Technolgies useful for Indian problems

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Sanjay M
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by Sanjay M »

Someone has designed a urinal combined with a sink:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/08 ... ixture.php

Image

The idea is that after using the urinal, you wash your hands in the sink, and this same water then rinses the urinal also. So this helps to directly make use of "gray water" for greater efficiency in water usage.

It could be particularly efficient in restrooms:

Image
ramana
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by ramana »

I read this story in Bloomberg Businessweek issue while waiting in the doctors office.

Micromax Phones Eat into Nokia's Indian share
Girlfriend-Only Phones Give Micromax Edge in India Over Nokia
By Mehul Srivastava - Aug 12, 2010 5:03 PM PT

Micromax Informatics co-founder Vikas Jain

Vikas Jain, one of the founders and business director of Micromax Informatics Ltd., in the Micromax offices in Gurgaon. Photographer: Adeel Halim/Bloomberg

Girlfriend-Only Numbers Give Micromax Phones Edge Over Nokia


Micromax now sells about 1 million handsets a month, with 37 models tailored to local tastes. Photographer: Adeel Halim/Bloomberg

Micromax Informatics Ltd. co-founder Vikas Jain drew inspiration for the company’s first phone from a line of Indian villagers standing in the midday heat to get their cell phones charged by a man with a car battery mounted on a bicycle. Their homes had no electricity.

In response, the company designed its first model, the X1i, with an oversized battery, a small screen, and tweaked electronics that made the phone run for as long as five days, and on standby for as many as 30 days.

“It was really the most obvious thing to do,” says Jain, who co-founded the company in 1991 with three friends. “Here was something that provided customers a feature nobody else had bothered to give them -- battery life.”

Micromax now sells about 1 million handsets a month, with 37 models tailored to local tastes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports in its Aug. 16 issue. The company has about 4 percent of the $6.3 billion Indian market, eating into the sales of Nokia Oyj, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, whose share in India fell to 52 percent by the end of last year from 64 percent in 2008.

Micromax’s phones start at $40 and few of them sport Wi-Fi, 3G, or GPS capabilities. That keeps costs down in a country with sporadic Internet access and little 3G coverage. One phone doubles as a Nintendo Co. Wii-like controller, allowing users to play video games. Another, marketed heavily with Bollywood- themed TV commercials, has costume jewelry embedded in it and swivels open to reveal a full keyboard.

Product Focus

Closely-held Micromax’s approach has attracted interest from Boston-based TA Associates Inc., a $16 billion private equity fund that invested $45 million in the company in January for an undisclosed stake.

“We did spend a lot of time with the broader universe of Indian phone makers,” says Naveen Wadhera, a TA Associates Advisory director based in Mumbai who worked on the deal. “But what we specifically wanted was someone with a real focus on product and a real effort at innovating. The others have a bit of a ‘me-too’ sort of strategy.”

Micromax has led the assault on Nokia by Indian phone makers, which as a group have grabbed 14 percent of the market, according to research by Indian trade magazine Voice&Data. Nokia isn’t giving up on the market.

Carl Zeiss, Anthropologists

At its Gurgaon offices, near New Delhi, Nokia is hosting a group of Indian tech bloggers who were writing about its latest touchscreen model with a Carl Zeiss lens. Elsewhere in the country, anthropologists working for Nokia track the results of an experiment where the company gave every person in four neighboring villages a free phone with access to local weather, crop, and other information. Each Nokia phone spends nearly 18 months in development, says Nokia India Vice-President and Managing Director D. Shivakumar, with models tested for water exposure, bent by robots, and shaken around in boxes full of sharp objects.

“Nokia’s one of those companies that nobody pays attention to when it does well,” he says. “It’s like when Roger Federer wins at Wimbledon, nobody talks about it. But lose once...”

Nokia’s stock has dropped 24 percent in the last twelve months, as margins suffered from its failure to bring out a high-end smartphone to take on Apple Inc.’s iPhone. Sales of high-end handsets have lagged behind worldwide, and the company cut forecasts twice in three months over delays in finishing the software for the N8, a flagship new model.

Four Months

A decline in low-end handset sales in India, Nokia’s second-largest market by revenue, may present Chief Executive Officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who unveiled a 40 percent drop in second-quarter profit in July, with further challenges.

The Finnish company’s time-consuming attention to detail, and the fact that Nokia makes phones for sale across the world rather than tailored to Indian tastes, may help Micromax continue to steal customers, says Naveen Mishra, lead telecommunications analyst at research firm IDC India.

