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Indian wins top world technology award

Sanjay Suri
India Abroad Correspondent in London

An Indian has won the prestigious world technology award for an experimental project that takes infotech to the fisherfolk.

The award was among 23 given out at the end of a two-day summit of the World Technology Network held at the Science Museum in London.

The event saw awards for entrepreneurship and entertainment in technology go to Shawn Fanning who created Napster.

The award for communications technology went to Robert Metcalfe who designed Ethernet.

India won the award in the field of education. The award was collected by Venkataraman Balaji of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. Balaji led a project to bring the benefits of IT to 15 fishing villages near Pondicherry.

"We took up a simple challenge," Balaji told rediff.com at the awards ceremony. "We wanted to see if IT can be meaningful to the lowest 20 per cent of the people of India and not just for professionals."

Balaji's team first adapted simple radio phones of the kind used by security guards to link them to a hub. This was then linked to the Internet.

That was then used to download precise information on the height of waves in that region from data supplied by the US Navy.

The result is that villagers now know when the area will be hit by very high waves.

"That makes it safer for them to go fishing, and they know when they can put the fish out to dry on the beaches," Balaji said.

The link-up has been used also to give local women information on reproductive health, Balaji said.

Information is tapped inter-actively so that they get precise medical information that answers their questions and needs.

This link has been created through the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Post Graduate Medical Education and Research. The result is that about 33,000 people in these poor villages are more up to date with the latest scientific information than most educated people in big cities.

Several other Indians who have made innovations in technology were shortlisted as finalists in various categories at the awards, which have become well established in the scientific world for rewarding innovations in technology.

The awards are sponsored annually by Nasdaq.

Two Indian scientists V V N Kishore and Rajendra Pachauri were shortlisted in the field of energy, Anil Gupta in environment, S A Dabholkar in social entrepreneurship, and Gururaj Deshpande and Vinod Dham in entrepreneurship.

The awards ceremony pointed towards dramatic developments in the future. The award in the space category went to British scientist Martin Sweeting who is designing a spacecraft less than the size of a human body.

"In ten years", he said, "we will be producing spacecraft the size of a credit card." Space technology will become available soon to every individual, he said.

Craig Vanter won the award in biotechnology for the human genome project. The award in IT software went to Olivier Faugeras of France who is developing robot technology for surgical and other uses.

The World Technology Network has been built up over several years as a "global association of innovative people in the world of technology," chairman of the network James Clark said. It was an association, he said, of "the ripple effect people".

Previous winners pick the top five in each category and then the winner.

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