Previous

Page - 9

In South Africa, a company by the name Freeplay Inc., sells a hand-cranked radio that uses a spring to generate electrical power. The newer models are even better. Once cranked for 30 seconds, the radio plays for almost an hour. Some models are also coming with solar panels.
Hence, villages where electricity is non-existent and batteries hard to come by, FreePlay Inc. is raking revenue.

Though the radios are too expensive for most Africans to afford, new technology has allowed Freeplay to bring the price down, and donations provide funds to put the radios where they are most needed. Various non-governmental organizations have partnered with the company's Freeplay Foundation to put the radios throughout the continent.

With increasing competition amongst telecom operators, the proactive ones have started tapping rural markets. Even government owned post-offices have started an innovative service called e-post. Using e-post, e-mails can be sent and received by people living in far-flung villages, those even without access to Internet. The regular postman along with regular mail delivers e-mails.

Out of 150,000 Post Offices all over India, about 650 Post Offices have been designated as e-post centers. These 650 e-post Offices are uniformly spread across all major districts and are linked with each other using Internet.

For example, a north Indian villager wants to send a letter to her son/daughter working in a south Indian suburb. Instead of sending a regular snail-mail, she goes to nearest post office and submits the letter. The letter by the end of the day is sent to nearest e-post centre. The e-post centre scans the letter and dispatches it as an e-mail to the e-post centre located nearest to destination address. At the receiver end, the print out is taken of the e-mail and the regular postman delivers the same to the addressee.

Next

* Contributed by -
Rohit Garg,
Final Year, PGDM,
S. P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai.