Information and Communication Technologies for Development

Patna, Saturday 22nd March - I met with Jennifer and Bipul from CRS Delhi this morning. My notes on the meeting are up on the wiki, so I'll just highlight a couple of the more interesting and important points.

It seems like our impression of the problem scope, at least as far as management in Delhi is concerned, was pretty accurate. Jennifer most definitely does not
favour a .NET/Windows Mobile solution; one of the first things she said to me when she saw Arvind's HTC phone on the table was that she was not keen on
buying them for all of their staff, so it seems like our gameplan of client-side Java + server-side ASP.NET is a good one. They asked about the possibility of tech support from MIT - we'll have to discuss this but I'm sure we can work something out, at least for the first year or so.

They do see this as the spearhead of a large-scale deployment of ICT throughout the organization, so we have to get it right. They have a few ideas for other things that might be useful, which I'll discuss further when I'm back in Delhi on Friday and I've had a chance to actually look around in Muzaffarpur.

One thing Jennifer mentioned is that this is unusual among CRS projects in that it has been initiated from the top rather than through a suggestion by the
partner organizations, so they may need some convincing. Head office in Delhi seems to be very much behind it though, so hopefully that should not be too
difficult. I think there are definitely benefits for everyone. At the moment the information sent by the partner organizations is manually entered into the
computer, but because of time constraints it is not analyzed thorougly enough so it is difficult to draw accurate conclusions, e.g. on how effective
preventative measures are. In addition, the partners can't access easily access the data held by CRS, and in any case it isn't really kept from year to year.

An end-to-end electronic system would allow access to information required at partner, state and head office level, and generally make operations easier and
more efficient. Of course, an end-to-end electronic system is reliant on a good quality network infrastructure. If our system falls over whenever there is an
actual disaster, it's worse than useless. I should be meeting with technical people from AirTel, one of the major national mobile phone operators, either
tomorrow or when I come back to Patna on Thursday, and I plan to speak with some represantatives from Tata Indicom who operate the landlines in Muzaffarpur. Hopefully I'll be able to get a sense of how reliable the network is and how much reliance we can put on it.

There was also a suggestion of using a satellite phone system. Unfortunately, satellite phones are regulated here and can only be used in the event of an
emergency. I asked Niraj, one of the people from the Muzaffarpur office who's currently in Patna, whether it was the local, state or Central government who
made the decision. It turns out it's a combination of all of them.

Despite the sinking feeling I felt when I heard this, I went ahead and asked how long the approval process takes - whether it comes through promptly after a
disaster, or whether it takes several days. Niraj laughed and said that a few days is definitely closer to the mark. I think it's still worth having a look
at what it would take to integrate with the satphones - they might be useful in the medium term, and maybe the government will deregulate them later.