is now connected, making it more feasible for telecomm operators to move into rural India.

The business case around services based on connectivity remains weak, however, because the question of who will pay is unanswered. But Tenet and the IIT incubator are experimenting with a number of technology and application options, developing ideas that could scale to become commercial.

Jhunjhunwala forecasts that mobile communication will reach 97% of India’s rural population in the next few years and that every village will have broadband in five or six years. However, he says, “we are also concerned about sustainable development and world issues such as climate change. Creating a better life for those in rural areas will challenge the poverty trap of moving to overcrowded urban areas and reduce climate damage.”

Rural healthcare

In Pakistan, ICT4D programs include a speech and language technology development research project led by Carnegie Mellon University and Aga Khan University, and initially funded by Microsoft’s Digital Inclusion initiative. Called HealthLine, the project seeks to overcome a lack of healthcare information in rural areas by giving members of the healthcare community access to medical information. Healthcare workers, mostly village women chosen by the government for two months of basic training, use a toll-free number to call and ask questions of an automated health information system. The system overcomes literacy problems and barriers to information access, allowing the women to act as frontline healthcare providers in villages that often have little or no health service provision.

Jahanzeb Sherwani, an undergraduate from Lahore and a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon, is working on the project in Karachi, talking to healthcare providers about their needs and considering how technology can be adapted for populations with a low level of literacy. The system is being tested and, if it is successful, could be scaled to cover the 100,000 rural healthcare workers in Pakistan. The economics of the system are good as health workers need only access to a phone and the health information is held on a PC server in Karachi.

Roni Rosenfeld, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, hopes the Pakistani government will fund a large-scale version of the project, but also envisions a business model that requires people to pay a small fee for information they want, making the project self sustaining if it is not government funded.

Are such projects sustainable? “ Absolutely,” says Rosenfeld. “Although it is hard to predict sustainability for any one ITC4D project, overall sustainable projects are sure to emerge. We need expertise in IT, economics, social policy, different cultures, and business, and we need to try out as many ideas and solutions as possible. Some will fail, but some will succeed.”

It is not just academic projects that are reaching the poorest people on the planet. Commercial companies are also playing a part. While cynics suggest their interest is in cornering emerging markets, corporations such as Microsoft take a more balanced view. Kentaro Toyama, a leader in Microsoft’s Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India, acknowledges the business potential of new markets, but also points to the company’s responsibility to help people get the most out of computers, particularly in places that have previously lacked access to technology.

In terms of ICT4D projects, Microsoft runs many, funding research budgets and collaborating with development partners such as the World Bank. Its projects include Digital Green, which disseminates agricultural education to small farmers through digital video, and text-free user interfaces, which allow nonliterate groups to access computers.

While the answer to the question of whether the end of poverty will be achieved by money or knowledge is probably both, Toyama adds the need for human interest. “The problems of developing countries are huge and dire,” he says. “We have to do as much as we can to help by harnessing the energy of people in developed countries. ICT4D is sustainable and can be successful as long as it attracts human interest.”

 

Sarah Underwood writes about computing and technology from Teddington, UK.

Patent Applications
Patent
Filings
Increase
in China

More patent applications were filed in China than any other country last year, according to China’s State Intellectual Property Office, which received 694,000 applications in 2007. The U. S. had the second most applications, with 484,955, followed by Japan with 443,150.

Three types of patents are granted in China: invention patents, which are valid for 20 years from the date of filing, and utility patents and design patents, both of which are valid for 10 years. In terms of invention patents, China is ranked third in the world, behind the U. S. and Japan. If China’s number of patent applications continues at its current rate, it will lead the world in invention patent applications by 2012.

Approximately one-third of the invention patent applications filed in China are made by foreign businesses, “which clearly suggests that filing in China has become an intrinsic part of most multinational company’s [intellectual property] strategies,” according to Evalueserve, a market and business research company.