I just got back from a talk by [[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/|Eric Brewer]], professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder of [[http://inktomi.com/|Inktomi]] on “Technologies for Emerging Regions”. Mostly non-technical, the talk’s focus was on technologies for the developing nations and the third-world countries. In the first half of the talk, Eric made arguments to convince the audience that this was a legitimate pursuit and offered many challenges for research on both technical as well as socio-economic issues. It was an interesting talk, and a couple of things that particularly caught my attention:

* One of the observations Eric made was that charity or donation was not a feasible model for injecting technology into a country like India. For the simple reason that this model is not sustainable — once the charity runs out, there is no one to maintain the service. He noted that almost 99.99% of the donated infrastructure (machines, network equipment and appliances) doesn’t work anymore due to lack of spare parts and maintenance. Basically, it just falls apart. It follows then, that any practical model has to be self-sustaining, and therefore, profitable (even marginally so). Some of the audience were worried about this since they understood this as “making money off the poor people”. However, as Eric pointed out, and I’m sure those who have spent some time in India will have observed, even people dwelling in slums have “disposable incomes” — they will have TV for instance, even though they don’t have proper living conditions for instance. And I agree that there is nothing wrong in setting up a profitable business — infact thats the only sustainable model that has enough incentive to make it last.
* The other thing that struck me was that Eric had these odd bits and pieces of information that even I didn’t know about. For instance, a UN study concluded that **none** of India’s dams are safe. Not even the great Hirakud or the Bhakra Nangal. I was shocked to say the least. Of course, one can always question the UN study itself, but I think thats going overboard.
* The talk went on to give other examples (environmental improvements, health care etc) where technology could be put to use. The key is to fit the technology to suit the requirements. As it turns out, the biggest challenges are socio-economic and pratical engineering rather than technical. Issues like dealing with the government, corruption become relevant all of a sudden. It seems that the [[http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/|TIER]] project had to spend a lot of time in building trust and relationships with various NGOs in India and Bangladesh.

All in all, I thought the talk was interesting. I hope I’m able to contribute in some way to these efforts over the next few years and beyond.