India is a land of contrasts. Pockets of prosperity adjoin areas of brutal poverty. Teeming cities, bustling with activity, are not far removed from remote rural villages. High technology thrives in a country where agricultural practices can resemble those of centuries past.
It’s no surprise then that the Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) group within Microsoft Research India finds it valuable to adopt a contrasting approach to projects designed to enhance the lives of millions in this ancient, storied nation.
“It’s a combination of skepticism with optimism,” says Kentaro Toyama, principal researcher and group lead, of his team’s efforts to identify how technological solutions might be able to serve people in emerging-market countries. “Skepticism about the real value of technology and optimism that we can make a difference—that combination is the crucial thing.”
The lab, based in Bangalore, is Microsoft Research’s newest, inaugurated in January 2005, and Toyama’s group was its first to coalesce, primarily because its mission was one of the reasons for Microsoft Research India’s formation. The goals for TEM remain the same as when it was formed, he says: “to both understand the needs and aspirations of people who either do not have any existing interaction with technology today or who are increasingly becoming users of technology, and to devise new solutions for them.”
Kentaro Toyama
“One reason we were able to get the green light for the lab was because there was a felt need for research in this area,” confirms Toyama, who also serves as the lab’s assistant managing director, “and I think India is probably the best place to do this kind of work. It’s very rare in the world to have a bustling IT industry that is growing rapidly, where you can go downtown and buy whatever electronic gadgets you want, and, at the same time, be within a 10-minute drive of a very poor urban slum or a half-hour from impoverished rural areas.”
Immersion within an emerging market is a key explanation for the success the TEM group has achieved.
“We have colleagues who do the same kind of work, but based in the United States, for example,” Toyama says, “and their pattern of work is that they spend a lot of time in the United States and then, every year for a month or two, they’ll come to India or Africa or Latin America to pursue the groundwork for their projects. It’s really hard for them. They can’t get the same kind of interactivity that we get. They don’t have the same kind of presence in those areas that we do.
“I’m more and more convinced that in order to do this kind of work well, you have to have a base of operations in the geography that you’re interested in impacting.”
It also helps to maintain a healthy skepticism about the value technology can accrue in such an environment.
“Literally everywhere,” Toyama says, “people are so excited about the potential of technology, and being able to interact with technology, that it is heartwarming to see.
“Sometimes, though, technology isn’t exactly what a community needs most, and even where it’s useful, it might require a lot of other physical and social infrastructure to be really useful. It’s important to have that doubt all the time, so that we don’t end up shoving technology into communities that don’t need it or need other things more.”
Partnering with established organizations with roots in the communities TEM studies performs a crucial role in helping the group retain a pragmatic approach focused more on the potential recipients of technological assistance than on the technology itself.
“My fondest memories in doing this work are all moments when someone has their first interaction with a PC. The joy and wonder is palpable,” Toyama says. “We almost always work with nonprofit organizations when we do any of the research we do. They help us connect with the community that they’ve taken possibly decades to establish a trust relationship with.”
Nearly three years on, Toyama sees unmistakable signs of progress in the mission his team adopted at the outset.
“We have several very mature research projects,” he says, “and the results we’ve been getting when we do evaluations are encouraging. We’ve made a number of inroads in education, in agriculture, with our understanding of things like rural kiosks, use of mobile phones, Internet cafés, and even microfinance. I think we’re doing pretty well by some measures.
“But in terms of lives impacted, I think we still have a long way to go. What we’re hoping for over the next few years is meaningful, wider-scale influence on the outside world. It could mean moving technology into products. It could mean having external organizations adopt some of the work we do. Maybe something that we discover helps a nation spend its education budget better. Our ultimate goal is to do research that makes an impact on the world at large.”
Technology for emerging markets is a broad umbrella, and Toyama’s group certainly has no shortage of projects it is pursuing. A few of the most compelling:
ONE COMPUTER, TWO SIMULTANEOUS USERS
Since joining Microsoft Research India in 2005, Udai Singh Pawar has been investigating how technology can improve the educational experience in schools where there are not enough computers to go around. His first project, Multimouse, enabled the use of multiple mice and multiple cursors on a single PC. That gave multiple students a simultaneous opportunity to gain hands-on computer and educational skills.
