Twitter helps track Indian power outages

July 29, 2011 by 1 Comment

Ajay Kumar, founder of powercuts.in, explains how he plans to implement a voice-reporting feature for villagers without reliable access to the Internet to report power outages. | Photo by Matt Heng

Story by Kay Kemmet with additional reporting by Matt Heng

The room goes black.

For some power outages are an inconvenience, but for others, they’re detrimental.

Blackouts plague Indian society from rural areas to the New Delhi’s capital city.

For Mridul Verma, a Lucknow engineer, the problem meant studying for final exams under generator-powered lights.

While the power outages have never caused him more than inconvenience, he said he’s frustrated because the government and power companies aren’t using modern  resources to address the issue.

To do something about it, the electrical engineer works with a group of tech-savvy Indians to collect power outage data through Twitter.

The idea started with a discussion about the problems. They began tracking planned and unplanned power outages from Mumbai to Delhi. Ajay Kumar joined the conversation and applied his computer programming skills to the idea.

Five minutes later, Kumar had the site up with a map tracking the Tweeted outages. In less than half an hour, he had a user-friendly site launched.

Two months later, the site Kumar founded, powercuts.in, is blowing up and people are using #powercutindia to track power outages throughout the country. While Verma said he knows that Tweeting about power cuts won’t make them less frequent, he hopes the instant data tracking can take the information to power companies and government officials and force them to ask, “What are we doing about this?”

Kumar demonstrates the mapping feature of powercuts.in. The map is an interactive representation of all power outages reported to the website. | Photo by Matt Heng

Kumar has an interactive map on the site showing specifics about each reported power cut. He also used a similar program to track the July 11 Mumbai blasts and help connect people with services in their area.

His most recent contribution was an application for Blackberry, Android and Nokia cell phones. His next step is to set up texting, so people can message from their phones when they don’t have Internet access. He’s using Verma as a tester for the texting program, and so far, it’s working.

But the Twitter, phone apps and texting are mostly just accessible to people in urban areas and the tech savvy, according to Kumar. He wants to make the communication accessible to people in villages.

Verma said this is where power problem is the worst, and sometimes the outages last up to 12 hours, especially during the summer. This season also is when people need power the most to harvest and process their crops.

Kumar wants to set up a calling system where people from the rural areas can leave a message with specifics about power outages. Most people in these areas have phones, Kumar said, so he thinks this is the best way to get information from rural Indians. In rural India, a mud hut may not have plumbing or electricity, but it will have an older generation cell phone powered by a battery.

Kumar said the problem is biggest in the villages, because residents can’t afford backup generators. People in the cities take advantage of the power outages, according to Kumar, because they can afford generators.

“You won’t see any coverage in the media where the problem is the biggest,” Kumar said. “They will always cover the metros and the cities.”

He doesn’t know what will come of the power outage information and map. With the site only being two months old, he isn’t focused on that yet.

“I can’t guarantee any action, but I can at least put their voices up,” Kumar said.

Filed under technology

Villagers receive news through cell phones

July 29, 2011 by Leave a comment

Story by Christina Condreay | Video by Ryan Bramhall

A shopkeeper in a small Indian village answers his cellphone to a familiar voice on the other line: Priya Gupta’s 18-year-old voice is unwavering, her stories direct and meaningful. This 30-second voice message tells the story of an upcoming vaccination clinic in the village.

The young journalist delivers hyper-local news reports in a local dialect of Hindi to 250 of her neighbors as part of Gon Ki Awaaz, or The Village Voice, a mobile phone project that sends out news reports to villagers living in Rampur-Mathura and the surrounding area. Villagers pay 10 rupees a month, about 25 cents, for the twice-daily updates that come as phone calls.

Before cell phones, news traveled slowly. Priya’s reports are the first mobile media to reach this part of rural India, said Sunil Saxena, the founder and technician of the project.

Even though many homes lack electricity and plumbing, battery charged cellphones go off in even the smallest of mud huts.

“The mobile is a powerful media,” Saxena said.

Residents relied on outdated newspapers for their information before the Village Voice, said Rekha, a subscriber of the service. Others can’t read Hindi. Now, all residents hear Priya’s voice within two minutes of her recording it on her own phone.

The papers also rarely covered news specific to the area, Priya said.

Priya’s talent for writing and public speaking, along with her self-confidence, caught the eye of Saxena a year and a half ago.

She wasn’t planning on being a journalist and had to spend time with her former teacher and current reporting partner, Dioyakar Pratap Singh, to learn what news was.

Her quiet confidence and writing skills have developed as the project has gone on, she says, along with her local celebrity.

She says that young girls look up to her.  Being one of the only women who works outside the rice fields makes her feel as though she is a role model.

The other villagers have come to know and respect Priya because of her stories, she said.  They are open to talking with her as she reports and approach her when they have news of their own.

Polio vaccination clinics, along with other healthcare news, are Priya’s favorite to report because these stories are important to the entire community, she said.

Saxena sees Priya as the future of journalism in India, where few people can read newspapers and no one has a computer, but even the poorest farmers have cellphones.

