Wi-Max Messiah

There is an air of excitement at ST. Philomena’s School for Girls this Sunday. While the rest of Tindivanam wears a rather deserted look, there is a hubbub of activity here as tents and speaker systems get put up for the visit of Craig Barrett. The dimunitive Sister Amili Mary is looking a bit harrowed, with journalists, event organisers and public relations people breathing down her neck, but she still manages a smile while taking us to the school’s computer laboratory.

The project being implemented at the school by Intel, the Union Health Ministry and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is quite unique. It will monitor the health and well-being of the girls in the school by measuring their height, weight and circumference. “Malnutrition is a problem with some girls, particularly those from interior areas, and this monitoring system will help us identify problems in children before they get critical,” says Sister Amili Mary.

The school is on the outskirts of the town, which lies on National Highway 45, and on the flyover to the government hospital, down the road, there are posters of Barrett with the town’s numero uno resident, Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss. However, in their haste to print posters for this ‘momentous visit’, someone forgot to spell ‘Craig’ properly, and the town is littered with posters welcoming ‘Graig R. Barrett’.

That is an amusing sideshow to the serious work that Intel and its partners have put into place at the government hospital. To put it simply, this is a tele-medicine project, but as Sumanth C. Raman, Advisor, TCS, puts it, this is unique in many respects. Standing next to the clean room where the project is being implemented, Raman points out two features that make it unique.

The first is that there is no ‘physical location’ for the project. “The entire hospital is a Wi-Fi (wireless internet) zone, because the electro-cardiogram (ECG) machine and laptop can be carried about, and information can be uploaded from anywhere,” says Raman.

The uploaded information in the case of Tindivanam Government Hospital is sent to Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bangalore, where it is analysed by cardiologists and a diagnosis is sent back within 10 minutes. The second unique bit is around the web-enabled system TCS has built that allows any number of applications to be added and any number of locations to be connected. “The system can be dramatically scaled up,” says Raman.

The next day, you realise why Intel became the lead partner in this project, which incidentally is part of the chip giant’s ‘World Ahead’ programme started by Barrett, when the town is taken over by supporters of the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), the party to which Anbumani Ramadoss belongs (not the entire town, because supporters of the opposition AIADMK party sensed the opportunity to hold a protest rally on the same day).

“I am so glad that Craig could come to my hometown and do these projects here,” the minister gushes, before adding that by the end of the year he expects similar projects to be in operation in five other districts in the country. “The minister saw the pilot project we had in place at Baramati last year and was very impressed by it and he wanted us to do work on something similar here,” says Barrett.

“This is all part of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), which will transform the country,” adds Ramadoss. “The idea is to connect towns like Tindivanam that do not have access to tertiary hospitals to better healthcare facilities.

There is no cardiologist in this town, but now locals from here can get a diagnosis from doctors from one of the best cardiology centres,” he tells this reporter before launching into another series of discussions with his party workers. Barrett, in the meanwhile, rushes off to Bangladesh, where Intel is working on some other projects.

The next day, on September 4, Barrett is flying back to Delhi. His schedule is running half an hour late, thanks to the daily traffic jam up in the skies above Delhi. But why has this 74-year-old veteran of the electronics industry thrown himself into such projects with a vigour that belies his age? “Governments are very often busy in running things that it takes private industry to show them what can be done.

And that is what we are doing with these projects.” Barrett specifically denies that Intel is pushing money into these projects, but rather is trying to build a “sustainable eco-system” of suppliers and vendors. “That is something we are trying to do with all our projects across the world in Lebanon, Mexico or in India.”

The idea, according to Barrett, is that the eco-system serving the unconnected will spur innovation and also competition. “Look at what is happening in low-cost laptops, we have announced the ‘Classmate PC’, (Nicolas) Negroponte has his One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and some vendors like AsusTek of Taiwan are also coming with a low-cost machine. Competition spurs innovation,” says Barrett.

He goes on to talk about the fascinating twists and turns in the world of technology, a half-decade after he started out, firm in the belief that technology has made humankind better.

“You can argue that there are some dark sides to technology, but on the whole it has transformed the way we communicate and how we share information.

If I were a young man today, life would be quite different than what it was when I started out, the opportunities in front of young people today are far greater than ever before,” he says with a laugh. With some help from companies like his, the opportunities could actually multiply.