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31 MAY 2013 VOL 340 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org Published by AAAS
Science for All
With 400 million people earning less than $1.25 per day, India is home to a staggering one-third of the world’s poor. Can scientists do more to lift people out of poverty?
CHENNAI, INDIA—In March 2012, Ashok
Jhunjhunwala invited 45 young hotshots in
India’s electronics industry to this southern
Indian city to brainstorm on a challenge:
Could they design a tablet computer with Internet connectivity that would sell for 2500 Indian rupees—about $50—and still allow their companies to turn a profit on the device?
To Jhunjhunwala, an electrical engineer here at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, it wasn’t merely the fortunes of India’s Silicon Valley that hung in the balance. India’s future was at stake.
India has made strides in extending education to all strata of society. According to the Ministry of Human Resources Development, in 2010, 50% of children attended school through grade 12—up from 37% just 8 years ago. Equality is taking root in higher educa-
Could they design a tablet computer with Internet connectivity that would sell for 2500 Indian rupees—about $50—and still allow their companies to turn a profit on the device?
To Jhunjhunwala, an electrical engineer here at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, it wasn’t merely the fortunes of India’s Silicon Valley that hung in the balance. India’s future was at stake.
India has made strides in extending education to all strata of society. According to the Ministry of Human Resources Development, in 2010, 50% of children attended school through grade 12—up from 37% just 8 years ago. Equality is taking root in higher educa-
tion as well. “The poorest children are getting
into engineering colleges. That was inconceivable a decade back,” says Jhunjhunwala,
who serves on a science advisory council to
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
But India is failing, Jhunjhunwala says, in what it offers up to those young minds in the classroom. “We have made zero progress, even negative progress, in the quality of education,” he asserts. Steering away from rote instruction and raising the bar, he says, “is our biggest challenge.”
Jhunjhunwala didn’t expect a cure-all from the computer jocks he coaxed to Chennai. But he knew that an inexpensive tablet, purchased en masse by the government and distributed to students, would be a powerful teaching aid. Two previous attempts had not lived up to their promise, and half the companies represented in the room, Jhunjhunwala knew, “were dead opposed to the idea” of a cheap tablet. It was hard to erase memories of the first cut-rate handheld alternative to lap- tops developed in India: the Simputer, which flopped a decade ago. The industry needed a reboot. But after huddling with the group all day, Jhunjhunwala recalls, “we felt confident that we could do something.”
But India is failing, Jhunjhunwala says, in what it offers up to those young minds in the classroom. “We have made zero progress, even negative progress, in the quality of education,” he asserts. Steering away from rote instruction and raising the bar, he says, “is our biggest challenge.”
Jhunjhunwala didn’t expect a cure-all from the computer jocks he coaxed to Chennai. But he knew that an inexpensive tablet, purchased en masse by the government and distributed to students, would be a powerful teaching aid. Two previous attempts had not lived up to their promise, and half the companies represented in the room, Jhunjhunwala knew, “were dead opposed to the idea” of a cheap tablet. It was hard to erase memories of the first cut-rate handheld alternative to lap- tops developed in India: the Simputer, which flopped a decade ago. The industry needed a reboot. But after huddling with the group all day, Jhunjhunwala recalls, “we felt confident that we could do something.”
Unlike in past efforts, competition is the
name of the game this time. As Science went
to press, a dozen companies were racing to
refine prototypes of a $50 tablet. These are
undergoing dozens of performance tests
here at IIT Madras’s research park. Based
on the benchmarking outcome, the Indian
government is considering making an initial
purchase this fall of 5 million tablets from
the five top-performing manufacturers; all of their machines will be marketed
under the name “Aakash 4.” The price for
each unit: Twenty-five hundred rupees, plus
taxes. With educational applications that
will initially enhance and someday possibly even supplant printed textbooks, the
Aakash-4, Jhunjhunwala predicts, “will be
an integral part” of India’s effort to raise
education standards.
The Aakash 4 is at the vanguard of India’s drive to use science and technology to raise millions of people out of poverty. The aim is to bypass hidebound approaches and link talent and ideas in a push for rapid economic growth.
S. Shankar Sastry, dean of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues envision the emergence of a new academic discipline—development engineering— aimed to assemble a toolkit of methods to find sustainable solutions to poverty. India, where 833 million of the country’s 1.21 billion people live in villages sorely deficient in health care, sanitation, electricity, and educational opportunities, is a natural crucible for such experiments.
In this impoverished landscape, Singh, an academic at heart, is sowing the seeds of an intellectual revolution. Last week, speaking about his vision of inclusive growth, Singh said: “The glass was almost empty when we started. The important point to note is that it is being filled.” High on the agenda are plans to extend a $1.2 billion National Knowledge Network—a high-speed Internet backbone now linking 1000 agencies and research institutions—to every one of India’s 630,000 villages.
Another push is coming from the National Innovation Fund, established last year with a $50 million pot of money to bankroll promising technological solutions for societal woes. “The fund is built on the principle that innovative enterprise can engage citizens at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” says Sam Pitroda,
chair of India’s National Innovation Council, which
helps oversee the fund. For example, using a grant from the fund, villagers coping with periodic droughts spawned by deforestation in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand are teaming up with scientists from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai to identify where ground water is more readily recharged in the watershed. The nuclear scientists are mapping underground water flow using isotopes of oxygen and tritium, enabling villagers to pinpoint locations to build recharge ponds.
helps oversee the fund. For example, using a grant from the fund, villagers coping with periodic droughts spawned by deforestation in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand are teaming up with scientists from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai to identify where ground water is more readily recharged in the watershed. The nuclear scientists are mapping underground water flow using isotopes of oxygen and tritium, enabling villagers to pinpoint locations to build recharge ponds.
Other initiatives that promise to transform India include agricultural extension services that use cell phones to broadcast best prac- tices and prevailing market prices for crops to farmers and fishers; a national ID pro- gram that will extend the welfare safety net to the nation’s poorest corners; and vaccines against diseases whose toll is highest among the most deprived. All told, experts say, India in 2013 will spend about $6 billion on science-based efforts to raise living stan- dards: half of its total R&D budget.
In a nation known for its prowess in rockets and atomic bombs, poverty alleviation is not something that most researchers gravitate to, says nuclear scientist Rajagopala Chidambaram, principal scientific adviser to the Government of India. “Active scientists are not the best suited for grassroots inter- vention,” he argues. The lion’s share of work, he says, should be left to nongovernmental organizations led by scientists. Others feel differently. “We have a moral responsibility to help the poor,” Pitroda says. For years, Pitroda, who helped establish India’s mod- ern telecom industry in the 1990s, doubted whether significant inroads were feasible. “The problems of poverty weren’t drawing talented researchers,” he says, and the gov- ernment approach was at times piecemeal, at times negligent. However, India’s rapid eco- nomic development is rewriting the script. “I didn’t think it was possible to do much to help,” Pitroda says. “Until now.”