Micromax takes no more than four months to go from idea to execution, says Jain. Its $75 Qwerty-keyboard phone is already India’s best-selling full keyboard handset, according to IDC, beating Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, the cheapest version of which goes for $320. Nokia plans to launch a similar phone, the C3, that will be cheaper than Micromax’s, as part of a mid-range series of phones.

Multiple Accounts

One of Micromax’s greatest successes has been a feature that allows phones to handle multiple accounts. In India, mobile plans are mostly prepaid and, thanks to an ongoing price war, among the cheapest in the world and getting cheaper.

Consumers often wind up with three or more accounts as callers shop around for the best deal offered by each carrier. Nearly 100 million Indians have multiple cell numbers, estimates investment bank Macquarie Group Ltd. To switch between numbers, cellphone owners used to have to swap SIM cards, the little plastic-and-metal identifier chips that slide into handsets.

Micromax has designed almost all of its phones to hold two SIMs, and handsets that can have up to two numbers are now part of its signature. One of its phones comes with a motion sensor so that all a user has to do to switch SIMs is briefly flip the phone upside down.

Nokia will introduce its own dual-SIM phone soon, promises Shivakumar, more than a year after Micromax debuted its first model.

“And because it’s a Nokia phone,” he says, declining to give a price or describe its functions. “it’s going to be the best in the category.”

Prakash Murarka, a 21-year-old college student in Noida, near New Delhi, says he has four phone numbers and one handset. He holds up his SIMs as if they were a miniature deck of cards, and slips two into a Micromax handset.

“The first one is to call my parents,” he says. Then he spins his phone like a gunslinger, kicking in the second SIM. “And this one is to call my girlfriend.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Mehul Srivastava in New Delhi at msrivastava6@bloomberg.net
Neshant
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by Neshant »

ramana wrote:I read this story in Bloomberg Businessweek issue while waiting in the doctors office.

Micromax Phones Eat into Nokia's Indian share
Pretty interesting stuff.

But does Micromax actually design its own phones or are these just relabelled imports from China ?
Sanjay M
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by Sanjay M »

I posted on this in the Telecom thread sometime back:

http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... &start=640
Sanjay M
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by Sanjay M »

Modified Salmon Is Safe, F.D.A. Says
By ANDREW POLLACK

A salmon genetically engineered to grow quickly is safe to eat and poses little risk to the environment, the Food and Drug Administration said Friday.
Sanjay M
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by Sanjay M »

Clean Water for the Developing World

Cotton fabric treated with nano inks produces a water filter that's efficient and needs little power to work.
Sanjay M
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by Sanjay M »

India should definitely court more international R&D in battery tech, since this could have a particularly liberating effect on the nation's energy-constrained economy:

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/26294/?p1=A2
Sanjay M
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by Sanjay M »

Has anybody tried out that audio-recording pen by Livescribe?
I've been hearing about it for the past few years and have been intrigued by it.
I'd be interested in knowing if anyone has used it firsthand, and whether they feel it works.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magaz ... wanted=all
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by Carl_T »

Sanjay M wrote:Someone has designed a urinal combined with a sink:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/08 ... ixture.php
Genius!!
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by vijayk »

http://inhabitat.com/2010/07/14/science ... in-winter/
Science City Stores warm air from summer to heat buildings in winter
a_bharat
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by a_bharat »

White space wireless
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/ ... e_wireless
in over-the-air VHF broadcasting, the channel between two analogue stations had to be left unused so that it would not interfere with adjacent ones. When UHF broadcasting came along, empty “guard bands” were added to each channel for the same reason. In some places, this so-called “white space” of unused frequencies separating working channels amounted to as much as 70% of the total bandwidth available for television broadcasting.

Mobile phone companies and other would-be users of wireless spectrum have long lusted after television’s empty airwaves. This week, after two years of haggling and testing, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, DC, finally gave the go-ahead for others in America to use them
.
The reason these channels {(52-69)} are so valuable—and why they were chosen for terrestrial television in the first place—is because their signals travel for kilometres, can carry a lot of information, are unaffected by weather and foliage, go through walls and penetrate all the nooks and crannies within the bowels of buildings. They will allow mobile carriers to cover, from a single tower, up to ten times the area possible from a tower using existing frequencies. Dropped calls should then become a thing of the past.

