By Danish A Khan

NEW DELHI, September 10 (IslamOnline) - Soon Third World's rural poor will have a portable, affordable, sharable and multi-lingual computer manufactured by a company in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley.

The dream of offering the poor an affordable personal computer (PC) of their own will be realized later this month. Seven technocrats, four associated with the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bangalore in the south Indian state of Karnataka, have put together an innovative marvel called “Simputer” or Simple Computer.

Swami Manohar, V Vinay, Ramesh Hariharan and Chandru, all from the IISc, Vinay Deshpande, Shashank Garg and Mark Mathias of Encore Software Ltd and Rahul Matthan of Trilegal - all got together to form the Simputer Trust.

They said that the project got underway only after a discussion on the digital divide at the BangaloreIT.com 1998, Asia’s biggest IT show organized by the Karnataka government and the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom).

The challenge to overcome the digital divide gave birth to “Simputer” which is a low priced portable alternative to PC, and promises the common man all the existing benefits of Information Technology (IT).

Sized 8”x5”x1”, the Simputer is relatively a low-cost, multi-lingual, mass access, palm-top device with a touch-sensitive liquid crystal display (LCD) screen, a speaker, a microphone and a stylus to touch and drag icons. It has easy-to-use applications including voice mail, text-to-speech capabilities and Internet access.

“Users can surf the Net by selecting icons and Simputer’s text-to-speech function would read back the contents in Kannada, Hindi and Tamil,” explained Vijay Chandru, a computer applications professor at IISc. However, English, being a non-phonetic language, remains a tough nut to crack for Simputer, he added.

In India, PCs are somewhat costly. The Simputer - priced at about $200 or Rs. 10,000, would be three times cheaper than a PC in the Indian market. “We are now making a range of Simputers with different configurations ranging from Rs. 10,500 ($214) to Rs. 23,000 ($469),” said Vinay Deshpande, founder-member and chairman of Encore Software ltd.

Simputers work on shared universal accesses and have enormous possibilities such as Net-banking/micro-banking through cooperatives and village post offices, railway ticketing, Net-shopping, storing agricultural data and gaining access to agricultural information, e-governance and schools. NGOs can also set up service kiosks.

Simputers also have a special role in the third world because it ensures that illiteracy and low income are no longer a barrier to handling a computer.