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.