• Investment World
• eWorld
• Brand Line
• Mentor
• Life
• Canvas
• Praxis
• Urban Pulse
• Brand Quest
• The New Manager

Stocks

• Quotes
• SE Diary
• Scoreboard
• Open-End Mutual Fund

Cross Currency

• Rates
  
  

Shipping

• Ports
  
  

Archives

• Yesterday
• Datewise
• Resources
• In Focus
• In Depth

Group Sites

• The Hindu
• Business Line
• Sportstar
• Frontline
• The Hindu eBooks
• The Hindu Images

Imagine a farmer in an Indian village enquiring about the rates of wheat from a trader in China. Sounds too global? Yet this will happen as globalisation diffuses to the village economies.

But what impact will it have on communications technologies? To set the context, most rural people need a communication technology that is simple to learn and use. The Internet as a means of communication is still in its infancy, even in some urban areas. The reason being the high capital cost and the complexity of its use.

But the computer is far more than what a farmer actually needs. What the farmer really needs is a simple medium that allows him to communicate in the local language and yet interact with the global community.

SMS, or short-messaging-service, fulfils all these criteria. It is simple and easy to use (thanks to the simplicity of mobile handsets) and one can write SMS in local language. MVNO (Mobile virtual network operator) for data services can add value to the SMS by providing an intelligent gateway that would offer translation services.

Thus, when the farmer sends an SMS to a mobile number in China, the intelligent SMS gateway of the MVNO will intercept the message and convert it into Mandarin before delivering it to the recipient. Further, if there are ten different addressees, all of them would get a message in their local dialects which would be decided on the basis of the number code series.

SMS would thus enable the business community (farmers, local traders, and so on) not so proficient in English to transact seamlessly with the global community and create a `glocal' community. This would be globalisation at its best.

(The author is Vice-President, Mobility Solutions, ValueFirst Messaging India. He can be contacted at nimesh.bhandari@vfirst.com)

Nimesh Bhandari

More Stories on : Telecommunications | Agriculture

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
New switching module for SAN

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line