Intel to narrow digital divide India says CEO

Sufia Tippu
Tuesday, 23 May 2006 20:24

IT Industry - Strategy

BANGALORE: The boss of Intel Corp, the world's largest chip maker, said on Tuesday the company intends to narrow the huge digital divide  in India by selling cheaper computers designed specifically for emerging markets and increase IT usage and desktop penetration in Asia's third-largest economy. During this first visit to India on Tuesday after taking over as CEO, Paul Otellini said India would play a key role in Intel’s “World Ahead” program which aims at  bringing  high-speed wireless Internet access to one  billion people who need access to computers.

“With only 2 percent of India’s population having a PC or an Internet connection, the challenge is huge and by multiplying the effects of computers, the Internet and education we can greatly accelerate the reach of technology’s benefits across India in the next five years,” Otellini said.

Systems would be priced 20 percent less than the lowest priced Intel-based PCs in India with similar configurations and more  important they are all being designed here in Bangalore.

“India will play a key role in designing and developing computing technologies used worldwide under Intel’s World Ahead progam. In India, the program unifies Intels’ local efforts to enhance the lives of the vast majority of India’s population who would benefit from IT and education but have not found it within their reach because the costs were high,” Otellini  pointed out.

By the end of the decade about 50 percent of the  PCs sold worldwide would be in the emerging markets and  “ we are creating an ecosystem in these countries so that we can drive the PC penetration in these regions,” said Otellini.

Intel’s “Jaagruti” ( awakening) initiative is a collaboration  with enterprises, government and education to support the spread of Internet “kiosks” in rural villages across India. Intel has developed a low cost rugged PC where harsh weather conditions and unreliable power sources could harm the usual PCs. “This Intel-powered  Community PC features a ruggedized chassis to withstand dusty conditions, varying temperatures and high humidity and more important  it has a customized power supply like a truck battery to maintain power  in case of power outages,” Otellini explained.

Initially designed for rural kiosks in India, the platform has generated interest from other countries with similar environmentals concerns and Intel expects to expand to other countries soon.

Intel is also developing “ Eduwise” a small laptop kind of a form factor which would not have a hard disk  but a flash memory for student use. “this too has been designed and developed in India and would be in the market by the middle of next year” he said.

Improving the education in India is also a hot topic for Intel. Currently 550,000 teachers have been trained by Intel in India and it is planning an additional 800,000 in the next five years.  Worldwide 3 million have been trained and the number is expected to go up to 10 million in the next five years. “ The greatest uptake  in this program has been in India and we expect to teach a billion students in the next five years. Our goal is to teach every student in the world,” he said.

Intel, which is facing intense competition from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.,  is clearly charting its map in India and emerging countries to  promote Internet use and computer training in developing markets. “ There is competition from others but we plan to get back our market share,” he replied to a query regarding Dell’s choice of AMD chips for some of its products.

In December 2005, Intel said it planned to invest more than $1 billion in India over a period of five years to strengthen its research and development and pick up stakes in telecoms and technology start-ups.