Conjure up an image of a farmer in rural Karnataka or Kerala, listening to a radio broadcast of the weather with a simple, small portable computer in his hand. With all the weather updates to boot, he makes a quick call to a bank for cash to buy seeds and fertilizer. He doesn’t stop there. With a pocketbook-sized computer in his hand, he smartly connects to the net for some handy tips on how to grow that particular crop. It’s all thanks to the Simputer, the backbone of this entire process. The Simputer has garnered all the data that he had wanted in the shortest possible time.
Now there is no denying that this is a utopian scenario. It would have been possible had this pocketbook-sized computer reached many of our farmers in the rural India. Though it ran into rough weather it had its good times too. Read how.
The Simputer Trust—a group of scientists of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and few engineering professionals from the firm Encore Software designed a linux-based handheld device, to make computing affordable and accessible to developing countries that face barriers of price, language, and literacy. First released in 2002 and with an initial goal of selling 50,000 Simputers, the project could sell only 4000 units by 2005!
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