The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Workshop on e-granary conducted

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Mar 17, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Workshop on e-granary conducted

Ramya Kannan

The project can take off in resource-strapped areas with little or no Net connectivity

CHENNAI: Adversity, as they say, creates the need to improvise. That is how project WiderNet began and its popular offshoot: the e-granary.

The frustrating part of teaching computers and communication technology in Nigeria as a senior Fulbright Fellow was no access to the Internet, Cliff Missen, director, WiderNet, says.

When he asked a colleague back home in the University of Iowa to copy some Internet sites on a CD and snail mail it to him, he did not think it was going to bridge the digital divide. But it just might have.

Inspired by the idea to store Internet files on a CD, the e-granary was born. It can be best described as an external hard disk with a whopping 250 GB memory space, containing over three million documents.

Information, as available on the Internet, is stored in the e-granary, which can then be used offline, hooking up with thousands of computers at the same time. "It is about 5,000 times faster than the Internet. A 200 MB video file will open up in about five seconds. That's how fast it gets," Mr. Missen explains. He and his team at the University of Iowa that helped develop the e-granary are in Chennai to transfer the technology to locals identified by the Tamil Nadu Social Welfare Board, so the e-granary project can take off in resource-strapped areas with little or no net connectivity. It could be used, for instance, in schools and colleges and its three million documents (almost the capacity of the University of Iowa Library) can be accessed by students without actually dialling up to connect with the Internet, R. Rajagopal, Professor, Department of Geography at the University, who has headed the team to Chennai, says.

Which is precisely what is going to happen. The Tamil Nadu Social Welfare Board and Madurai Meenakshi Mission Hospital and Research Centre- Madurai, have teamed up along with the folks from Iowa University to see if the e-granary is a viable option in Tamil Nadu.

The first steps toward this were taken on Thursday at the Raj Bhavan in Chennai at a workshop to disseminate information about the e-granary to NGOs, principals in the city.

S. Kumara Prasad, joint secretary, T.N. Social Welfare Board, said it was exciting to form this relationship and take vast information to the villages and inaccessible areas.

Inaugurating the workshop, C.K. Gariyali, Secretary to the Tamil Nadu Governor, said she hoped the e-granary would be put to good use in the State.

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