By contrast, the white space freed up below 700 megahertz is to be made available for unlicensed use by the public. Unlicensed does not mean free. Network infrastructure will still have to be built. But a new breed of wireless internet service providers using white-space frequencies will not have to pay for their spectrum. They should therefore be able to offer high-speed broadband at far lower rates than today.
ramana
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by ramana »

I heard on BBC today about Apps 4 Africa program of State Dept.

Here is link to the winners:

http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/ico ... ast-africa

I liked the Beehive app but what do I know!
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by RamaY »

^ Ramanaji,

Noted this post :mrgreen:
ramana
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by ramana »

More on Apps 4 Africa site:
http://vote.apps4africa.org/drigg_home
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by Amber G. »

Google tests driverless car
Google has built a car that can drive itself and tested it on more than 100,000 miles of public road..Can it drive inside Chandni Chauk ?
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by Raghavendra »

The Bull Run http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story ... l-run.html

When Kanpur businessman Vivek Chaturvedi took up farming as a full-time occupation in 2004, he had no way of knowing that he would usher in a revolutionary farm machine six years later. Chaturvedi's innovation, an ox-driven pump, can pull up 25,000 litres of water in just an hour from depths of 150 feet without the use of electricity or fuel. Experts say the ox pump, if used nationwide, can save up to 2.5 million litres of diesel every year apart from reducing pollution and the market dependence of farmers.

Image
Chaturvedi (centre) with Sharma (left) and Aslam (right).
Chaturvedi's mechanic friends, Sultan Aslam and Purushottam Lal Sharma, who worked hard on this pump are both school dropouts. Their piece of engineering has been approved by none other than the heads of the Mechanical Engineering departments of IIT-Kanpur and IIT-Delhi, Prashant Kumar and R.R. Gaur respectively. They have now assembled a team of three professors to improve their ox pump further. Not only that, the director of the Deen Dayal Upadhyay State Development Institute, Uttar Pradesh, R.N. Trivedi has bought 30 pumps for the state Government. He has also sent a proposal to the Centre to subsidise the purchase of the machine. Trivedi says the machine will also promote the traditional practice of using natural manure in farming.

The story of the device started from Pariyar village of Unnao district in Uttar Pradesh, when Chaturvedi who gave up his family business, took to farming. He decided to avoid conventional practices like buying seeds, fertilisers and diesel-which makes farmers market-dependent and came across this machine in Kanpur's Bhanti Gaushala. But the machine was far from perfect. Undeterred, he along with Aslam and Sharma worked for one-and-a-half-years and adapted it for farm use.

The invention has reached Maharashtra, where farmers are using it in the districts of Akola, Vardha and Nagpur. The chief scientific advisor to the prime minister, R. Chidambaram, gave it top honours at a technology workshop in IIT-Delhi last year and even recommended that the Government of India promote this technology. It's time to salute folk wisdom.
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by ramana »

KrishG
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by KrishG »

SaiK
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by SaiK »

http://www.wapt.com/r-video/29956605/detail.html
this bionic ankle is different.. powered one.

has a lot of dual use tech in it [think robotics for the forces].
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by chilarai »

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679008/an-i ... d-industry
When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself--for a whole week
A high school dropout, he taught himself English and pretended to be a millionaire to get U.S. manufacturers to send him samples of their raw material.
:D
Demystifying the napkin was only the first step. Once he knew how to make them, he discovered that the machine necessary to convert the pine wood fiber into cellulose cost more than half a million U.S. dollars. It’s one of the reasons why only multinational giants such as Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble have dominated the sanitary napkin making industry in India.

It took Muruganantham a little over four years to create a simpler version of the machine, but he eventually found a solution. Powered by electricity and foot pedals, the machine de-fibers the cellulose, compresses it into napkin form, seals it with non-woven fabrics, and finally sterilizes it with ultraviolet light. He can now make 1,000 napkins a day, which retail for about $.25 for a package of eight.
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by abhischekcc »

Amber G. wrote:Google tests driverless car
Google has built a car that can drive itself and tested it on more than 100,000 miles of public road..Can it drive inside Chandni Chauk ?
Can YOU drive inside Chandni Chauk? :lol:
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by samverma »