The project met with some success and has been built into a Microsoft product called MultiPoint. Now, Pawar, an associate researcher for the TEM group, is examining ways to extend the concept and the functionality into the milieu of the small business, with a second project called Split Screen. The project enables the monitor of a computer to be split vertically, and each half can be used independently, thus doubling the computer’s user capacity.
Udai Singh Pawar
“We decided to take a step back,” Pawar says, “and look at the number of people who want to use computers and the number of computers available. We went to lots of small businesses, and in a small business, you often have five to six employees and one computer. They end up sharing the computer.”
Pawar and Toyama call the mode of sharing that Split Screen enables “simultaneous shared access.”
“Normally,” he says, “shared access is in time, for example, at an Internet café, where people share a PC, one after another. We’re trying to do shared access in space.”
As it turns out, there are lots of appropriate scenarios in which such shared usage makes sense, such as desktop publishing, travel agencies, and computer training. Take one computer, use Microsoft’s Terminal Server, plug in a second mouse and keyboard, and, voilà, you have partitioned one computer to offer a full computing experience, running independent sessions of Windows, to two users.
Obstacles remain. Privacy might be an issue, and for education, it’s not clear how much collaboration Split Screen encourages or discourages. How does the licensing model work? Do ergonomic concerns come into play? The project is ongoing, and technological refinements continue. One would enable document sharing between the two users. Another extends the platform with dual monitors. The potential is alluring.
“We’re not yet sure,” Pawar says, “whether this makes sense as a product. But if people start understanding that there’s a need for simultaneous shared usage, and technology can play an important mediating role in that, that in itself would be a success.”
BANKING SERVICES ON THE GO
Combined interest in economic development and communications research has taken Jonathan Donner from the United States to East Africa and on to Bangalore, where he is studying the impact of mobile technology and how it can be extended to mobile banking in emerging markets.
“I continue to be really interested in the social and economic impacts of the spread of mobile technologies,” says Donner, a TEM researcher. “I started looking at small businesses and information technologies while I was a post-doc at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. It is great to be in Bangalore and to study similar transformations under way in India: what happens the first time a small business gets a mobile telephone, how they use it, and why.”
Donner has led or participated in a number of different kinds of mobile-communications studies, and now he finds himself examining mobile banking and its effects in new markets.
Jonathan Donner
“There is a lot of enthusiasm about m-banking right now,” he says, “because there are a lot more people in the world with mobile phones than with bank accounts. Initiatives in South Africa, in Kenya, here in India, in Southeast Asia and the Philippines are all looking to extend banking services through the mobile channel to people who previously didn’t have bank access at all.”
The scenario leads to all sorts of interesting questions to explore.
“I’m interested in the social-network questions around mobile banking,” Donner says. “Who do users transact with? Is it new people, or is it the same people? Is it still their cousin who lives 50 miles away, or do people suddenly have new channels, new economic partnerships, and new financial behaviors?”
It’s an exciting problem space, in which the potential benefits of personalization, processing power, and flexibility provided by 21st-century mobile-communications networks have to be tailored to be most effective for new users, many of whom are gaining access to these tools at the same time they are getting their first telephones. Ultimately, it is these users who decide if and how to take advantage of mobiles and other information and communications technologies in their daily lives.
“The field hasn’t figured out—and I don’t think ever will figure out—universal, magic bullets to using technology as a tool to accelerate economic development,” Donner says. “It clearly works sometimes. It clearly hasn’t worked all the time. It’s a very complex question.”
POOR PEOPLE, RICH POTENTIAL
There are tens of millions of impoverished households in India. For some, that might seem a depressing, insoluble problem. For Aishwarya Ratan, it represents a huge opportunity.
“I think inequality is a big problem,” says Ratan, an associate researcher with TEM. “My questions are around improving basic service delivery, improving market mechanisms that will allow poor households to compete a little better.”
One mechanism that shows promise to improve conditions for poor households is that of the microfinance institution, and Ratan learned a lot about them from an initial survey in early 2006.
