What is “Rural” Information Technology?

Science is man’s search for answers to the human condition. In order to be meaningful, science must account for the entire ecosystem in which it has to operate – the time, space, society, culture, and economics. The creation of technology is the process of making science viable in a specific environment. At Thinvent, we have applied these principles to the creation of IT products that are specially suited to the Rural Indian scenario.

Today, Rural India is emerging as the largest and most viable consumer segment on the global scene. Governments, NGOs, businesses, and corporates alike are making a beeline for the villages. Products and services are being reinvented and redesigned to suit the needs of the end consumer – the peasant.

Rural IT efforts have perpetually aimed at placing the cheapest possible computer in the hands of the peasant. Over our past 15 years of experience with numerous IT projects across India, we realise the that one cannot simply replant the seeds of western IT into the soil of rural India, and expect a healthy harvest. And hence Thinvent was born, to cater to the end consumer – the peasant – by enabling the organizations that operate in the rural space. We create Information Technology products that assist you in your quest to satisfy the needs of the rural consumer.

How is Rural IT different?

Erratic power, heat, dust and unreliable connectivity, are as much a feature of urban India as of rural India. However, traditional urban methods to counter these problems, such as uninterrupted power supplies, air conditioning, dust proofing, and redundant connectivity, are simply not viable in the rural context.

If we are to build all the infrastructure that traditional IT demands, can we achieve the cost efficiencies that the value-oriented rural customer demands? By enclosing ourselves in a pristine environment even in the rural settings, do we not alienate ourselves from the very men and women we strive to serve?

What IT products and services do you need to operate in the rural space?

IT is a set of tools that enable business delivery. Businesses don’t need the fastest computers. They need faster turnaround times. Your business applications should enable your staff to serve more customers, achieve greater customer satisfaction, and be more satisfied employees. IT should deliver you meaningful information that lets you know, plan, scale and execute. And all this should happen within the desired cost.

How can Thinvent help your business ?

By applying the principles of appropriate technology, Thinvent has created IT systems that make themselves at home in Rural India. Our products and allied services are designed to specially address your business concerns around power availability and consumption, unreliability of communications networks, the heat and the dust!

Our power efficient computers do not require air conditioning and are dust proofed. Relying entirely on cutting edge technologies, we deliver IT services such as POS, ERP and HRM, to field locations where connectivity is a big issue.

What will it cost ?

We are happy to state that in large volumes, our solution has one of the cheapest acquisition costs in the world. What’s more, we also dramatically reduce your operational expenditure.

At a peak power consumption of less than fifty watts (monitor, computer, UPS overhead – all inclusive), our computers operate for a whole day from just a car battery. In just a few hours of charging from the grid, you can store enough power to drive your computer for a full day, saving you the cap-ex of solar or genset power. It also puts solar computing within the reach of small and medium initiatives.

We offer a three-year warranty on hardware and software. Packaged, our system is only twice as heavy and bulky as a laptop carton, enabling hand-carriage. With zero moving parts inside, our equipment is vibration-safe. Two of our customers take them village to village in a van – and they are powered on and running while the vehicle is moving.

The hardiness of our hardware and software will enable you to derive maximum value from every rupee spent.

And the proof of our success?

The Indian Railways! The size, scale, and magnitude of operation of the Indian Railways needs no introduction. Turn-around-time per transaction and uptime (availability) of the IT system are two crucial parameters for their success. And against all benchmarks of quality and reliability, our products have exceeded the Railways’ expectations.

We have delivered automated ticket vending, unreserved and reserved ticketing, crew management and parcel management, at remote locations. We provide computers, kiosks, biometric authentication and smart card solutions, high-availability servers, remote management and monitoring, automated breath alcohol testing, and location aware handhelds. Many of these products were developed by us from scratch, when none of the existing commercial solutions met the requirements of the Railways.

Whether the stations have erratic power, unreliable connectivity, poor maintenance or no local IT support, we help the Railways achieve the impossible – ticket after ticket after ticket!

Key Features:

• We handle a mixed network of dial-up CDMA/GPRS, WiFi, Ethernet and DSL.
• Remote management and monitoring is built into every component of the system. The health of the entire network is monitored from a central location. SMS alerts are sent directly to rural operators when their computers are unreachable.
• All critical system status are displayed as a colour swatch on the task bar. Various possible faults with the computer, the operator’s network, and the central servers, are identified.
• Bundled software includes browsers, voice, video and chat communication, office applications, media players and graphics programs.Support for a wide variety of printers, digital cameras, and other common peripherals.
• A bouquet of carefully selected central services – email, collaboration, voice and chat switching, spam and virus control, content management, document management, knowledge sharing portals, educational portals, video streaming, Internet access control, centralised backup, and many more.
• Unique methodology of state preservation using centralised backup of system configuration, and periodic backup of user data to secondary storage. This minimises hassles when replacing faulty hardware.

To know more, please call us, or send us an email. Also browse through this website for white papers and case studies on our rural IT solution.

