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With a view to provide specialized health services to patients in rural areas, a two way telemedicine link between Sir Ganga Ram Hospital here and Community Health Centres at Haryana and Rajasthan was established today.
Launching the pilot project ‘Village Resource Centre´ (VRC), a link between the hospital and CHCs in Gohana, Haryana and Kaithun, Rajasthan, Union Minister for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal said the Ministry is planning to start 15 other VRCs in different parts of northern India soon.
“The project aims at providing quality healthcare, early diagnosis, treatment and tertiary consultation from SGRH to medical kiosks established in village hospitals,” Sibal said.
The VRCs will also provide services like rural medical insurance, farming advise, weather updates, water management, employment generation through vocational courses and educational facilities.
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In an effort to lure young voters to the polls, Connecticut Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz recently announced Thursday that her agency’s Web site will offer a video showing how to use the state’s recently acquired optical scan voting machines. The 90-second video can be downloaded onto personal recording devices, including iPods, and will also be available on YouTube.
Bysiewicz acknowledged that most young people who know how to use an iPod would likely understand how to use an optical scan machine. But it still makes sense to provide instructions on the Internet, where young people get much of their information, she said.
She pointed to national efforts to remind young people to vote through text messages on their cell phones apart placing ads in newspapers, on cable TV and radio.
“We’re trying to get the information out to all the age groups using the media that they’re most likely to use on a regular basis,” she said.
For years, Connecticut used lever voting machines. The new system requires users to fill out ballots by hand and feed them into scanning machines.
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The Madurai Division of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) will phase out the use of paper slowly with the introduction of Enterprising Data Management System (EDMS), which would pave way for keeping records in electronic form, and facilitate LIC transactions by a policy holder from anywhere in the country. The Madurai division will serve as a pilot scheme in the south zone, and the second division in the country.
Between 1-14 August, LIC sold 73,432 policies, mopping Rs82 crore as premium.
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The fishermen of Veerampattinam will soon have a mobile phone enabled intelligence system that will tell them everything from where to fish to when to venture home because the weather could turn ugly. M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) is working on on a solution to provide real time information on mobile phones using CDMA. The features:
1. Weather updates to help the fishermen decide whether or not to venture out
2. Information on fish concentration to increase catch
3. A GPS capability is also being worked out, which would make rescue operations easier.
The pilot project involving 10 fishermen is running on the Tata Teleservices Ltd , whose coverage extends to a range of 15-20 km off the coast, covers about 80% of the fishermen’s requirement. “It is currently in Phase 0—we hope to move through four phases over a period of one and a half years. By November this year, we would like to perfect the application, and make about 100 phones available across the coast,” says Parag Kar, senior director of Qualcomm in India and SAARC.
The cost of the handset is estimated at less than Rs 2,500, and would be subsidized by Qualcomm and MSSRF.
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During the late 1990s, an oft-repeated story about India’s mobile revolution featured fishermen in Kerala who used their mobile phones to call wholesale agents before reaching the shore to check market prices. Considering that mobile calls used to cost 20 cents a minute in those days and were obviously limited to the affluent, the story appeared apocryphal to some.
There is now a research that has mapped the benefits to those fishermen. The study, by Robert Jensen, a Harvard University economist, found that as mobile coverage increased in Kerala, fishermen’s incomes increased by 8%, fish prices fell by 4% on average and less wastage was created. It concluded that information makes markets work, and markets improve welfare.
It is this welfare function that the mobile phone revolution seems to be spreading across India, especially in rural areas. Mobile phones are making conventional economic transactions more cost- and time-efficient. They often make up for poor infrastructure by substituting for travel. They allow price data to be distributed and enable traders to engage with wider markets.
As India adds more than seven million subscribers every month, there is a distinct impact on the grass-roots economic landscape. Mobiles have played the role of a growth multiplier. From the roadside motor mechanic to the mason, the vegetable vendor or the illiterate housemaid, everyone is getting linked to his or her relevant marketplace. The farmer in the countryside can now base his harvesting decision on the regional commodity market rates he receives via text message, or plan his sowing in line with the weather forecast. Read on …

