South Africa could learn from Indian scientists who invented a cheap device enabling the poor and illiterate to surf the Internet

Stuart Millar

From the outside, the Simputer is nothing special: a grey box the size of an electronic organiser, with a black and white screen and four chunky buttons.

But the handheld device might solve the most pressing problem of the Internet age: how to get developing countries online. The Simputer, short for simple computer, promises to have as profound an impact on communications in the developing world as the clockwork radio of the British inventor Trevor Bayliss.

The device took a group of Indian scientists almost three years to develop. It will give online access for about R1 642, a fraction of the cost of a PC, when it becomes commercially available in India early next year.

Unlike the PC, it does not need a mains electricity supply but runs on three AAA batteries.

The Simputer's most revolutionary feature, however, is that it eliminates the biggest single barrier to computer use in the third world: illiteracy.

Almost 50% of India's population is unable to read or write. To overcome this, engineers at the Indian Institute of Sciences in Bangalore, epicentre of the country's hi-tech activity, and a local software company, Encore, developed a remarkable piece of text-to-speech software.

Called Information Markup Language -- or Illiterate Markup Language by the inventors -- the software allows the Simputer to translate English text into a variety of Indian languages, then read the information aloud to the user.

Swami Manohar, a scientist at the institute and a senior member of the team, said: "We spent a lot of time analysing how IT could really impact on the developing economies -- this was before the phrase digital divide [between rich and poor nations] became fashionable.

"Then we resolved that, instead of declaring what needed to be done, as technologists we would just do it."

To start with, the Simputer will be targeted at India, where there are two million PCs for a population of one billion.

Because the developers are licensing the hardware to manufacturers cheaply, and making the software available free under licence so that it can constantly be upgraded and distributed, the technology, especially text-to-speech, is likely to spread quickly to other countries.

The need is overwhelming. According to estimates from the World Resources Institute in Washington, more than four billion people worldwide remain untouched by the IT revolution -- yet the global economy is increasingly reliant on electronic communications and information.

"It is not access to technology but access to information that is critical," Manohar said.

"There are tonnes of initiatives coming out of New Delhi -- poverty alleviation schemes, women's welfare and caste/tribe welfare schemes -- but unless a person who is eligible actually knows that the schemes exist, it is not going to help them.

"The Simputer could improve their lives radically."

He envisages farmers, for example, using the Simputer to go online to access land records or to find out which markets would pay the best price for their products.

Electronic banking is another potentially massive use.

There are similar projects elsewhere. In Brazil, for example, a cheap, no-frills computer, the Computador Popular (or the Volkscomputer, as local people call it in imitation of the popular VW car) is being developed as part of a government-backed scheme to bridge the digital divide. It will have an estimated price tag of about R1 877, including monitor.

The Simputer's text-to-speech capabilities put it well ahead of the pack.

It works by breaking words down into basic sounds, then putting them back together in an Indian language, using a library of 1 200 sounds that is adequate for most dialects.

At present it can translate from English into Hindi, Kannada and Tamil; the developers say it will be easy to apply the same basic principles to any other language.

"The resulting speech sounds quite artificial, very much like the robots of science fiction movies," said Manohar.

"But in terms of understandability, it will be 99,9% for native speakers of that language. After listening to a few sentences, the person's brain gets calibrated to understand the accent."

To keep costs down, the inventors have absorbed all the development costs themselves, a bill that could have run to as much as R234,6-million if the Simputer had been put together in Silicon Valley in the United States. They have also used free "open source" software, such as the Linux operating system, wherever possible. The project's website is www.simputer.org.