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Hindu: In the largest such simultaneous deployment of ‘free-and-open’ software in India, over 15 lakh Kerala schoolchildren on Friday start taking their quarterly practical tests in Information Technology on personal computers using a special Linux version.
The IT@School project of the State Education Department has developed an operating system based on the Linux version Ubuntu. Called IT@School GNU Linux Version 3.0, it was distributed to 2,832 high schools — over a thousand of them government schools, the rest aided and unaided ones.
Between September 7 and 22, children of Classes 8, 9 and 10 will use some 30,000 PCs to do their quarterly practical examinations in IT.
The State’s path-breaking e-learning initiative Akshaya had raised popular expectations, but the cost of proprietary software licences in bulk was unaffordable. This led to the State emerging as a pioneer in the use of Open Source resources in a host of education and e-governance projects

Pop stars are doing it, so are millions of teenagers and even Communist Party politicians — blogging has taken Vietnam by storm and spawned an alternative communications universe to dusty state media.
In an online phenomenon that has exploded in a little over a year in this youthful and booming nation, millions of net surfers now reveal all as they share daily gossip and thoughts on their fast-changing society.
When Vietnam hosted world leaders for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit last year, student volunteers and state-paid staff provided behind-the-scenes looks at the event.
Bloggers have fought wars over the cultural divide between Vietnam’s north and south, but they have also raised funds for the needy, arranged organ donations and given support to people suffering deadly diseases.
Vietnam may be a one-party state that censors its official media and the Internet, but this hasn’t stopped millions of yong people embracing a world of carefree online chatting their parents could only have dreamed off.
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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 …

Hindu: An estimated one lakh broadband enabled service centres are expected to come up in the country by March 2008 at a cost of Rs. 5,400 crore if Union Minister of Communication and Information Technology A. Raja is to be believed. One centre will come up for every six villages with all e-governance services. A sum of Rs 1,600 crore will be put up by the Central government and the rest by the private sector under the Public Private Partnership (PPP).
The Minister said that for the implementation of e-governance, the government on its part is trying to provide basic infrastructure including internet, window facilitation centre and last leg connectivity for implementation of e-governance. However participation of the private sector and citizens is a key for providing totally transparent services to the public.
The application of IT to government processes, e-governance in short, could have a profound impact on the efficiency, responsiveness and accountability of government and on the quality of life and productivity of citizens, especially the poor. Read on …

Reuters – A nonprofit group that designs low-cost computers for poor children may start selling $350 laptops on the commercial market by Christmas, an executive said on Monday.
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, said the computer could sell initially for about $350, or twice its production cost, although the group is also considering a higher price tag.
Although the green-and-white XO was designed for elementary school children in poor countries, analysts say that some of the features make it attractive to kids in wealthier countries as well as adults.
The foundation has kept its costs down by developing its own technology, including the display, and using a relatively inexpensive microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. It also uses free Linux software, saving the cost of paying to use Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Read on …