Gentlemen, i have come across an additive product that promises to guarantees a minimum of 10% improvement on any diesel generator (used for back up like in multi story buildings). At an average cost of Rs.43 per ltr(pan India average) the net savings is working out to Rs.2.50 per liter. This has already been tested in companies like Airtel, DLf, Unitech etc..(mainly companies that have multiple buildings and run on the back up generator pretty frequently in spite of being Delhi) and the minimum improvement has been above 12% (calculations and testing done by these companies engineers and technicians..we just stood on the side and cross checked their readings) and reduced the sulphur emissions from the exhausts without causing any problem to the machine(knocking etc.). I am more than happy to introduce this product across any person(s) who have a very large consumption of standard diesel in the year and would like to try out this product. Please do let me know if there are any interested parties out there.
ramana
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Post by ramana »

This is not a marketing site. So please be aware of that aspect.
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by krisna »

Aakash ubislate 7. the inside story
The annual gadget bacchanalia known as CES kicks off next Tuesday in Vegas, but as has been the case for the past decade, the most important new product in consumer electronics won’t be there.

This year’s star no-show, however, wasn’t invented by a certain Cupertino fruit factory, but by the obscure Canadian startup Datawind. It’s called the Aakash Ubislate 7, and its humble specs would cause iPad owners to burst out in hysterical laughter: A 7-inch screen without multitouch. A battery that lasts a little under three hours. A processor that runs at a tenth the speed of iPad 2′s A5 chip and just two gigabytes of storage — all running a four-year-old version of the Android OS and crammed into a chunky case reminiscent of a vintage GPS.
The Aakash is the product of a competition sponsored by the Indian government in February of this year to develop and manufacture an ultra-cheap tablet optimized for the nation’s 1.2 billion market, targeting a price point below $50. Montreal-based Datawind, founded in 2000 by the brothers Raja and Suneet Singh Tuli, beat out giants like European semiconductor titan STMicroelectronics by coming up with a design that undercut the next highest bidder by nearly 25%. In fact, when the results were announced, CEO Suneet Tuli frantically called his older brother to ask if they’d accidentally miscalculated their costs. CTO Raja assured his sibling that they hadn’t: They’d won the bid. Now all they had to do was deliver.
But as soon as the announcement went all, their call center was jammed with calls, and their website started crashing due to excess traffic, to the point where their Internet provider warned them they might be experiencing a malicious hack attack. Their initial inventory of 30,000 units sold out in three days. Within two weeks, they’d built up a backlog of 1.4 million preorders. According to CEO Suneet Tuli, that reservation pool is now over 2 million — and still going strong.
The shocking demand for Datawind’s $50 tablet underscores the fact that access to the Internet is no longer a luxury, but a utility
it also pointed to the fact that the nation’s path to Net nirvana would go the opposite direction from that of the West, where computing began with bulky, expensive desktops and shrank down in size and price to embrace notebooks, then tablets and smartphones. Internet access in India began with the smallest and cheapest device, the phone, and would grow up and out. Which meant that the key to winning the market wasn’t a device positioned as an inferior laptop alternative, but as a superior substitute for a cellphone.
:P 8)
But price alone wouldn’t be enough to make the Aakash a success. The key to unlocking Indian demand was creating a device that reflected the market’s unique preferences and restrictions — factors with which the Tulis, who were born in India and moved with their family to Canada as adolescents, had native familiarity.
The first design decision the Tulis made was to give the Aakash a full-sized USB port.
The other decision was to focus the tablet’s wireless experience not on the current-generation standard, 3G, but on GPRS, which is about 10 times slower.
Datawind made use of the 17 patents they’d obtained for compression and image rendering to ensure that the Aakash could deliver a 3G experience on a 2.5G connection. “So the experience you get on GPRS with our tablet is as good or better than the one you’d get on 3G in India,” says Tuli. “We built our tablet understanding that the default network it would run on is one of the slowest and most congested in the world.
The acid test for the Tulis? Whether the commercial version of the Aakash could stream a full-length Bollywood movie on GPRS without stuttering or choking. :lol: (The initial build of 30,000 Ubislate 7s — created to government specs — were WiFi only, but all preorders will be fulfilled with the upgraded $57 Aakash Ubislate 7+, which will also feature a much-upgraded processor, a more advanced OS and better battery.)

