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By Susan Twombly with M S Anuradha
'It's not about technology as in a hammer looking for a nail. It's not a solution looking for a problem. It's about having a set of capabilities that we can bring to the world. It's about co-creating a sustainable future.'
— Anand Tawker,
Director, Kuppam HP i-community Program,
HP Emerging Market Solutions
Mar. 2005 -- When the HP Emerging Market Solutions Team started the first i-communities in India and South Africa, they had no way of knowing how important that work would be in rebuilding Cuddalore, India, a fishing community devastated by December's tsunami.
But based on their experiences at the Kuppam HP i-community program at Andhra Pradesh, India, what they did know was that the power of listening could be as important as the power of technology.
The devastating December tsunami left Cuddalore in shambles and destroyed the livelihood of this fishing community.
As director of the program, Anand Tawker believed that the knowledge from Kuppam could be used to rebuild Cuddalore in the wake of the tsunami. He was right. After speaking with a friend in Cuddalore, Tawker heard the message loud and clear: The traumatized fishing community was urgently seeking new sources of employment, increased information access and on-the-ground project management — all things his team had successfully dealt with in Kuppam.
With a clear mission, an HP team led by Technology Deployment Manager Sai Sreekanth Mulagaleti traveled from Kuppam to Cuddalore and went to work. And they did so in a most culturally sensitive way — respecting national pride and cultural traditions that are so important to a community rebuilding and re-establishing hope: They recognized the need to provide a 'hand up,' not a hand out as they heard and responded to local needs.
'Often, listening can be the most powerful thing to do,' Tawker says. 'At HP, we understand technology and how to bring the power of technology to life. We also understand problem solving and marshaling, allocating and managing resources, as well as the importance of organizational leadership.' Tawker reflects, 'It's the job of the i-community team to really listen carefully to understand clearly what the challenges and problems are, and then bring to bear the competencies, capabilities and assets of HP to solve problems in ways that best suit the local community.'
The Entrepreneurial Spirit Rises:
HP Technology Creates New Job Opportunities
Gangadeep Singh Bedi, head of the District Administration at Cuddalore, emerged as a key driver in the rebuilding efforts. Working with the HP team as part of the reconstruction efforts, he stressed the importance of job creation in an area where the primary industry, fishing, had been virtually wiped out. He saw the seemingly impossible odds, as well as the value in the solutions proposed by the HP team.
In Kuppam, HP had developed mobile photography and video solutions that provided self-sustaining job opportunities for that emerging market. The HP Rural Livelihood Program for Village Photographers now enables a team of entrepreneurial women to provide high-quality photographic services to inaccessible remote areas around Kuppam. The women rent portable Digital Photography Kits, including solar-powered HP portable cameras and HP printers, for a small monthly fee. They charge a small fee for ID photos and pictures of families and special events — doubling their family income while gaining valuable job skills for the future.
Fishing boats destroyed
Gangadeep Singh Bedi, head of the District Administration at Cuddalore, emerged as a key driver in the rebuilding efforts. Working with the HP team as part of the reconstruction efforts, he stressed the importance of job creation in an area where the primary industry, fishing, had been virtually wiped out. He saw the seemingly impossible odds, as well as the value in the solutions proposed by the HP team.
In Kuppam, HP had developed mobile photography and video solutions that provided self-sustaining job opportunities for that emerging market. The HP Rural Livelihood Program for Village Photographers now enables a team of entrepreneurial women to provide high-quality photographic services to inaccessible remote areas around Kuppam. The women rent portable Digital Photography Kits, including solar-powered HP portable cameras and HP printers, for a small monthly fee. They charge a small fee for ID photos and pictures of families and special events — doubling their family income while gaining valuable job skills for the future.
In Cuddalore, where the tsunami had completely destroyed many personal records of Cuddalore citizens, a Herculean task lay ahead for the district administration as they attempted to re-identify people, update census records and provide survivors with accommodation, job opportunities, healthcare, monetary and other aid. The HP team saw this as a clear opportunity to leverage the success of the Rural Livelihood Program of Kuppam.
