Video-eMail to Help Villagers Connect

"E-mail? I think female is better," says a pony-tailed guy in a recently-produced advertisement of an Indian biscuits-manufacturing company. But, Dewang Mehta would probably prefer to say: "Forget e-mail, video-mail is better."

Video-mail, developed by Mehta, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, the apex body of software and service companies in India, is a software that enables even illiterate people to send messages over the Internet without having to know the English alphabet.

The message is recorded by the sender with the help of a camera and mike installed in the computer, then compressed and sent as a two megabyte text file, with 760X640 pixels resolution. The recorded message is "decompressed" by the user at the other end, who sees a recording of the video and gets to hear the audio of the message.

The software has already been experimented on 18 cab-drivers in Mumbai, all of them with relatives in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh, and was reportedly a huge success. Mehta told India Abroad that 11 of them were illiterate and seven literate. The literate ones were asked to send ordinary e-mail in Hindi, while the illiterate cab-drivers asked to record their message over video-mail.

Unlike e-mail, video-mail messages, which are three-minute recordings, took 5-10 minutes to reach the end-user, Mehta said, adding that the impact was something unexpected. Most of the illiterate end-user villagers, who had to pay Rs. 15 for video-mail, instead of Rs. 1 for e-mail, vowed to become and make their relatives literate as they would have to pay less in order to send and receive ordinary e-mail instead of the video-mail, which was priced higher.

Mehta said that the Union government’s Prime Minister's National Task Force on Information Technology, of which he is a member, accepted his recommendation that all the 600,000-odd STD/ISD booths spread across the country should also offer Internet services. Mehta said he believed that people across the country, including the 52 percent illiterates, should be able to own an e-mail address though they may not have phones or personal computers.

In fact, Mehta’s recommendation is set to become a reality, with the Delhi government of Chief Minister Sheila Dixit inaugurating the first of 100 STD/ISD booths in the capital to be upgraded into cyber information centers offering Internet services on Sept. 25, a day after the end of the Indian Internet World Conference 1999, organized here by IT majors Micromedia and Penton.

In fact, one of the major issues raised in the conference was the integration of the masses in rural and semi-urban parts of the country with the IT industry and the fall-out of the developments in the industry on those set of people who are either unaware not literate.

Mehta will launch video-mail on Oct. 2 free of cost: “I am a true believer in Mahatma Gandhi and feel that freedom in the true sense of the word has not been brought to the masses and Internet can change this.”

“Internet is the only revolution that will make them learn how to earn by nurturing an entrepreneur spirit,” he said, adding that Cable net will ultimately cause the leapfrogging of the Internet in the country.

Mehta said that compared to 37 million cable television connections, there are 340,000 Internet connections and 1.4 million users in India. This will jump to 2 million connections and 6 million users by 2001, he said.

In the next two years, Mehta estimates that at least 100,000 STD/ISD booths will offer Internet services, including the regular e-mail and the voice-mail, he’s developed.

Mehta, who is a Chartered Accountant and is cost and management accountant, had graduated in computer graphics from London in 1985 and is also on several private and public sector company boards, including the National Institute of Fashion Technoogy.

Mehta, who is still a bachelor and has no family, told India Abroad that working for the IT industry is his work and hobby alike and for the past seven years he has not taken a single vacation or Sunday off. Mehta is also on the board of Central Board of Film Certification and plans to become a film-maker in about three years time. He says he'll definitely make a good masala Hindi film for mass appeal.