Warana Experimenting With Wired And Wireless

Warana, a district in southern Maharashtra, is the experiencing innovative experiments using technology. Brady Forrest wrote about the Warana Unwired project being conducted by Microsoft Research India. They have literally made the mobile the next PC. The idea is to use the combination of PCs and mobile phones to implement a client-server architecture that communicates through SMSs. It is quite innovative and I like the idea of using existing technology than asking the common man to spend on more.

We replaced the client PCs with SMS enabled phones. On the server, we attached a smart phone through USB to their PC server. So, we effectively have an SMS gateway that receives incoming SMS messages and converts into database calls and the response was also converted to an SMS message and the result sent back to the phone that sent it. The authentication was through the SIM card (essentially the phone number).

Parallely, Warana is also going through the Warana Wired Village Project, being conducted by the Warana Cooperative Sugar Factory. Through this a farmer will be able to quickly access information regarding the crop and the associated business. It is a project specifically to help the farmer take a better and informed decision, whether it is about monitoring the crops or selling sugar.

Under the “Warana wired village project”, the villages in this sugarcane-growing region have computers that are linked to a central network that provides farmers access to essential pieces of information such as the ideal time for planting and harvesting sugarcane, the current market rates of their produce, and payments made by the factories.

It might be premature to say whether these projects will be successful or not, but these attempts do show that there are efforts towards indigenously using technology towards better information. One big factor is going to be the Government regulations regarding this, to treat the individual farmer on the same level as the giants. Whether these projects will be replicable in rest of the country is a difficult question to answer. Warana has more literacy rate, has industries and people there are aware of rest of the world. It is going to be not equally easy in the interiors of the village.

I hope to see such applications for the basic necessities. I am not talking about Nichlos Negroponte’s OLPC program. I am talking about solving deeper problems, like using technology to ease availability of energy, water, education and employment. Is it possible to use technology to make villages self-powered, whether we are using the solar energy or the Gober gas? Is it possible to use technology to take education to the interiors? Can we use the technology to ensure employment irrespective of where they are? These are some of the questions that need to be addressed and technology can play a big role in digging up the answers.