“That’s the compelling proposition we saw,” says Tuli. “For the Indian consumer, it’s all about communication, connection and multimedia consumption.
In Thailand, Yingluck Shinawatra — the country’s first female prime minister — made the promise to give one tablet PC to every Thai child a big part of her campaign,” says Tuli. “At a debate, one of her rivals asked where the money would come from to fulfill that promise. She brought up our project and said, ‘It’s simple — we’re going to buy those.’” :rotfl:

Dozens of other governments have also sent feelers out to Datawind, prompting the company to consider how to aggressively ramp up production on a global scale. “We’re not just talking about developing markets, either,” says Tuli. “We think we can make an impact on the digital divide right here in North America.”
The components used to make up the Aakash Ubislate 7 cost around $20. Given the historical trends, their cost should drop by about 50% over the next two years, and half again two years after that. Which means that by 2016, the world could be buzzing about the imminent arrival of the first $10 tablet.

“There are a few barriers that need to be broken, but similar ones have been broken in the past,’ says Tuli, before concluding with a statement that echoes fellow Canuck Justin Bieber: “If there’s one thing we’ve learned in this process, it’s that you should never say never.
good show. Indian solutions to unique Indian problems. :P
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by SureshP »

Small is good in quest to resolve water crisis

Can Peepoo stop the flying toilet? A small Swedish company believes so. At the World Water Forum in Marseille, it is promoting a cheap, smart fix for the world's billion slumdwellers.

Lacking mains sanitation, they have to defecate in latrines, the bushes or, in the security of their home, into a plastic bag.

Image

Once its contents start to pong, the bag gets tossed into the street, a "flying toilet" that imperils health and neighbourly relations.

Enter Peepoo.

Devised by a Swedish architect with the help of his students, it comprises a slim bag with a larger liner tucked inside, both made of biodegradable plastic and designed to fit over a small pot.

Inside the bag are a couple of spoonfuls of granulated urea, an ammonia that eliminates germs and other nasties within two to three weeks.

After use, the bag is knotted and taken to a dropoff point -- where the family gets a small refund because the contents, after rotting, are sold for fertiliser.

Costing three euro cents (four US cents) each new, the bag is sold with its human waste for one euro cent (1.3 US cents).

"We are testing the business model in Kibera," said Camilla Wirseen of the Swedish firm Peepoople AB, referring to a notorious slum of Nairobi.

"So far, it is a huge success. People love it -- there are no smells in the home, the risks of diarrhoea spreading to other family members are reduced and the bag is cleanly disposed of.


"We have saleswomen who are setting up networks and selling the bags, and that way they make money for themselves."

Peepoo has hidden benefits, too, acting to prevent another scourge.

"They tell us that the number of young children who get raped while going out into the bushes to go to the toilet has fallen," said Wirseen, shaking her head at the phenomenon itself.

Production of the bags is currently 3,000 a day, but will ramp up to 500,000 a day from November to target markets in South Asia and elsewhere in Africa but also for stockpiling for disasters.

Peepoople are among a crowd of small, smart entrepreneurs who, alongside mega-corporations pushing their wares at the six-day fair in Marseille, see the world's water crisis as a source of profit and aid.

Dressed in a Hawaiian-style red, black and blue shirt, Jumpei Taniguchi is dazzling visitors by taking a beaker of filthy water and transforming the muck into drinkable water in less than a minute.

His company, Nippon Poly-Glu Ltd. of Osaka, Japan uses a granule formula that clumps bacteria, toxic metals and particles together, but does not use chlorine.

The "clumper," or flocculant, is polyglutamic acid, which is what makes the Japanese dish of fermented soybeans called natto so sticky.

Calcium is added to it to neutralise the negative, repellant electrical charge of particles. That way, the poly-glu sticks the particles together.

Image

"The product is selling very well in Bangladesh," which has high levels of natural arsenic in its groundwater, said Taniguchi. "We have saleswomen, the Poly-Glu Ladies, who sell it in their neighbourhood."

Dutch engineer Henk Holtslag, wearing the handlebar moustache of a 19th-century inventor, works with Dutch non-government organisations which send their skills to developing countries.

He showed off a rope pump, a device with an ancestry going back 2,000 years.

Image

Image

Nothing could be simpler: you drill a hole in the ground and install a pipe with a loop of rope with knots that are just smaller than the pipe's diameter.

Turn the handle to make the loop go round, and the knots -- in this case, PVC caps -- bring up the water in spurts.

"If you install a rope pump costing just 100 dollars (70 euros), that provides water for 10 families," or enough to grow one and a half kilos (3.3 pounds) of grain per person for 80 people, said Holtslag.

