Indigenus

Makes me sad that digital book reading technology would cost Indians far more than book lovers in the western world. A slew of new technology tools being launched in the west will be priced far more in India, a country whose tech-savvyness and love for books match any western nation. Add to that the higher cost of acquiring a book online.

But first the details, and then a little more crib.

Among many such devices, Google Inc. is hoping to launch a new online service that will let readers buy electronic versions of books and read them on gadgets -- cell phones, laptops and possibly e-book devices. Google Editions will make millions of printed books available online, abiding by all copyright laws.

Google faces competition from Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-book reader and Sony Corp.'s new Reader Pocket Edition. Kindle weighs less than 300 grams and gets you a book to read within a minute. Sony's eBook Store includes more than 100,000 books, as well as a million free public-domain books available from Google. The Kindle Store currently has more than 330,000 available titles, according to an Associated Press report.

Indian bibliophiles will have to wait a while to be able to afford these 'lighter than the lightest paperback' devices. Or hope that someone kindles a flame here to develop an indigenous e-book reader! The latter sounds more like it, what with a country abounding in world-class software experts. Or maybe, we have an indigenous version already that has escaped my keen eye.

Posted by Subhra Priyadarshini on October 21, 2009
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I read with sheer delight this piece of news from Kerala, the coconut country. The state’s industries minister Elamaram Kareem has gone public with the urgency to fulfill a long-standing need of his people –- a state-of-the-art coconut plucking machine! The Kerala government has announced an award of one million rupees for anyone who comes up with a commercially viable coconut plucking machine.

For those of us from coastal states, the sight of a loincloth-clad coconut plucker expertly scaling the tall tree is common. But apparently, there’s a dearth of such skilled manpower across the coastal state, where coconuts are ripe for the picking every 45 days. My colleague Jacob Thomas, from God’s own country, tells me that earlier the climbers used to charge three rupees to climb up once and bring back the bounty. Blame the inflation for this, but today’s coconut pluckers would settle for nothing less than twenty five rupees per climb!

Earlier the government tried to meet this acute shortage of tree climbers and farmhands in the state by setting up a training school for coconut-plucking and tree climbing. In Kerala, a large large number of coconut-pluckers are actually from the coastal state of West Bengal or from Bihar. The state has over 16 crore coconut trees while most villages have only one or two climbers, grossly insufficient during harvest time. However, the plan to create a pool of trained agricultural workers does seem to have clicked. Some experiments with ad-hoc machines have also not yielded much result.

So the only way forward is innovation! It is coincidental that Raghunath Anant Mashelkar wrote on Nature India recently why innovation has to be at the forefront for a country with such peculiar needs -- the need for a national innovation ecosystem.

I will be happy to hear such need-based innovation stories from all corners of this huge country. Have you heard of an innovation that has changed the lives of the people around you?

Posted by Subhra Priyadarshini on August 21, 2009
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I just checked out the much-hyped beta version of Bhuvan, India's answer to Google Earth, and have to say it will need some more meat under its skin to make a true impact. I am sure the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will go live with the final version only when it if fully satisfied, what with all the hoopla surrounding it. Or at least lend an ear to feedback from users.

For starters, despite its promise to be 'bandwidth-friendly', the time taken to open Bhuvan's homepage itself faces stiff competition from Google Earth. And now that Google has Caffeine under its belt, it's all the more reason why ISRO needs to buck up! Also the site opens on internet explorer and is flash enabled only leaving users like me who prefer Firefox or javascript looking at a blank screen or being prompted to click on more buttons.

However, ISRO itself is not as competition conscious since it feels Bhuvan is a niche product specific to India.

Competition or not, the promise of Bhuvan sounds fairly good: better 3-D satellite imagery of India than available now on the web, country weather information as well as administrative boundaries of states and districts. There are interactive tools on offer for you to measure, draw, save and print information. The images are from the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites and there's talk of providing real time images as well, though how it would be achieved is apparently still being worked out.

With Bhuvan, ISRO will try to get the Indian record straight on political and territorial boundaries while protecting strategic data -- a bone of contention between Google Earth and the Indian government on a number of occasions.

Feedback welcome.

Posted by Subhra Priyadarshini on August 13, 2009
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So what do you think it’s going to be? The innovation of the century or another government-backed exercise that basks in the limelight for a while and flickers away?

A lot has been written about the 10 dollar laptop. First up, I fail to understand why we should give it a US dollar tag if it is an indigenous product being subsidised by the Indian government? Why not call it the Rs 500 laptop instead like the one lakh rupees car by the Tatas?

As of now, all we know is that the laptop will have a two gigabyte memory and wireless internet capability. A prototype (of a slightly higher cost) has been demonstrated to the Union minister of Human Resource Development but even that sounds like a marvel. The rest will perhaps come from subsidies, but who knows? The government has reportedly earmarked more than 46 billion rupees to develop the low-power gadget to work in rural areas with unreliable power supply and poor internet connectivity.

The laptop, being developed by Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Indian Institute of Technology, Madras will be manufactured at the government-owned Semiconductors Complex in Chandigarh. It will reportedly use a cheap microprocessor and do away with the hard disk, CD/DVD drive and other costly and problem-prone components. The wonder machine, being eagerly awaited by rural school administrators, will be a basic keyboard-screen-USB port model.

Let’s wait for the miracle to happen.

Posted by Subhra Priyadarshini on February 04, 2009
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There are murmurs in Vigyan Bhavan about a proposal to set up the country's first all-women engineering and technology institute in President Pratibha Patil's hometown in Maharashtra. The HRD ministry is mulling over the proposal for this exclusive women's technology school in Amravati near Nagpur on Patil's recommendation. The country's first woman president was apparently worried about the small number of girl students getting into the IITs.

The proposal has met criticism on these accounts: 1) Will there be enough women qualifying to fill up one IIT-type school if there aren't enough in the existing ones? 2) WIll the standard of students not suffer if the target is to fill the school up somehow? 3) Is it prudent to make technical education gender-specific?

What are your views?

Posted by Subhra Priyadarshini on June 26, 2008
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On Technology Day today, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decorated rocket scientists V. K. Saraswat and Dipankar Banerjee. The two scientists have long been involved in developing critical materials for aircraft carriers. Leader of the Agni-III missiles team Avinash Chander was decorated with the DRDO Award for pathbreaking research.

Pune's High Energy Materials Research Laboratory that makes explosives for many strategically important missile programmes got the prestigious Titanium Trophy. The Aeronautical Defence Agency of Bangalore was feted for defense research. So were Raju Venkata Narayana and his team from the Electronics and Radar Development Establishment, Bangalore and R B Subramanyam and his team from Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory, Hyderabad.

A befitting to salute the men shaping the strategic technology of this country!

Posted by Subhra Priyadarshini on May 12, 2008
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