The standard of education was falling in the Maldives before broadband Internet access brought a quiet online revolution to classrooms in the Indian Ocean atoll nation.
Now Asina Ahmed hooks up to the Internet and uses a smart board with a touch-sensitive screen to liven up a maths class for a group of young Maldivian children on remote Rashdoo Island.
Ahmed invites eight-year-old Aishath Zayba Ismail to count the number of cherries in a fruit basket. Ismail approaches the board, places her hand over the images and glides each cherry across the white board.
With a special pen she scribbles “four cherries” on the screen.
Before the smart board arrived, there was no interactive learning in Rashdoo Island, 37 miles (60 kilometres) west of the capital island Male.
Broadband connectivity across the atolls has enabled interactive learning methods like the smart board to take off, putting the fun back into classrooms and encouraging children’s communications skills.
Literacy rates in this Indian Ocean archipelago exceed 90 percent, with nearly all children receiving some form of primary education, but the quality of teaching remains low, partly due to the low skills of the teachers themselves.
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LiveMint: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), India’s biggest phone services firm, will piggyback a state-of-the-art wireless broadband network that it’s setting up for a large computer kiosk network for the Union government to offer up to 85,000 customers high-speed wireless broadband services.
A draft tender circulated by the state-owned BSNL among hardware vendors details a range of voice and value-added services to be offered. “The class of service features shall support…real-time and extended real-time voice and video traffic for voice over IP, fax, video conferencing and video on demand applications,” says the draft tender, indicating the type of services for which it plans to use the network.
The service will use the emerging Wimax (worldwide interoperability for microwave access), which is capable of data speeds of 10 megabits per second (mbps). In comparison, third generation (3G, a fast mobile phone standard) networks promise data throughput of 2mbps and data-friendly cellular networks deliver speeds of up to 512 kilobits per second.
The centres, to be run on the public call office model by village-based “entrepreneurs”, are being designed to provide government services such as issue of certificates, registration of births and deaths, along with commercial information. Read on …

LiveMint: Goa is set to become the first state in India to be fully connected through a high-bandwidth broadband network.
By March, the network will be rolled out together by the state government and Bangalore-based tech solutions company United Telecom Ltd in a so-called public-private partnership model.
Optic fibre cables and wireless technologies will be used across the state and will also link some 200 computer kiosks that deliver government services to the state’s residents.
United Telecom is also providing connectivity for 450 common service centres in Jharkhand. Read on …

Hindustan Times: The government is now ready to bring in a regulation for television through Internet and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV).
A joint group comprising officials from the Information and Broadcasting and the Telecom ministries has been constituted to draft a regulatory framework for IPTV and Internet television. “The group is due to submit its report soon,” an official said.
The joint group will also examine the issue of content. “For IPTV and mobile television, only the channels approved by the ministry can be allowed. But it would be difficult to enforce the same in case of internet television,” the official said.
The government is considering the law under which the new broadcast modes can be regulated as well as how it should be done. “The current broadcasting law does not cover IPTV, internet television or mobile television because the mode of transmission is not traditional–meaning, satellite or terrestrial,” a senior I&B ministry official said. For the ministry, the issue is that if the new broadcast modes are considered cable services, the definition of broadcasting service and cable operators will need to change, an official said.
Ministry officials believe that by the time the new technologies are ready to be implemented on a big scale, the regulatory framework will also be ready. So far, MTNL and the Bharati Group have announced IPTV services on a pilot basis in South Delhi. Prasar Bharati has started mobile television services for six channels in New Delhi area. Read on …

The Kerala IT Mission and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing or CDAC has launched a web portal, the first of its kind in the country, to check cyber crimes.
Users can log on to www.cyberkeralam.in and register themselves. They will be given a password using which they can share their grievances with experts at C-DAC.
Users can expect immediate tips but if the problem requires a detailed investigation it will be referred to the high tech cell of the Kerala police. Read on …