Filed under technology, villages

Who you gonna call? India’s call centers

July 29, 2011 by Leave a comment

Call center workers await naan and tea from a shop outside the Aegis office. | Photo by Sarah Miller

Story by Elias Youngquist

Americans know that familiar call. A program froze up, a computer is smoking or a customer feels cheated. An angry call must be made to a person 8,000 miles away.

The person across the globe could be Gaurav Aggrawal, a 21-year-old college graduate from Noida, a suburb of New Delhi. He works the night shift at a call center that services confused Microsoft Excel users. He schedules his life around American time zones and his call company’s need to run 24 hours a day.

Aggrawal’s work day typically starts at 10:30 p.m. and ends around 7 a.m. For most workers, this schedule can wreak havoc on social life.

“You become antisocial. After some period you are limited to yourself. It’s too hectic,” Aggrawal said. “Your life gets revolving around your organization.”

Merchants selling naan and tea cater specifically to the stressed-out workers on their smoke breaks. The workers heave a sigh of relief as they lean against their motorcycles and enjoy their break.

“It’s all night, doing drugs, smoking – it’s a part of the job. Getting addicted to drugs is part of the job.”

Beyond addictions, many call center workers find the job to be a hindrance to their health.

“You’re not concerned with your diet. Many times you’ll skip meals,” Aggrawal said. “Life gets upside-down.”

Despite the health hazards of working the night shift, Aggrawal declares his satisfaction with his job. He, like most people in his office, took the job because he didn’t have a lengthy resume. He also enjoys the opportunity to experience different cultures, even if they’re irate because they cannot add a column on Excel.

The job is a welcome alternative to working in 104 degree heat on a construction site, toiling away in a factory or becoming one of the 10 percent of India that is unemployed.

Most employees try to transition to better work. The 2.5 million workers don’t stay long in the call center, preferring to chase degrees in other fields.

Rahul Gupta sits on his break outside the Aegis call center in Noida. After 500 calls in a day his short break is well needed. | Photo by Sarah Miller

“I want to be a writer, pursuing my journalism degree and work in Indian broadcast,” Aggrawal said.

Working at a call center is a good way to gain work experience for a resume and earn some easy money.

“It’s easy to get addicted to easy money,” Aggrawal said.

Day call center workers typically sing a brighter song, working regular hours, having fewer international calls and generally a sunnier disposition.

“I am satisfied. It is very good,” said Rahul Gupta, a day call center worker from Aegis.

After Gupta works 10 hour shifts, he is also working on his computer science engineering degree, similar to many workers who work toward other jobs or pick up part-time jobs elsewhere.

Translation and reporting by Avneesh Kumar and Razia Sahab.

Filed under technology

Villagers use mobile phones to advertise businesses

July 24, 2011 by 1 Comment

Kismat Ali (left) and Lallan Idrieshia (right) are mobile phone merchants in the village of Rampur-Mathura. The co-owners use the network to advertise and have increased business by 50 customers since the exposure. | Photo by Jennifer Gotrik

Story by Elisabeth Loeck

People in remote Rampur-Mathura villages are using mobile phones to learn news about their community. Now local businesses are starting to use the network for advertising.

In the 20-kilometer radius that the news service reaches, Sunil Saxena, the program’s founder, said that most people do not have access to television and cannot read newspapers.  Mobile phones are the first device they can use to actually communicate information in a language they can understand. The trick will be figuring out how to make the service pay for itself. Advertising may be an answer.

Two reporters file audio stories from the community, which are distributed to 250 subscribers via their mobile phones. It costs 20,000 rupees a month to transmit the stories, but subscribers pay just 10 rupees a month for the service. Beginning in March 2010, the network began running advertisements from local businesses, and in July, it began to charge 20 rupees a month for the exposure.

Saxena believes that his experiment with advertising proves that businesses can be persuaded to use mobile phones as an advertising medium. If he can attract enough subscribers, he says, he may in turn attract enough advertisers to support the network and sustain the project.

Filed under Rampur-Mathura, technology, villages

Indian village children learn to use technology

July 23, 2011 by Leave a comment

Video by Camila Orti | Story by Ashley Burns

Tanuja Singh stands at the front of a group of peers next to an archaic computer with a paint program open.

The screen reads ‘Wel Come’ in colorful letters.

This is the Mamta Foundation school located outside of Lucknow, India. For these children, an education is a luxury and computers are a bonus

“We want to get the children used to using computers, so they aren’t afraid of them,” said Shikha Sikka, an events coordinator.

Singh is particularly proficient with these machines.

“She is very clever and at the top of her class,” said Shikha.

Singh says she wants to become a doctor some day. She wants to help society.

For Singh, getting to school at eight o’clock in the morning is a treat. She gets to play cricket with her friends and use the computers here.

“She is very interested in Google and the Internet,” continued Shikha.

Only one computer has Internet access, so Singh and the other students are limited.

Next year will be Singh’s last year at Mamta. When she finishes here she will go on to the village secondary school, where the fees are less.

Filed under Mamta School, schools, technology

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