to amplify what people in developing countries can do to improve their lives and eradicate poverty. Again, the task is Herculean, with the World Bank reporting that, despite a reduction in the proportion of people living in poverty in the developing world over the past 20 years from 40% to 20%, more than a billion people still struggle to survive on a dollar a day.

improving farmers’ Lives

Successful ICT4D projects include eSagu, an IT-based personalized agricultural extension system that started in 2004 as a research project by the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Hyderabad, India and is funded by Media Lab Asia, a nonprofit organization that carries out collaborative research in developing relevant and sustainable technologies, and culturally appropriate solutions, which will improve daily life.

In India, farming is the backbone of the economy, with two-thirds of the population living in rural areas and depending on agriculture for their income. However, the farming community faces numerous problems, including a lack of timely expert advice to help farmers be more productive and competitive.

eSagu (“Sagu” means “cultivation” in the Telugu language) aims to improve farm productivity by delivering farm-specific expert advice in an opportune manner to each farmer without the farmer needing to be literate or IT competent. The system is based on a team of agricultural experts at an

With healthLine,
women can become
healthcare providers
in rural villages that
often have little or
no health service
provisions.

eSagu lab, usually in a city, supported by an agricultural information system. A small computer center, with a coordinator who is an educated and experienced farmer, covers a group of five or six villages. Every day, the coordinator visits farms to collect information and take photographs. A CD is then prepared and sent by parcel service—broadband is prohibitively expensive—to the main lab, where the experts analyze each farm’s crop situation and prepare farm-specific advice. This is downloaded to the village eSagu center via a dial-up connection and the coordinator delivers the experts’ advice to each farmer.

By closing the gap between agricultural research and practice, eSagu helps farmers improve efficiency and use pesticides and fertilizers effectively. An evaluation study showed that eSagu farms accumulated benefits worth about $89 per acre.

IIIT professor P. Krishna Reddy, who has been involved in eSagu since

it started, suggests that the scalability of the system and its ability to be developed using existing infrastructure mean it could be expanded across rural India and replicated elsewhere.

“eSagu has been very successful. This year we will look at how it can be commercialized and improved further, still for the benefit of rural farmers,” Reddy says.

At the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Madras, professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala of the Department of Electrical Engineering, leads Tenet, a telecommunications and computer networking group that aims to bring not only telephony and Internet services to rural India, but also social improvement such as better education, agricultural development, and job creation. Jhunjhunwala also chairs a rural technology and business incubator with a mission to design, pilot, and nurture business ventures and a vision to facilitate inclusive technology and business development in rural areas.

“Everything is so different in rural areas compared to urban areas. The technology is different, connectivity is difficult and often only mobile, and the economics are different as there are a smaller number of people in a specific area with little ability to pay for services,” explains Jhunjhunwala. “Each challenge is a huge learning experience and things you assume will work often don’t.”

While little connectivity in rural India 10 years ago meant there was no business case for commercial expansion, 60% to 70% of the rural population

Computer Science
Richard Karp Wins Kyoto Award

Richard Manning Karp was recently awarded the Kyoto Award in the category of Advanced Technology for his contributions to the theory of computational complexity, which he first developed in the early 1970s by establishing the theory of NP-completeness.

A professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, Karp has

had an enormous influence on the principles behind the analysis and design of algorithms used in numerous scientific disciplines.

Karp’s NP-completeness theory increased the efficiency of problem solving by providing a standard method of measuring the computational complexity of combinatorial problems.

His NP-completeness theory classifies problems by their degree of difficulty: Class P

represents problems for which
polynomial-time algorithms of
deterministic solutions exist and
Class NP represents problems
for which polynomial-time
algorithms of non-deterministic
solutions exist, including the
sub-class NP-Complete, the
most difficult-to-solve problems.
By developing a standard
methodology for this process,
Karp significantly advanced
the theory of computation and

algorithms that now support the field of computer science.

Karp is the recipient of the 1985 ACM A.M. Turing Award, the National Medal of Science, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, among other awards. He will be presented with the Kyoto Award and a $460,000 prize from the Inamori Foundation at an awards ceremony in Kyoto, Japan, in November.