Posts tagged india
In India, a "Missed Call" is Ad-Hoc Infrastructure
More on the growing toll-free missed call ecosystem in India:
This week Pluggd.in, an Indian site focused on Indian entrepreneurs and startups, profiled a startup called RealTech Systems which has developed an irrigation control system for farmers that uses cell phone networks and missed calls. Essentially a farmer installs the company’s Real Mobile Starter Control product at an irrigation pump, and the device uses a SIM card and a missed call to turn the pump on and off remotely.
The problem, as Pluggd.in puts it, is that many farmers have to walk many miles to get to the pumps for their farms, but once they reach the pump sometimes the power to run the irrigation system isn’t available — unreliable power is one of the biggest infrastructure problems throughout much of India. The farmers can use the product to check to see if power in the area is turned on, and then run the irrigation accordingly — from miles away.
(Via GigaOm)
Technology Participation in India
Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods is an amazing dissertation on the rise of modern India.
Here’s two tech bits that really caught my eye:
In 2000 India had a grand total of just 3 million mobile phone users, the precise number that neighboring China was adding to its subscriber base every month. By the end of 2005, India was adding 2.5 million users a month and had exceeded a total base of 100 million.
And yet:
Less than 10 percent of India’s dauntingly large labor force is employed in the formal economy, which Indians call the “organized sector.” That means that fewer than 40 million people, out of a total of 470 million workers, have job security in any meaningful sense. It means that only about 35 million Indians pay any kind of income tax, a low proportion by the standards of other developing countries.
This leaves just 14 million people working in the private “organized” sector. Of these, fewer than 1 million—that is, less than a quarter of 1 percent of India’s total pool of labor—are employed in information technology, software, back-office processing, and call centers. Software is clearly helping to transform India’s self-confidence and the health of its balance of payments situation with the rest of the world. But India’s IT sector is not, and is never likely to be, an answer to the hopes of the majority of India’s job-hungry masses.
Thinking about China or India requires wrapping your mind around an entirely different type of scale.