Download Whitepaper

Whitepaper on Rural IT

Thinvent provides you with the right hardware, software and tools, to deal with the heat, dust, erratic power and unreliable connectivity that characterise rural India.

Links

• Read more about our Solution for IT in India.
• Read about the Features of Thinux for Rural Tele-centre Operators.
• Read our Rural IT Whitepaper.

Downloads

• Rural IT Whitepaper.
• Datasheet of our hardware, software and power conditioning equipment.
• In-depth rural technology document.

1. An operating system that extends upon the legendary stability and security of Linux. Thinux has an inbuilt recovery mode and “read-only” base, that ensures that no matter what goes wrong on the field, the system can be recovered on-site.

2. Preconfigured drivers for all the hardware devices that one is expected to attach to the computer.

3. Pre-installed applications that enable common computing tasks such as browsing and document preparation. These applications also cover the syllabi of common computer courses that the telecentre operator may wish to deliver.

4. Compatibility with most popular Windows software.

5. Localisation. One can access Hindi and other Indian language websites and create documents in Devanagari under Thinux. Moreover, Thinux itself can display most software menus and help in Hindi, Tamil, etc. This is a boon for rural students and users.

6. Support for connectivity through dial-up, DSL, CDMA, GPRS, Wi-Fi and VSAT. Built-in VPN connectivity.

7. Remote Management: Thinux gives you the ability to remotely configure, upgrade, control, inventory, view and reboot your computers, from anywhere in your network, through a simple browser-based interface. This greatly simplifies the task of managing a heterogeneously connected network of thousands of computers.

8. Remote Monitoring: To help run the project successfully, Thinux provides you with details like uptime, connectivity issues, resource utilisation (such as number of printouts). These statistics are collated and made available at the central monitoring location.

9. Unified Communication: Thinux has built in support for all modern forms of communication – email, chat, VoIP and video-conferencing. The centres can use these services to communicate with you and each other, and also offer these as services to the village folk.

10. UI Customisations: When a computer centre is set-up by a new entrepreneur, the user will face a number of teething problems. This leads to frequent support calls. We minimise these in two ways.

First, the entire UI is customised to be very user-friendly. All the software and tools that they commonly require, are placed in a handy and organised manner. On-line help and tutorials (localised to Hindi) guide them through common tasks like taking their first printouts.

Secondly, we provide on the screen, a number of status icons. When the user calls up for support, the personnel can ask for the state or colour of each icon, and quickly determine the cause of commonly occurring problems. This is very helpful in debugging problems with printing or Internet connectivity.

The above software consumes a disk space of less than 512MB.

In a country like India, hardware in the field must face all kinds of extremities. From the vagaries of Indian weather, which can range from sub-zero temperatures to fifty degrees centigrade, to erratic power supply, which, when it does get supplied, is rarely at the correct voltage or frequency. These problems are often compounded by the hostility of the users to the device. IT is usually used to monitor the people who use it, which does not auger well with them.

The other major problem is the lack of connectivity. While the world is moving to a web based, centralised computing model, India still does not have reliable Internet or WAN connectivity in most parts of the country.

Our Hardware Solution

It is these precise problems that Thinvent addresses. We work on hardware such as thin clients, hand-helds and ruggedised servers, which can withstand the environments our customers work in. We address the power, heat and dust problem, by making our devices consume very low power. This enhances battery life. Lower power consumption leads to lower heat dissipation, leading to heat resistant and compact devices. Dust proofing is also achieved because heat dissipation eliminates the need for cooling fans that suck dust.

Our devices have no moving parts. All the storage is done on solid state media. This greatly enhances the life of the product, and leads to lower downtime and less servicing. Since the deployment area of these devices is diverse, higher MTBFs mean significantly reduced travelling times for service personnel.

A reduction in moving parts and size has a very advantageous affect- a reduction in cost of the product.

Our Software Solution

We create Linux based operating environments under the brand name of Thinux. Thinux is designed to derive maximum processing from the low power components used in our hardware. The OS provides 24x7x365 uptimes, remote management and monitoring, remote application upgrades, support for various peripherals, Indian language localisation, small footprint, etc.

The freedom of open source gives us the power to customise the operating environment to unique needs of the customer. Often projects don’t demand general purpose computers. They require single-purpose devices focussed on achieving the business goals of the project.

Connectivity

A major problem in deploying dispersed IT systems is the lack of guaranteed bandwidth. Thinvent works around this problem by providing multi-modal transport of data between the client and the server. Our systems support DSL, Ethernet, VSAT, WiFi, packet radio, leased line, cable, dial-up, GPRS/EDGE/3G, CDMA, and other forms of data connectivity. We even provide limited connectivity over SMS.

Connected-Disconnected Operation

Thinvent provides its customers, the ability to run “on-line” applications in a connected-disconnected environment, by replicating the entire server side database and application stack on the client device. The local and central databases are kept in sync through the intermittent connectivity available. This mode has been favoured by many government agencies, such as the Indian Railways.