Aishwarya Ratan
“It was with some rural and urban households,” she recalls, “trying to figure out what assets they own. What are the livelihoods they’re engaged in? What sorts of financial investments are they making? Where are they borrowing from?
“We learned that these microfinance providers, who come in between formal banks and completely informal moneylender/private financing, seem to occupy a really interesting niche. They’re providing lower-cost services than informal lenders using joint-liability contracts, but at the same time, they are open to innovating on their products and services, just as formal providers are.”
Innovation comes with costs, though, and for microfinance institutions with thin profit margins, that’s a concern.
“Their use of labor is really efficient,” Ratan notes, “and the investments required for technology-based data management, along with the up-front device costs, are still quite heavy for them to bear.”
To help, Ratan is offering a costing tool to enable microfinance providers to get a clear picture of whether and how such investments could prove beneficial.
“If I project into the future five years,” she says, “can I expect this technology investment to give me returns?”
If microfinance can be transformed into a large-scale infrastructure, she suggests, it could deliver real, tangible assistance.
“One model of microfinance in India is based on self-help groups,” she says. “Think about them as mini-credit unions, all across the country. Their outreach is amazing—it’s about 33 million households at this point. If you think about India having about 60 million or 70 million poor households, there’s potential to have scaled impact here.”
For Ratan, studying the problem is the first, essential step toward solving it.
“The more you understand the constraints of the people you’re trying to work with and fill in the gaps with public or private structural support, then, along any number of domains, people can innovate on their own,” she says. “But if you go into it saying that I have a solution and I want to find people who will buy it, that’s a backward approach. You work from the people. You find out what they want.”
PROJECTS GALORE—AND MORE TO COME
There are plenty of other compelling projects being conducted under the TEM rubric. Nimmi Rangaswamy, an associate researcher who has been with Microsoft Research India since its inception, is investigating a host of issues ranging from rural PC kiosks to the technological needs of the middle class. Indrani Medhi, an assistant researcher, is working on Text-Free User Interfaces to help illiterate and semi-literate people derive value from PCs. A project called Warana Unwired takes a look at using SMS text messaging as a communication service for agricultural cooperatives. Digital Green, led by Rikin Gandhi, employs video to popularize good agricultural practices. The Digital StudyHall project, under Randy Wang, sends video instruction on DVD to bolster teaching in schools in underserved communities.
And, Toyama says, there are more on their way.
“We have our hands in quite a few different areas,” he says, “but there are still some things that we haven’t been looking at very carefully. One is healthcare. Healthcare might be one place where technology might make a difference to very impoverished communities.
“Another thing that would be interesting is to do more work with hardware. PCs are just a little too expensive, not just due to the hardware and the cost of the software, but because of the total cost of owning a PC—maintaining it, running it with electricity, connecting with a network, even renting the space that it requires. The total cost of owning a PC that’s connected to the Internet is actually quite significant and very difficult, ultimately, to support in some of these very poor communities.”
But to continue the momentum the TEM group has achieved over the past few years, Toyama says, it needs to remain true to its overarching goals.
“Our approach,” he says, “has always been the same as the rest of Microsoft Research. We hire the best researchers we can find and then let them define their own problems, devise their own solutions. That’s worked out quite well so far. I would say the group is only limited by the sum total imagination that we have as individuals.
“What I enjoy about the group is that it’s very interdisciplinary. We have Nimmi, who is an anthropologist. We have Udai, whose background is in physics. And, there are economists, designers, computer scientists in between. You put all of them together, and lo and behold, the disciplines don’t always agree with each other in terms of methodology or interest in a problem. In fact, I would say they very rarely agree with each other in terms of methodology. But out of that kind of dynamic tension, I think we’ve been able to develop an overall mentality for the group that’s been very positive.”
And that energy promises to continue to draw inspiration from the unique experimental crucible that India provides.
“There’s so much interest in computing technology and in computers,” Toyama concludes, “that it would be a shame if we couldn’t find ways for them to be adapted for exactly the purposes that developing communities want.”
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