The Dutch are training African technicians in making, installing and maintaining the pumps, thus enabling them to sell the devices to villagers and farmers.

Holtslag and others said the era of direct aid -- of donor and beneficiary -- was over.

Endowing local people with skills and harnessing the power of enterprise were the keys, said John Naugle of Relief International, a US NGO which has designed a flexible rainwater collector helped by a $4.5-million (3.5-million-euro) Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant.

The rugged $50 (38 euro), 1,400-litre (350-gallon) plastic bag is being test-marketed in Uganda, branded as "bob" and backed by eye-catching marketing.

Image

"What happens when a direct aid project's budget is used up? It ends," said Naugle. "But the need for water is forever."
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-sma ... risis.html
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by svinayak »

PRESS RELEASE NETWORK
http://www.pressreleasenetwork.com

Think for India - Dr Jawahar Surisetti launches a movement for thinking in India



Raipur, India - Mar 25, 2012 (PRN): Dr Jawahar Surisetti, eminent educationist and psychologist and author of international bestseller " Mama and me", has launched a movement " Think for India- Socho to jaane" which raises cudgels against the current education system which feeds children with education but not with the power of thinking. He aims to talk to and convince atleast one crore Indians in the one year to join his movement to introduce thinking in education.

After his 2 year long strenuous research for which he has been awarded the Man of the Year by the US state, he has surveyed 30000 students in India and an equal number in the US and Europe . The findings of this research have alarmed him that the students in the current system use only two of their five senses in the learning process. Secondly only 47% have fun during their learning period. The view of the students is that their teachers do not encourage or like questions being raised in the classroom and reward discipline and adherence. Students also felt that the key to their parents' hearts is success in exams.

Consequent to his research , he innovated the Think! Curriculum which is based on the linear learning process where all the five senses are used for holistic learning and the children are forced to think. The assessment and learning processes are open ended and force the child to come up outcomes which involve thinking. There are a lot of games , activities , life skills in this joyous journey of Think! that the students encounter and love it.

Another problem is that internationally including India, the curriculum available is expensive and could be afforded by elitist schools only, so the access is only to a few students. Life Educare, the company that owns Think! Curriculum wishes to reach out to all private and public schools in India and make this curriculum affordable and available to all.

Think for India, the movement will take off with a series of seminars on The Art of Thinking for students, teachers and parents and in this interesting series of interactive seminars in schools and colleges will kickstart the process of introducing scientific but interesting methods of introducing thinking in the teaching learning process of school as well as higher education institutions. After doing this in India, this will go international.

The website http://www.thinkforindia.com will be launched in April this year.

Once the system and the curriculum force the students to think, they will become more employable. Currently the academics in educational institutions give certificates and degrees but the corporate world says tat only 13% of the available human resources in the country are suitable for employment. This is because there is a lack of development of thinking processes in the education system.

For more information, contact:

Dr Jawahar Surisetti
Tel: 9303277947
Email: jawahar4@yahoo.com

###

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SaiK
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

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http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/tam ... epage=true
Rs 3960 crore 660 MW Ennore Thermal Power Station replacement project.

She said it would be an ‘environmental friendly’ project with advanced ‘Supercritical technology’ in which less coal would be consumed and more power generated.
Now, it appears amma is all taking the credits even if a fly flies a national flag!
btw, what is "supercritical technology"!?!? :mrgreen:
SaiK
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

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vasu raya
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

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regarding the bio waste cleaning by manual labor problem that was brought to the PMO's notice by Amir khan, there are wet vacuum pump making companies which could help out muncipal corporations, with private construction companies providing work wear to labor, it shouldn't be difficult to give these labor, suitable wear similar to the ones used by hospital staff

DRDO developed NBC suits for the military, their derivative work for biological agents can be adopted by medical staff and such manual labor; Hopefully all nuclear power plants are stockpiling the NBC derivative suits in the case of emergencies. if we work this backwards, the volume needed is high enough for mass production considering various suit types needed. DRDO has set an example with Jaipur leg.

Another point, with DRDO's bio-digesters being adopted by railways, they could be accepted by society using a model similar to the ubiquitous public phones now all over the country without the need for water plumbing
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

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From Science Daily

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 102245.htm

Maybe instead of bemoaning the govt lack of funding for Science porjects may be the new Bharat Ratna CNR Rao could spearhead the 3D printing movement in India:

Here is what MTU is doing for promoting research lab equipment via 3d printing.

