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There's no stopping the internet

This piece, from the IHT, on how the internet is "penetrating" India, shows the extent to which this marvelous technology can have a positive effect"

"Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In fact, workmen like Manohar, a house painter, are usually forbidden to touch clients' computers on the job here.

So you can imagine Manohar's wonder as he sat dictating his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary who entered them into a computer. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then, with a click of a mouse, Manohar's very own social-networking page popped onto the World Wide Web, the newest profile on Babajob.com.

Babajob, an Indian start-up aiming to bring the Facebook/MySpace revolution to the world's poor, is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: Entrepreneurs and large multinationals are making India a hub of computer innovation targeting the poor.

Outsourcing brought hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of techies to Bangalore. Now, more than a decade into the outsourcing surge, many of those companies and their employees are applying their skills not just to developing software, but to confronting the grinding poverty around them too.

"In Redmond, you don't see 7-year-olds begging on the street," said Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob's founder, referring to Microsoft's Washington State headquarters, where he once worked. "In India, you can't escape the feeling that you're really lucky. So you ask, 'What are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going to use all these skills?' "

Perhaps for less altruistic reasons, but often with positive effects for the poor, corporations have made India a lab for extending modern technological conveniences to those long deprived. Nokia, for instance, develops many of its ultracheap cellphones here. Citibank first experimented here with a special ATM that recognizes thumbprints to help slum-dwellers who struggle with personal identification numbers. And Microsoft has made India one of the major centers of its global research group that is studying technologies for the poor, like software that reads to illiterate computer users.

Babajobs is a quintessential example of how Indian back offices have spawned poverty-inspired innovation."

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