Using HP's portable Digital Photography Kit, several Cuddalore citizens have been trained by the HP team and hired by relief agencies to create photo identities of the survivors and to document destroyed areas in need of aid. With the guidance of the HP team, the photographers may develop into experienced professional entrepreneurs, helping the community regain its financial foothold.
Cuddalore, post-tsunami
Given the popularity of movies in India, HP has encouraged another emerging business model with its HP Digital Rural Theater. The portable kit includes a video projector with a DVD player and a set of speakers. District administrators use the kit to disseminate public service announcements. But entrepreneurs can also rent or buy the kit to show movies to local neighborhoods — creating a new livelihood while helping to restore a sense of normalcy in a community recovering from disaster.
Access for Today, Growth for Tomorrow
Weeks after the disaster, as help arrived from various relief agencies, repetitive questions and redundant activities thwarted the efforts to make the progress needed towards rebuilding the community. To ensure the goods, supplies and medical help was actually received by the people that required it most, Cuddalore needed a central information hub and more efficient, on-the-ground distribution of all the supplies pouring into the area.
What lay before the HP team in Cuddalore was fundamentally a gigantic management and coordination problem — one that the team had a lot of experience dealing with in Kuppam on an ongoing basis.
The Kuppam HP i-community Team
With the help of non-government organizations (NGOs) the team began working with local officials and relief agencies to create a mobile information and communication technology infrastructure that would provide a single point of focus for all information and activity, enabling workers to hit the ground running. Working with existing organizations in the area is a key strategy HP employs to leverage the strengths of each organization to benefit the community.
The most immediate challenge was to create a straightforward way for Cuddalore officials and nearly 50 international and community relief agency representatives to communicate. Originally, the representatives left their posts in the outlying areas every day to meet in Bedi's office for necessary debriefing — an extremely inefficient use of time and resources.
Based on its knowledge from the Kuppam HP i-community, HP implemented a wide-area, fixed-wireless broadband network using 802.11b technology for Cuddalore's communications infrastructure, enabling online cross-communication, including video conferencing. Field workers can now use laptop computers to report activity, stay up to date, and share information to streamline the delivery of goods, services and medical help.
Meeting the Needs of Emerging Markets: The HP Multi-user 441 Desktop Solution
The foundation for Cuddalore's Central Information Center (CIC) is the HP Multi-user 441 Desktop Solution, already being piloted in Kuppam, India, and sold in South Africa. This new Linux-based solution allows four users to work independently from a single CPU - delivering the full functionality of four PCs for half the price.
With low acquisition and maintenance costs, and over 70 office and educational applications, the Multi-user 441 Desktop Solution provides emerging markets with a secure, flexible solution capable of addressing local needs.
In keeping with the i-community goal of providing solutions that are affordable and sustainable, the Cuddalore solution leverages innovative, ingeniously low-tech 'cantennas,' antennas made of discarded tin cans, to tap into the wireless network. Standard antennas, which would have to be imported into India, would make the cost of adopting and expanding the wireless network prohibitive. Cantennas cut the cost significantly.
Another communications priority was to help relief workers get oriented as they tried to bring assistance to remote areas. Given the degree of devastation, many landmarks had been obliterated. Integrating GPS and mobile communications technology with the indexing capabilities of digital photography, the HP team enabled relief workers to establish their location based on images and reliable maps — especially helpful to workers who parachute into remote areas. And when people begin rebuilding homes, the technology will be useful in recreating known markers and boundaries.
'Throughout all these projects, we try to balance technology and performance considerations with the ability of local people to use the technology now and maintain it affordably in the future,' says Tawker. 'We're really just adapting to local conditions to make it easy for people to adopt, use and expand the technology. Our goal is to create solutions that continue to have an enduring impact and value for a long time to come.'
As access to HP technology increases, new professions arise and the distribution of goods and services becomes more efficient, the very hopeful, determined people of Cuddalore will have the tools they need to make their own recovery. 'In a fishing community such as Cuddalore, this brings to mind an old and true saying,' says Tawker. 'Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime.'
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