DIY and Save: A Scientist's Guide to Making Your Own Lab Equipment
Nov. 18, 2013 — Joshua Pearce is not one for understatement. "This is the beginning of a true revolution in the sciences," says the author of "Open-Source Lab." For cash-strapped researchers, he could be right.

His new book, published by Elsevier, is a step-by-step DIY guide for making lab equipment. The essential tools are a 3D printer, open-source software and free digital designs. "It's a guidebook for new faculty members setting up labs," he said. "With it, they can cut the cost by a factor of 10, or even 100 for research-grade equipment. Even in the classroom, we can do a $15,000 educational lab for $500."

In keeping with the open-source concept, parts of "Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs," will be freely available at different times on the Elsevier Store. Chapters one and two are free now.

Pearce, an associate professor at Michigan Technological University, began printing out lab equipment in earnest after a seminal moment, when he priced a lab jack at $1,000. "All it does is move things up and down," he said. Using a printer and open-source software, his team made a utilitarian replica for about five dollars.

Pearce hasn't looked back. On his desk is a dual-purpose gadget: it can measure water turbidity, like a nephelometer; and it can do chemical analysis based on color, like a colorimeter. "We've shoved two devices into one, and it's completely customizable," said Pearce. To buy them both with equivalent accuracy would have cost over $4,000. To make this hybrid on a 3D printer cost about $50 including the cost of an open-source microcontroller, sensors and LEDs. :eek:

Saving money is just the half of it. "This lets faculty have total control over their laboratory," he said. Because designs are fluid, "devices can evolve with your lab rather than become obsolete."

The technology goes beyond slashing costs; it can also result in better science, says Pearce. Replicating another researcher's work becomes much easier and cheaper. "Equipment designs can be shared as easily as recipes," he said. "Scientists from all over the world are contributing designs." And it may change the dynamic of graduate education. "We get a huge influx of students from China, India and Africa, in part because they have so few good labs," Pearce said. "If they could print their own equipment, they wouldn't have to leave their home to study unless they wanted to, and many more talented people could contribute to experimental science. We could have a truly global scientific community."

But for Pearce, perhaps the best thing about open-source 3D printing is the open-source part. Makers, as 3D printer aficionados are called, not only use designs posted on the Internet. They also post their own and provide feedback. "It creates positive scientific karma," he said. "You can share your ideas and get help from the community, and it speeds things up so much. It's like having a global R&D team dedicated to your work ."

"Open-Source Lab" is written for a wide audience, from novices to those who are "at one with the force of open source," who can skip the introductory material and get right to work printing their own equipment.

At the close of the Acknowledgements section, Pearce cautions the reader not to rely too heavily on existing designs. The whole point of open-source printing is to join the community and share, share, share. "If the hardware is not good enough for you or your lab, remember, it is free, so quit whining and make it better!"
In the early years of the atomic physics revolution in the 1920 s thru the 1930, scientists used to make their own glass equipment for their research purposes. The Manhattan project gave impetus to high cost lab equipment and ruined everyone.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 144622.htm
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

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Cosmo_R
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

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" ...giant 3D concrete printer that can build a 2,500-square-foot house in just 24 hours.

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... dbJP8Gxqog
vasu raya
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by vasu raya »

Good move by TN govt.

Cloud computing for State Data Centre in TN
The State Data Centre of the Tamil Nadu Government will be enabled with cloud computing.

By this, departments of the State Government would not have to create exclusive infrastructure in computing.

An amount of Rs. 11.39 crore had been set apart for this purpose, according to an official release.
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

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I am unable to find the right thread for this. It touches on several things that are important - efficient food production, environmental impact of rearing of meat producing animals, factory farms, ecological balance between predators and prey (i.e. food webs), prevention of cruelty to animals, biodiveristy, agriculture, feeding nutritious food to the teeming millions of the developing world who are also meat lovers, and of course the least (AFAIAC) important of all - religious restrictions on meat diets.

Bill Gates & Twitter Founders Put "Meatless" Meat To the Test

The above is /. discussion - which has some nice data points and insightful posts - of the original article linked below.

TODAY puts 'meatless' meat to the test: Does it taste like chicken?
Last edited by Vayutuvan on 16 May 2014 05:32, edited 1 time in total.
KJo
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Re: Technolgies useful for Indian problems

Post by KJo »

Someone please correct the spelling in the title from Technolgies to Technologies.
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