its share of cows and buffaloes, small water bodies, narrow lanes and small houses.
The village community places special emphasis on education; the people I met here were extremely determined that their children gain the IT skills that can prepare them for job skills and economic success. It is one of the 300 villages where we have implemented the Hindi version of Microsoft Digital Literacy—an IT training program for use in shared-use iCafes and kiosks like those in Badsa. The Badsa village council (Panchayat, meaning a council of 5 people) has a goal to make every household e-literate, and is sponsoring one person from every household to become e-literate through our Digital Literacy program. I met the head of the village council (Sarpanch), who introduced me to the various members of the Panchayat and gave me a tour of the village. Overall, the initial response from kiosk owners and students alike has been extremely positive; within just a couple of weeks of announcing its availability, more than 1,200 villagers signed up. Before leaving, I had the honor to present a certificate of completion for the Digital Literacy course to Naveen Kumar—the first student there to have successfully completed the curriculum.
India’s economic success has been tied closely to its support of local technology innovations. The ability for those at the middle and bottom of the economic pyramid to make real human progress through harnessing and building local software economies is truly significant, and fostering this local innovation is a key focus of our work through Unlimited Potential.
In Chennai, I had the privilege to visit the Indian Institute of Technology there—one of the most prestigious institutions in the country—touring the campus and labs and visiting the TENET Incubation Center as well as the on-premises Microsoft Labs. While there, I had the good fortune to spend time with one of the preeminent thought leaders in the field of rural ICT connectivity and head of the TENET program, Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala. We discussed his current and future projects, as well as possible areas of future collaboration.
While in Chennai, I also visited the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation, who we have been working with on areas of skill development and capacity building for village communities. We had a great discussion on how we can enable participatory locale-specific content development deploying dynamic user-generated approaches for village knowledge enhancement. Other highlights from my time there included the incredible traditional South Indian breakfast we were served at Dr. Swaminathan’s guest house and a relaxing morning walk along the riverside. I covered a stretch very popular for joggers and walkers, stopping in at the Madras Rowing Club on the way.
Throughout this trip, the unifying thread that I saw, whether in a rural village or a crowded city, was the common human experience shared across India. Whether by finding a job or starting a business, the most fundamental need of people is to support their and their families’ basic needs, propelling their contribution into their communities, their region and ultimately their country. As we discuss investments in technology, we must also consider the investments we make in people—it is the potential of individuals that holds the key to changing the world. So, by partnering with those who can effectively help scale technology’s human impact, together we can focus on empowering not just the few, but everyone, in India.
Thank you,
Michael Rawding, Vice President, Unlimited Potential Group
